Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Examined

PeterBecker writes "An evalutation of the impact of the changes Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement is available from the Australian Parliamentary Library (Research Paper #14). It takes a very critical stance, with statements such as "IPRs fit awkwardly in an agreement that has the aim of advancing free trade." and "While there has not been a comprehensive economic evaluation of IPRs, the Productivity Commission has found that, as a net importer of IPRs, Australia would lose more than it gains by strengthening IPRs. The net economic impact is thus likely to be negative.". Interesting read especially for those of you who might be affected but missed the fact thanks to close to no coverage in the mainstream media."

Comments

EU Council, Please Look at

[Karl-Friedrich Lenz]

this report and ask the same question:

Who would profit from legalizing software patents, the American or the European software industry?

Re:The media

[Unordained]

... and that they might have something to gain from it. Most big news outlets are owned by companies that also make/sell movies, music, or other media covered under copyright law that would be worth protecting overseas (your nightly news really doesn't matter in that respect.) Now, it's quite possible that because it's not an inconvenience to them, it simply didn't interest them (and they figured you wouldn't care either.) If this were very much not in their own best interest, they could easily blow it into a "big deal" everyone would suddenly mildly care about (as much as anybody seems to care about anything these days -- oh, wait, has that been true for all of history? Oh.)

.au would be insane to accept this

[leonbrooks]

Guess what the single biggest transferrer of money in .us is?

Correct! It is indeed enforcement of IPRs. Parking meters on a grand scale.

Of what benefit to Australia is:

1. opening their markets to the biggest property-rights sharks in the world?
2. joining their markets to those of a country whose income is earned not so much from innovation or production as from milking them both?
3. Moving their laws towards those of a country already neck-deep in litigation?
4. Opening their markets to a huge producer of Australian staples like wheat?

From an Australian perspective, she's a no make sense.

At all.

So why is it going ahead regardless?

Enquiring Aussies want to know.

Re:.au would be insane to accept this

[The OPTiCIAN]

> So why is it going ahead regardless?

It's a tradeoff for other concessions. Australians get agricultural deliverables as a result of this.

Don't get me wrong - I am staunchly opposed to a FTA that incorporates any of the brainless concessions on Sonny Bonno, patent law and copyright definitions. But the FTA is not *pure* evil, although it is poorly-conceived and will be bad for Australia's medium and long-term economic interest if implemented.

It shouldn't be necessary but unfortunately the so called leaders of the free world are a bunch of protectionist arseholes and our farmers don't want to have compete against their tarrifs. The government's naive policy flows from this motivation.

A poster in another thread noted:
> Thanks to the free trade agreement, Australia is now likely to get DMCA-like laws.

Australia already *has* [stupid] DMCA-like laws. However, under this agreement they would be expanded and (more seriously), entrenched in a foreign treaty. This means that if it gets introduced we'll have an extra level of lockin to them even when the fogies in parliament have moved on.

As a call-out to geeks, the best thing you can do if you're pissed off about these things is to join EFA and to join a major political party. Too many geeks whine endlessly about how little their government does right, yet never get involved in a meaningful way. If you're pissed off about this stuff don't be a whining loser, go and meet some humans and see how it works.

You'll see that bad decisions almost always have more to do with incompetence than conspiracy. Particularly in Australia which is largely free of corruption, back-room donation skills, that sort of thing.

Re:The media

[caitsith01]

"An examination of some of the shortcomings of a trade agreement between the U.S. and Australia does not effect most people directly."

Of course it does, and the IP law parts of it certainly affect them a hell of a lot more than the provisions about sugar, for example, which have had the bulk of the coverage in the media including incessant front pages for several weeks a few months ago.

The problem is people are too lazy to try to understand the finer details, even when they are very important details. On top of which, there is only a very weak consumer advocacy movement in Australia, there is no Nader-type crusader to draw attention to such issues, and only a few interest groups (Electronic Frontiers Australia being one, but they never seem to get any media play).

People with your attitude are actually the problem. We are going to trade away our own laws, developed over hundreds of years through the British common law and then locally since federation, in exchange for the lowering of a few tariffs on manufactured goods, and you think its 'boring' to have to think about it.