"Commerce Minister Craig Foss said today that following industry consultation he had decided to remove the patentability of software from the Patents Bill, which is currently before Parliament."
If anyone is going to support Free and Open Source Software, it's going to be a guy named Foss.
The government asked its citizens their thoughts "a recent poll of more than 1000 Kiwi IT professionals found 94 per cent wanted to see software patents gone." -- As overwhelming as 94% is, I wonder the motivations of the last 6%.
The U.S. is in software patents so deep, the only way I can see it changing is watching other countries move faster without the drain on innovation and the need to pay lawyers when you code.
Off topic, but thanks for that link: while I'm not going to go into the politics, those clips make me want to go back home now, just because of those scenes from Australia...
[partisan alert] I wouldn't go too far on that. If you're poor and unemployed here you probably don't feel like the govt. are working for you all that much.
I'm continuously amazed by all of the major political parties here in New Zealand who keep using logic and facts instead of merely political stances. Our process of making laws is open, listens to the people as well as lobbyists, and yet allows room for policy differences.
Our process of making laws mostly listens to the people, but it it is contingent on the government's willingness to listen. The problem is the lack of rules around urgency (http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/parliaments-urgency-provision-b...). For non-Kiwis, urgency allows a government to force through a bill in a hurry and without consultation. The loophole is that urgency doesn't require a supermajority and there are no limits on the kind of bills that can be passed this way: if the government decides to bypass the normal legislative process, there's not much anyone can do to stop it.
And I'd argue that all of these examples were driven by lobbying (from the media industry, the Hobbit producers and the espionage agencies). Our process of making laws is generally healthy and open, but it does have dangerous blind spots.
Except for the "we made a mistake, now we are retrofitting the law so that we did not make a mistake" laws that have been passed over the last few years. The Search and Surveillance Bill, as well as the upcoming changes to the GCSB spring to mind.
At least these are just the government covering it's own ass, rather than out and out corruption.
Great Ape personhood, or at least granting them the right to not have cruel tests done, has been done by several other nations not just New Zealand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_personhood
I can't remember the exact wording but one provision was about how they couldn't be exported unless it was in their best interests. E.g. you can't sell them a circus overseas in which they would likely receive cruel treatment.
So it's not about calling them people, it's about giving them some rights because they have sentience.
I don't agree with the label, I do agree with the principle.
Many animals show signs of sentience and even if they don't, they should not be allowed to undergo cruel testing. To try to only apply this to great apes shows a lack of understanding of the issues involved. It is often human nature to be guilty of anthropomorphizing.
The intentions are noble, but the focus is too narrow and the label is quite frankly, ridiculous.
The label is a bit weird, I agree, but personhood is an established legal concept with clear interpretations and case law so I just think of it as lawyer speak. Extremely disabled people may lack clear communication and yet a person who makes decisions on their behalf is guided by similar principles. The argument in favour of personhood is that the benefits of that legal history outweigh the superficial qualms by using a slightly wrong title.
While other animals have sentience too this is about the thin edge of the wedge, and what's achievable in politics. You go for the creatures that are nearest to human and then increase it as is appropriate. It's important to establish precedent and not to go too far at once or else the first step will fail and politicians won't touch it again for a long time. I see it more as practical political expediency rather than a lack of understanding of how non-apes may be sentient too.
Sure, we all know since Descartes that animals are robot-like objects, have no feelings and no emotion and should be treated as such. So, let's make sure the Law does not take in account any of the discoveries related to emotion and pain in animals, and let's keep business as usual and feel good about it.
Wow, over-reaction, much? Look, I could go on and make several well reasoned arguments about how animals are not human but clearly it would be wasted on you.
Just a quick question, but once you have given Chimps human rights and said Chimps go on and kill and eat other apes/monkeys, as they commonly do in the wild - would you have them up for murder and cannibalism charges with appropriate punishments?
OK, maybe I took your comment the wrong way. Sorry about that. The way you wrote your comment gave me the impression that you were saying animals are not worthy of compassion, but if that's not the case then it's all good.
Human rights for Chimps. Definitely no. If you give them rights, you need to make sure they abide by the same laws that humans abide by. If one 'tells' a chimp to steal something, will the human be punished? He could as well say, "I told him to jump off the cliff, but he didn't do that right? Why are you punishing me for this". I mean, I know this sounds ridiculous but humans have known to be clever to exploit every possible loop hole in wording or spirit of the law - case in point, the patent system.
I would argue that if we are to give chimpanzees human rights then we may as well start enforcing building codes for beavers and ants. What is unnatural (law) does not necessarily work for those the animal kingdom. It should not be forgotten that animals have a certain level of rights to coexist with us on Earth but at the same time it does a disservice to humanity to treat them as our equals.
It's certainly honorable to want to give rights to animals and it wouldn't be a "wtf" moment if they declared they wanted animal rights (or chimpanzee rights in that case) based on current human right.
But granting human right to chimpanzees is not saying animals have the same rights than humans. It's saying chimpanzees are humans. We can debate on how apes are different (if at all) with humans, but we should not forget that what NZ government was basically saying is that they're not different.
I guess the discussion starts from "human rights" because there is no established "animal rights" anywhere in the first place. I'm not saying I agree that they should have human rights.
I dont think "rights" is the right word to begin with, but "compassion towards other species" would be a good place to start with, and reflecting about how "moral / ethical" it is to inflict pain willingly on other species.
Because if "pain" and "emotions" are felt pretty much in the same way by animals and humans (for which there is more and more evidence on that as we learn how the brain works), why would it be moral to inflict pain to animals but amoral to inflict pain on human beings ?
> Because if "pain" and "emotions" are felt pretty much in the same way by animals and humans (for which there is more and more evidence on that as we learn how the brain works), why would it be moral to inflict pain to animals but amoral to inflict pain on human beings ?
Without being an antispecist, I surely agree with that. It would have been indeed a great thing to start with writing some kind of animal rights chart, or even a global "life rights", that would include human rights (and which would probably leads to questions like "how much is it ok to takes from nature" or "when taking animal life for food, how to do it respectfully"). But I don't think that's what this government had in mind.
I may be wrong, of course, but it seems to me they had more anthropological considerations about apes than considerations about animal suffering, or else, they would have proposed some kind of general animal law.
Welfare-society-partisan I guess? The best thing a government can do is not run into debt and avoid charging massive taxes to employees and companies working in their country. That way, business can thrive better and jobs get created in larger number, so it should be a good thing if you are poor and unemployed.
Countries ridden with welfare are not doing TOO well currently. Most countries in Europe, US, Japan. All deep to their neck in public debt, always at the verge of bankruptcy. This can't be good for anyone in the end, poor included.
Yeah. Have you ever heard of peer to peer assistance? you know, that thing called charity that used to exist before governments started to take care of it themselves?
How about Mother Theresa? How about the Red Cross? About about the religious associations who live on donations only?
In your little world everything comes from the government, as well as your ideology it seems.
[Mother Theresa] felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus. Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International, criticised the failure to give painkillers, writing that in her Homes for the Dying, one could "hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. On principle, strong painkillers were not administered even in severe cases. According to Mother Teresa's philosophy, it is 'the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ'."
The quality of care offered to terminally ill patients in the Homes for the Dying has been criticised in the medical press. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal reported the reuse of hypodermic needles, poor living conditions, including the use of cold baths for all patients, and an approach to illness and suffering that precluded the use of many elements of modern medical care, such as systematic diagnosis. Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, described the medical care as "haphazard", as volunteers without medical knowledge had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors. He observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa)
As a Canadian, I think I strongly prefer our government-provided healthcare to the Mother Theresa version.
I would not bring up a notorious nutter like Mother Theresa in support of your Ayn Rand ideology if I were you.
And your argument that charities and government-funded welfare are mutually exclusive is just plain bizarre. In any case, let us know how Somalia works out for you.
> ANd thanks for the cliche that poor = robber/criminal
Parent was pointing out that a reasonable government welfare program does a lot less to foster resentment than a free market "fend for yourself" approach.
> I am sure many honest poor people appreciate your point of view.
Honest people still have to eat. Poor people don't (usually) choose to be poor, and if you force them into a corner with no other alternative, they will either
a) Die
or
b) Resort to crime or some other undesirable activity to prevent themselves from dying.
Growing public debt from one year to another. And quite fast, too.
"Canada’s federal debt grew steadily between 5% and 10% per year until 1975. For the next 12 years it grew on average over 20% per year. It surpassed $100 billion in 1981, $200 billion in 1985, $300 billion in 1988, $400 billion in 1992, and $500 billion in 1994. It peaked at $563 billion in 1997. The debt then declined to $458 billion by 2008. With the recession, the federal debt grew by $5.8 billion in 2008-09 and is expected to grow by $55.9 billion in 2009-10. November 2012 Canadian debt surpassed the $600 billion mark"
You better check your sources before commenting. Or maybe you are one of those to think that federal debt is not an issue and that you never need to pay it back. You are in for a big surprise.
Well welfare has a threshold effect. Nordic countries have very small populations to take care of. You'll see that countries where welfare becomes an issue are usually larger ones in the dozens of millions.
But I wouldn't put all the nordic countries in the same basket. Last I know Sweden is not doing too well compared to Finland.
Greece is a rather small country, so are Portugal and Ireland. If anything, being small makes things worse, as it is more likely that there is less economical diversification.
Greece never had an economy to begin with. It's got a free ride with the Euro cheap interest rates and now a brutal reality check when they had to pay back.
Is is not all relative? It's not like countries with "small populations to take care of" have massive populations to pay for that welfare.
I don't know the answer, but maybe you do: what percentage of the population is considered "on welfare" for those countries that are striving, versus those that aren't?
"Last I know Sweden is not doing too well compared to Finland."
'But from another perspective, Finland’s performance looks disappointing. An alternative destination from Helsinki on one of those monster cruise ships is due west to Stockholm. Unlike Finland, Sweden chose not to join the euro. Until the crisis, that made little difference. Both countries did well; if anything Finland’s performance was stronger. But over the past five years their fortunes have diverged to the detriment of Finland.'
> Countries ridden with welfare are not doing TOO well currently. Most countries in Europe, US, Japan. All deep to their neck in public debt, always at the verge of bankruptcy. This can't be good for anyone in the end, poor included.
At least most of said countries have smaller debt-to-GDP ratio than US.
You should get rid of all patents if that's the case. Patents slow down innovation period. And software patents can be non-obvious, just like hardware patents -- software and hardware innovations can be just as equally obvious to anyone who starts to work on a problem.
Don't be fooled - we're selling off our assets as you speak.
But hey, we can buy shares in them, so the thing I partly owned I can pay money for and partly own it again.
"The U.S. is in software patents so deep, the only way I can see it changing is watching other countries move faster without the drain on innovation and the need to pay lawyers when you code."
Lawyers have a lot of money. Those laws aren't going to change until the role of money in politics changes. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Probably the last 6% either hold patents or really don't quite get the issue. Lots of folks work in closed source/proprietary only and have no problem with the idea of making everyone license every little thing.
Motivations of the last 6% are probably relating to trying to create a business that won't just be copied by someone who has access to resources faster than them, e.g. entrepreneurs and business folk..
Have you tried getting funding before for something that's complex, though then could easily be copied / re-engineered by big companies? Investors will know this and you won't be able to start the business with investors' money in most cases like this.
Naw.. if you've got a 3 or 4 letter last name and you work in/on/around I.T. you're going to run into an acronym that happens to be your name at some point.
It would be very cool if a major software house set up or moved their development shop to NZ so as to be free to develop and test their products in a patent-free environment. Sort of like we have tax havens ... software development havens?
It would be even cooler if a few different countries did this and set up a sort of, software patent-free economic zone.
It could create a whole new architecture for software - just the patented parts hosted remotely in software-patent-free zones while the rest is brought local to the customer. At least for the types of products where that works.
>while the rest is brought local to the customer //
Sounds like contributory infringement to me. Why not just host the entire thing distally and access via VPN?
The answer lies in where a product is considered to be sold. If you're targeting customers in the USA say then it doesn't matter where your server is you're still considered to be selling in the USA.
YMMV and I'm afraid I don't have any caselaw handy to cite on this.
I have to ask (I do t understand this stuff), how do you ban software from import - login to NZ server, pay, download?
Would a banner saying that people in the US are forbidden from doing this be enough to get the seller off the hook?
Inducing someone to infringe a patent valid in the US by importing (downloading) your product into the US is itself an infringement of the patent under 35 USC 271 (b). Even with the banner, plaintiff / prosecution lawyers could argue that you were inducing infringement - otherwise, why use a banner and not one of the widely available IP geolocation databases for an IP based block? Why, for example, sell to credit cards issued by US banks? Obviously, if you put more effective technical measures in place, but people from the US are, say, using a non-US proxy and paying by BitCoin, it might be easier to defend.
If someone in NZ breaks US law, there is then a question of whether they can face any consequences for it if they never leave NZ. Patents law has both a civil and a criminal aspect to it.
Under NZ civil law, the New Zealand courts can enforce civil judgements made against a New Zealand resident person, but only if the matter doesn't relate to taxes, and the person was either physically in the jurisdiction that made the judgement on the day the suit was filed, or the person takes any action in the foreign lawsuit other than arguing lack of jurisdiction.
New Zealanders can be extradited to face criminal charges abroad, but subject to the following test: "if the conduct of the person constituting the offence in relation to the extradition country, or equivalent conduct, had occurred within the jurisdiction of New Zealand at the relevant time it would, if proved, have constituted an offence punishable under the law of New Zealand for which the maximum penalty is imprisonment for not less than 12 months or any more severe penalty". That doesn't necessarily stop long and protracted proceedings - Kim Dotcom was probably protected by the safe harbour provisions under New Zealand copyright law.
Even if someone is safe from civil enforcement of a foreign judgement or criminal extradition, the US might still have power over them. For example, if they have assets in the US, they might not be safe. How do people pay to download the software - if it involves a payment system with US operations, like Visa or Mastercard, they might still be able to shut it down or garnish customer payments. Selling only by BitCoin might seriously hurt conversion rates.
>so as to be free to develop and test their products in a patent-free environment //
You're free to used patented inventions for development and testing - you can't use them commercially. So giving away the resulting product (which I think would include external testing by anyone considered part of 'the public').
The whole deal with patents is [supposed to be] to stimulate innovation - the sufficient disclosure parts of patents applications are for the express purpose of making duplication of the invention possible within the relevant art.
You're supposed to develop and test with patented inventions.
The problem of course comes when R&D of a product pauses and you have to start negotiating licensing and such in order to bring a product to market.
While software that violates other countries' patents cannot be sold to those countries, the sale of software is not the only use of software. The visual effects industry for example can sell their visual effects, and this is a major part of the NZ software ecosystem.
As a kiwi in Europe I can say that this will affect any future decision on where I'll base my business.
That is until the US comes in with their bullying tactics and buy our PM with 5 minutes of facetime with Obama.
How can anyone support legalized extortion like software patents? Hopefully this will change in global scale, when new decision makers will replace the old farts who don't have a clue what software development actually is about.
What does this mean for software companies in New Zealand? If they sell software in the US (and who doesn't, with the internet and all), I assume they're still on the hook for US patent law?
My NZ based employer does business in the US, and hold US software and/or business method patents.
I can't speak for my company, but I personally feel that the whole software patent system is ridiculous, and I'm pleased that the local situation isn't going to go down that road.
At least, not until we get railroaded by the 'Trans Pacific Partnership'(TPP) Treaty, or its newer cousins, whenever they show up.
In the mean time, I would assume that we would be unable to sell something that violated an US patent, in the US, but wouldn't be liable for sales of that might violate a US patent in NZ, unless there is some other bi-lateral (or unilateral) treaty covering the situation that I am not aware of.
No. Technically NZ company can not sell anything outside NZ. And company only operates in jurisdiction of his origin country. Technically "selling in the US" means that NZ company is exporting (and this is regulated by NZ laws) and those who buy that software are importing (which is regulated by US laws) said software into US and US patent holder(s) can try to prevent that import. But even then this means nothing to the NZ company in question. On the other hand if said NZ company has daughter company in US, then yes, that company can be sued.
I'd like to know that too. I mean Xero has offices in the US certainly, so they'd be able to be served and the sort, but what about NZ exclusive shops?
So the scenario is that a company in NZ distributes software using NZ servers to users in the US? I can imagine some problems. What happens if they sue the users in the US? What happens if they go to ICE and have the domain you're distributing from seized? What happens if one of the company's officers goes to the US on vacation and gets served?
I guess there's one way to find out. But it seems like the better plan is to fight to eliminate software patents everywhere instead of pretending the internet is going to respect every nation's borders or vice versa.
Yes, that jurisdiction's law applies, although NZ companies can apply for US patents too. Further, I would presume that web software hosted outside the US could avoid having the server component covered by the US jurisdiction. It could be just patents on client-side tech.
Thats misleading, since software patents are regularly granted anyway. From the article you quoted:
"Patent laws in the UK and throughout Europe specify a non-exhaustive list of excluded things that are not regarded as inventions to the extent that a patent application relates to the excluded thing as such. This list includes programs for computers.
Despite this, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) regularly grants patents to inventions that are partly or wholly implemented in software"
The patent situation is definitely better in UK and Europe than in US, but actual enforcement is key. The problem is using ambiguity of English to justify the software as having a "technical effect" and patentable by that metric. At which point saying that software isn't patentable is at best misleading since you could argue that all software has a "technical effect".
It's not "ambiguity of English" -- all (usefulsoftware does have a technical effect. Or would you say software should be excluded from the "tech industry" and people should stop calling themselves "software engineers"? This is why it is mostly patentable in the EU.
About the only thing the "technical effect" limitation prevents is business method patents.
I don't know the rules in detail, but the claim is that "software isn't patentable". And yet software with a technical effect is patentable. But all software has a technical effect. Ergo, software isn't patentable because its software, its patentable because it has a technical effect and UKIPO has granted patents on software on that basis. This means that claiming "software isn't patentable" is a misleading claim at best.
or it will be superceded by the Trans Pacific Partnership. But I can't tell since the text hasn't been officially released. Leaked drafts don't look good though.
It will be interesting to see what the practical effect of this is over the long term. The new SOP says that certain processes involving software will still be patentable, which seems remarkably similar to the Supreme Court's finding in Diehr.
I've always felt that NZ was a sensible place for startups (in theory, I've never been). A nice clean country, easy of doing business, no capital gains tax, respectable government, no drones or porno scanners, California-like in north (and amazing scenery every in general), impressive # of tech companies in relation to size. They'd be smart to do a Start-up Chile sort of program. If I were a VC and wanted an adventure, I'd set up shop in Auckland and target the promising startups who couldn't get US visas.
We recently covered patents and basic copyright law in a technical writing class. What my professors taught me was that 'patent is a contract between society and inventors to encourage progress'. And it seems fair on certain levels.
I am a huge proponent of FOSS, I respect Stallman, I've read his book and I think patent trolls are dicks. However, is it a good idea to make software not patentable? Will we as a community fail to innovate then?
The point of patents isn't to encourage progress. Inventors have existed and will exist with or without patents, and we will have progress with or without patents. The point of patents is to destroy trade secrets. The contract between society and inventors is, tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise to not compete with you for a while. The word "patent" itself means open, as in the phrase "patently false", i.e. manifestly or obviously false.
This is what patents are supposed to be about: a magician revealing his tricks. Without patent law, the public may have never known how Michael Jackson did the Smooth Criminal leaning trick. He would have taken the secret to his grave.
The problem is the vast majority of software patents are of this kind. They are not revealing any secrets. They're just making life difficult for everyone else. This is what needs to be abolished.
The problem is that the vast amount of computer software doesn't contain an inventive step. The vast majority of software development is taking existing, well-understood techniques and solutions, and applying them to an equally-well-understood problem. Implementation, rather than innovation.
The parts of software development that are genuinely inventive (and thus could be considered worthy of patent protection) are either already held to be not patentable (mathematical algorithms, development practices), or are far better served by copyright and trademark law than by patents (design). Patents serve little-to-no-purpose in protecting legitimate invention in software.
Lets also not forget that proprietary software implementations are by design a secret, which almost always are kept forever from the public.
So a genuinely inventive idea can be independent created over and over again. A email sorting algorithm could had firstly been made in then 1950, again in the 1970, 3 times in the 1990, and then claimed in a patent in the 2000. Even if source code was public, a patent examiner would have to compare and understand billions of line of codes to even try to grasp what is genuinely inventive, and was has already been done before.
Examining software patents is an unsolvable problem. Society can either have them an accept that any review is a token effort at best, and a rubber stamp in the common case, or they can avoid the whole mess by not allowing those kinds of patents.
Take it to the extreme: say IBM patented the `operating system software`, for example. Would Microsoft and/or Apple have come to exist as projects out of a basement or dorm? Say someone patented a media player that could hold a library in the cloud and could stream it to the user via a network / internet... would Spotify, Rdio, or any other competitors exist today?
Software patents are suffocating innovators, rather than inspiring them.
Misconceptions abound. You cannot patent "operating system software" because it is an abstract concept with no embodiment, like "flying car" or "hyperdrive spaceship".
And people did patent "media player with music in the cloud", or more accurately, various aspects thereof. Spotify famously got sued over a patent on a specific way to do DRM for streaming music, for example, when they entered the US. They just licensed it and moved on. The streaming music industry is growing all the time, despite tons of patents in the field.
Conversely, if you think weak patent rights means unbounded innovation, I haven't seen any particularly impressive tech originating in China or India.
Things are patented left and right in the US, and always have been, and I don't see innovation here slowing down any. And it would not be surprising if people understood the realities of patents instead of believing what tech media tells them (insert reference to pg's "Submarine" essay here).
> You cannot patent "operating system software" because it is an abstract concept with no embodiment, like "flying car" or "hyperdrive spaceship"
Exactly why I started my sentence with _take it to the extreme_.
Innovation in the US may not have slowed down (I would argue that it has, although I'm not in the US), but it has definitely become quite expensive. In my opinion, that's a barrier for independent software developers.
Actually, small players like startups and independent developers are the least likely to get hit with patent problems. It's only because the few trolls that sued a lot of small guys got a huge amount of publicity that it seems like a big problem. These trolls are abusing the cost asymmetry of patent litigation, and something needs to be done about this, but they are still relatively rare. Unfortunately, this problem shows signs of growing fast.
Yes, because there was no innovation until patent protection came to be. Do you seriously think we would have invented and shared the secret of making fire over 10,000 years ago without patents to protect the original inventors? Or the wheel or the steam engine or telescopes? LOL
New Zealand is such an awesome country. Wasn't it also voted the most free country in the world? I have no sources to back that claim up; I read it somewhere.
That's a nasty one, but such an easy law to avoid. Use direct downloads or download movies, since the movie companies are protesting paying costs by not filing complaints.
Even in its nastiness it is sensible in its own right - $25 cost for the copyright holder to send a notice. The notice can also be challenged by the accused infringer.
Well, also you can't get another notice within 28 days.
And if I recall correctly, you have to get three notices within 9 months.
So basically if you manage to spend less than 1/3rd of your time "On Notice" you should be sweet as.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL
EDIT: Actually, fence-post error. The correct figure is ~2/9ths, as penalties trigger on the receipt of the third notice (so we can't count its period).
I think everyone forgot about the 3 strikes law here.
None of the big ISP's enforce it AT ALL.
I've heard a couple of small ISP's kick a couple of people off back when it was first introduced but since then there's been nothing.
Considering most of my friends here all torrent everything off The Pirate Bay (They don't use private trackers :p), I don't think I've heard of a single person I know get in trouble.
Telecom NZ would see that enforcing that law as a cost to them (they are pretty anal about spending money on things other than marketing), so they would probably not do anything until the government takes them to court.
My father got a letter from his small ISP saying that they won't be playing along the the three strike thing, and for some reason even if they wanted to they couldn't be sure which of their customers was the infringer. Heavily suspicious, but not 100%. So carry on, we got your back. He is just outside Tauranga.
If anyone is going to support Free and Open Source Software, it's going to be a guy named Foss.
The government asked its citizens their thoughts "a recent poll of more than 1000 Kiwi IT professionals found 94 per cent wanted to see software patents gone." -- As overwhelming as 94% is, I wonder the motivations of the last 6%.
The U.S. is in software patents so deep, the only way I can see it changing is watching other countries move faster without the drain on innovation and the need to pay lawyers when you code.