New Zealand Just Got Saner Software Patent Laws September 2, 2013 · by Hugo Ferreira · in Pirate Topics After five years of debate and lobbying from major multinational software patent holders, some sanity has been brought into New Zealand’s software patent system. New Zealand has announced that they will no longer approve meritless software patents describing age old processes solely because they are now done in a computer. However they will still approve software patents of processes they deem new inventions, and give the example of a new firmware for a washing machine that provides incremental improvements. In other words, this bill is not a total ban of software patents, …