No to Software Patents in New Zealand?

I read on ars technica that New Zealand's parliament is considering a patent reform law that eliminates software patents.It's a little speculative, since the law hasn't passed yet, but it is interesting news.

The bill summary says that software patents inhibit innovation and competition so they are not allowed. Patents of hardware inventions with embedded software are still allowed, so the change isn't quite as absolute as it sounds, and New Zealand is fairly small when you consider markets from a global perspective, so the scope of the change may not be large.

I think this is more interesting from the perspective of things to come. Will other nations follow suit? The US and European Union are constantly talking about patent reform, and actually working on changes from time to time, so there is certainly a chance that New Zealand will influence larger nations with a bigger portion of the global economy.

If nobody follows New Zealand's lead on patents, I suppose they could end up being a bit of a safe haven: you can run servers there that violate patents all over the globe without running afoul of New Zealand's laws, so it might serve to undermine the utility of patents that can be used in a distributed manner.

I have mixed feelings about software patents - some awfully sweeping patents that seem painfully obvious get granted, and on occasion patent trolls squeeze way too much cash out of going concerns that is then turned into more IP and an even larger army of lawyers out to squeeze more cash out of the IP holdings of the patent trolls. This doesn't really seem to be terribly beneficial to me, and the modern environment with huge enterprises with universes of patents in all sorts of areas can lead to huge barriers to entering markets.

On the other hand, I like to see truly cool inventions being rewarded. Patents can be a useful element of a functioning IP system that rewards innovation and encourages more of it, and it isn't clear to me that copyrights and trade secrets alone provide enough protection and rewards by themselves. Ultimately my opinions don't matter much anyway, I'm just an intereste observer with some skin in the game, and as long as the system allows for software patents I will continue working within that system and do my best to invent useful patentable ideas for Cisco.

Nicely straddled - as I say, I have mixed feelings about software patents.

Now if I could just come up with some useful inventions.