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Australia-U.S. Trade Agreement Contains DMCA-like Provisions
femto writes "The text of the US-Australian Preferential Trade Agreement has been released. It has significant implications for Free Software and the Public Domain within Australia. Implications include extension of copyright terms (death to the Public Domain & Gutenberg Australia), software patents (death to Free Software) and the DMCA (death to fair use). It is not yet law. The Europeans have shown that software patents are not a done deal. Now is the time to write letters to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Join the EFA. Contact your local library. Sign up to the mailing list to organise opposition. Just make a noise during this year's federal election."
By GNAA Staff
Darl here, with another fine Fr1st P0st. After all -- SCO did everything first, and the rest of the responses to this story will owe their heritage to a foundation built on SCO's staff of talented programmers.
You may be wondering why SCO salesmen are not answering your numerous calls while you try to order more SCO licenses. Well, we aren't answering the phones because we're too busy celebrating our newest business partner. Rather than explaining it myself, I'll let our formal press release do the talking. Take it away, Mr. Reuters...
LINDON, Utah, Sept. 8/PRNewswire - FirstCall/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), the owner and licensor of the core UNIX operating system source code, today announced its second Fortune 500 clent for the SCO Linux IP license, the GNAA (Nasdaq: RHAT - News), developer of fine Slashdot trolls on irc.efnet.net #GNAA, also well-known for revolutionizing small business development with its "Step 2: ??????" profit model. The availability of the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux affords Linux deployments to come into compliance with international law for the use of all 2.4 and future kernels. The run-time license permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in Linux distributions.
By purchasing a SCO Intellectual Property License, customers avoid infringement of SCO's intellectual property rights in Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 kernels and assure Darl financial security for the purchase of his second home. Because the SCO license authorizes run-time use only, customers also comply with the General Public License, under which Linux is distributed. Source may still be distributed under the terms of the GPL, however source distributors are held accountable for all violation of SCO's IP. Indemnification is provided for customers of runtime clients only. Read that twice, dirty hippy. You're not in the clear yet.
GNAA spokesperson penisbird said of the licensure, "coming into compliance affords us a new competitive advantage with the other Slashdot authors. By being in the right, we can thumb down our noses at not only the Windows users and the BSD-thieving Mac Users, but also the unwashed Linux hippies running stolen code on their parents' PCs." VP of anus enlargement goat-see added, "fr1st p0st? damn i miss. how do i next story?"
Mr. Darl McBride concurred with GNAA's analysis, adding "We soon hope to convince additional clients such as Trollklore and Cabal of Logged In Trolls of the benefits of licensing SCO's valuable IP. Also, I <3 GNAA bunny. (@.@)" JesuitX clarified the nature of the SCO and GNAA alliance, adding "We're more than just a licensing client. We're also going to be helping to bring these other potential licensors into compliance. We can break them in little by little as paying sublicensors. The alternative is pretty horrible. Our lawyers can take a reticent client from virgin to hello.jpg [figure 2] in under an hour, and believe me -- it is not pleasant." freetibet was recorded saying, "I read Slashdot just for GNAA posts".
Commander Taco was unavailable for comment, however Cowboy Kneel was said to ask for a print of [figure 2] for his basement apartment. Simoniker remained British and unable to spell "color," while Timothy responded by posting the same story six times, and Hemos reposted a seventh time, the submission differing only from his application of that damned Einstein icon.
If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
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I often wonder why people think that voting is a good thing, and everyone voting would be a very good thing, when the grand majority of people don't pay very much attention to politics most of the time.
What we want is for everyone to know exactly how awful these trade deals/laws/whatever are, and then have those people vote. We want the people who don't follow this stuff to not vote, because then politicians would have to worry about actually addressing the issues in their campaigns rather than running on a kissing babies and an, "I believe in what you believe" platform.
Frankly, if we got all the uninformed people to stop voting we'd probably have a bit more of an uproar about esoteric issues like copyright and trademark law.