Nathan Cochrane writes in The Age: ‘Opponents of a Canadian company’s patent to tax online transactions believe they can stop it before it is granted by the Australian patents office.’ This is the DE Technologies patent I blogged about before, which they hope to license under some hefty terms; ‘annual licence fees of $US10,000 ($A15,324) each, plus 1.5 per cent a transaction and $0.11 cents each time a document, such as an invoice, is generated.’
At FightThePatent.co.nz, they note that the NZ government plans to amend its patent law to make it much harder to file such patents in future. They also link to another Age article which says the patent has already been granted in Oz as of ‘February of this year, according to IP Australia’.
An Aussie tech executive called Matthew Tutaki is planning to try and have it quashed. The situation can be followed on FightThePatent.co.nz. Unfortunately, in turn it seems DE Technologies are planning to fight back.
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