Indian government has rightly rested its Digital India initiative on a series of measures to liberalize the economy. PM of India will be receiving from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) on April 30 a report on the Patent Office’s Computer-Related Inventions Guidelines (CRI),
in which parties who usually applaud free-market measures are horrified to discover that Section 3(k) of the Patent Act really does prohibit government-awarded monopolies in software, and that the controller of patents is implementing the statutory command.
Software patenting is not a requirement of TRIPs, or of any current international trade law. Software patenting is not in the Indian national economic interest. Indian Software companies can do patent their inventions abroad, actively competing in market. In the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations, too,
Indian efforts to implement its own longstanding patent law, preventing foreign parties from using the patent system to hobble Indian advantages in software-making, have come under direct fire.
