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TRIPS Agreement

Revision as of 12:09, 20 May 2009 by Ciaran (talk | contribs) (External links: , by Anton Hughes)

TRIPS is an international agreement of the World Trade Organisation (of which most countries of the world are members).

Sometimes politicians are told that software patent legislation is required for compliance with TRIPS, but this is rubbish.

Article 27

The clause used as a base for this rubbish claim is Article 27 paragraph 1: "patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application."

However, TRIPS does not say that writing software is a "field of technology". In fact, that term is not defined at all, so every legislature is free to decide which activities are and which aren't part of a field of technology.

Article 10

Moreover, a direct comment about software in TRIPS is in Article 10: "Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971)." Literary writing is not a field of technology, so this sentence implies that the authors of TRIPS did not intend software to be counted as a field of technology.

External links