Apple, Facebook eye digital payments
Global technology giant Apple has submitted at least five applications to the Indian Patent Office over the past year for innovations related to digital payments, in a bid to boost sales of its iPhones in the country.
Recently, Facebook made a patent application for digital wallet in its messaging services Messenger and WhatsApp. The influx of patent applications comes at a time when India is pushing for electronic payment as a tool to bring in more people into the formal economy and increase its tax base. Apple’s applications range from innovations around using biometrics to authenticate payments to securely transferring payment to a device, such as a point of sale (POS) device. The move suggests the company is preparing to bring its Apple Pay service to India, even as rivals Samsung and Google have already begun working on similar projects. Apple Pay is the company’s proprietary system for making payments using Apple devices in stores, within apps and even on the web. In the US, Apple Pay works with all major credit and debit card providers where a user’s phone can save the card details securely and use it, instead of having to carry the physical card. Both Apple and Facebook did not offer comment on the matter. The move by the two companies to apply for patents on digital payments comes despite India’s stand of not allowing patents on software, unless paired with hardware in an innovative way. Last year, the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks decided to scrap revised guidelines that said patents on software would be granted on the basis of ‘demonstrating technical advancement’.
“The law in India clearly states that software is intrinsically not patentable. The Joint Parliamentary Committee on Patents had very clearly said software as such was not intended to be granted patents. In 2005, a move to amend the Patent Act such that it allows software to be patented was rejected by Parliament on the grounds that it could lead to monopoly of MNCs,” said Venkatesh Hariharan, a member of iSPIRT’s expert group on software patents.