Information Society Watch

January 22, 2007, Tectonic

South Africa disallows software patents and according to an academic from South Africa ,Derek Keats, Microsoft has been violating this law by filing software patents over there. He said this during a workshop on software and business method patents where Microsoft officials were present, while Microsoft officials refuted this claim and insisted that Microsoft were operating within the laws of the land.
The problem arises because as a non-examining country, the patent office does not check the validity of the patent, it only checks if payment has been made and that the correct forms are filled out. For this reason, software patents slip through the process illegally. Once a patent has been filed, it is extremely difficult to revoke it since the legal costs are extremely high and in many cases, countries such as South Africa cannot afford such costs. In fact, this is part of a larger problem where patents pose a challenge to many countries who are simply overwhelmed by the sheer money power multinationals bring with them.
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