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Does anyone know how this affects companies exporting software from NZ to, say, the US?

I am assuming you're fine until you have an official/legal presence in the US, at which point you come under US patent law. Does this sound correct?

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Invention patents cover, among other things, importation, manufacture, and use of the patented invention. So without US patent licenses, their US customers could be liable for infringement.

That leaves SaaS an open question. What if you send your data out to be processed in a software patent-free country and receive it back later? That's not the same as having a machine that infringes at all.

I'm not clear what the boundaries are, but I imagine that this is settled by existing patent law. Surely at sometime during the previous 200+ years, some patentholder has sued somebody in Detroit or New York for shipping materials to Canada for processing using a process or machine that was patented in the US but not in Canada.

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