Imagine if… the cure to the AIDS virus was patented on discovery.

This is the third and final e-poster in our ‘Imagine if…’ campaign, with a very real warning of how the patenting process has tangible, life-or-death consequences in Africa. We ask you to upload the new e-poster to your blog or social networking profiles, as a way to drive home the importance of the patent issue, and the role that FTISA plays, and will continue to play, in reforming patent policy, legislation and practice in South Africa.

A big thank you to Pria Chetty who provided the inspiration for this poster; along with those who contributed their slogans to this campaign over the last month.  Also kudos to Infiltrate Media who interpreted the slogans to produced these stunning images.

To all those who have confirmed their attendance at the event – this is a final reminder for the AGM tomorrow, which starts at 2.00pm until 7.30pm at the University of the Witwatersrand, Administrative Block, Room CB8. This is going to be a highly interactive event, so be ready to contribute, contribute, contribute! A detailed programme for the afternoon is available here.

And to those who cannot attend the event, we are planning on live blogging the proceedings, so join us on the homepage of this website (http://ftisa.org.za) from 2pm for a blow-by-blow account of the AGM.

There is some good news – it seems the UK patent office just turned down a trivial software patent (similar in nature to the MS XML patent) sought by Oracle.

The patent officer made the following judgments:

“Stephen Probert drew on other guidance in CFPH’s case, where the judge had pointed out that the European Patent Convention of 1973 had excluded computer programs from the scope of patentability because they would do more harm than good. The policy behind the exclusion was that computer programs as such “could not be foreclosed to the public under patent law.” The argument runs that to grant a patent for software would stifle the market.

Read the full story.