At the outset, I would take this opportunity to congratulate the
Indian Patent Office for coming up with the guidelines for
'Computer Related Inventions (CRI)[1].' More so, because they did
not call it 'Software Patent Guidelines.' That would have
been a misnomer and a paradox drawing huge criticism. The Patent
Office hit the bull's eye with the title for the guidelines at
least, by calling it Computer Related Inventions and not Software
Patents. The term software patent confuses a novice and he
inevitably thinks that the issue revolves around bringing software
protection from the purview of Copyright Law to Patent Law.
So it will be only apt to set the terminology right. In common
parlance, when a patent attorney is talking about software patents,
he is actually referring to an invention which is related to a
computer in some way or the other, and has software as one of the
essential features. Software, in simple terms, is an algorithm or a
method written in the
