I am left with 2 questions:

Under the proposed TPP investor-state dispute provisions, will an overseas holder of a software patent be able to sue the NZ government for lost profits?

Does patent infringement liability arise at the point of manufacture or the point of sale? Microsoft asserts that Android infringes various software patents it holds and has signed licensing agreements with a number of mobile phone manufacturers. What happens to these agreements if Android phones are either manufactured or sold in NZ? If I buy an Android phone in NZ, can I expect a refund for the (secret) amount the manufacturer has paid to Microsoft?

However, my view is that there are too many billions of dollars at stake for there not to be a legal challenge to ad-blocking at some level. The various legal & policy responses to file sharing gives some insights here.

Cheers
Guy

One significant difference between TV and internet traffic which you have mentioned but explained, is that the former is a streamed broadcast.

Therefore, the argument above; that if a stream is altered in some fashion it constitutes copyright infringement is a ridiculous one. If a broadband provider offers a poor service and the UDP steam is not complete from server to users computer – Does that constitute copyright infringement? Should we expect end users to start suing all ISPs? Seriously, that is never going to get to court.

As for WWW content – ie web pages, they are not streamed and the content delivered to the end point differs from PC to PC, from mobile device to mobile device, from web browser to web browser. The end user’s choice of device or Brower dictates what IS and what IS NOT transferred to their device, and how it is rendered. Any how many pages are plain HTML these days? Statistically, the vast vast majority of content delivered is dynamic, changing dependent on what cookies a users has on their device, previous pages viewed, time of day, etc.

What about the Security appliance conglomerates (Intel or McAfee as they are also known for example), which offer the blocking of certain content? Are they breaking copyright law too?

If there was IN ANY WAY a threat to ad blocking software using the above argument, they would just change their code, so that all data was transferred to a users machine, and simply not render the advertising.

I feel it is obvious that advertising will have to change or disappear. If you want to read articles from the Guardian website for example, you would need to subscribe to their site, including the delivery method, forcing you to see content unfettered. For those not willing to pay, they would offer a free but limited content option. Many sites already offer a similar model.

This negates the need for any lengthy, costly, court battles, which winning would ultimately be fruitless as users would still win by using some other new technique that avoids the law, such as firewalls or other systems which use IP lists to block known advertising.

The Bill is silent on that issue (it’s perhaps admirable for its brevity!) however I think the Brinkibon case still correctly states the general principles, and together with s 11 of the Electronic Transactions Act, I would say that the contract is formed when an email arrives rather than when it is read. That is, if an offeror has designated email as a mode of acceptance, then it is implicit that they are responsibile for promptly clearing their emails and will take the risk of a malfunction in their own email systems, rather than putting the risk on the offeree. However, as with the “fax cases”, if the offeree is aware that the email was not received (e.g. they got a “mailbox full” message), then there would be no contract.

Regards
Guy

It’s becoming increasingly untenable for the minister to assert he’s doing one thing (excluding software patents), while his officials are working hard to ensure that the opposite (that software patents are still granted) is true.