Australia to Get Software Patents and Anti-Circumvention Laws

Marlor writes "Australia's main opposition party have just confirmed that they will be supporting the Free Trade Agreement with the USA. This means that Australia will be adopting DMCA-style laws and Software Patents in the name of 'harmonizing IP laws with the USA', despite consistent lobbying against them. Matters are made worse by the fact that, unlike Americans, Australians are not protected by 'fair use' provisions." Odd that 'harmonizing' is always in one direction - for some reason, no one ever wants to decrease IP regulation to harmonize with some other country.

Comments

Economies

[headkase]

I'd like to see a block of maybe africa and the middle east just say screw it and form their own economic associations independent of the United States. They wouldn't have great GDP's but at least they'd be creating their own economies suited to their specific needs and not letting the vacuum machine that is the US suck up all their money.
Developing countries are not a market for our TV production and their home textile industries can't get off the ground because the West floods developing markets with cheap bolts of cloth or discarded clothing. Our economic interests do not match, the developing world needs to bootstrap itself to the next economic level while the West economies tend to take aggressive advantage of any market as our goal is the creation of our wealth not for the benefit of the markets that such behaviour tends to suck dry.
Or not.

Re:Economies

[Threni]

> I'd like to see a block of maybe africa and the middle east just say screw it
> and form their own economic associations independent of the United States. They
> wouldn't have great GDP's but at least they'd be creating their own economies
> suited to their specific needs and not letting the vacuum machine that is the
> US suck up all their money.

You could call it Cuba, for instance.

A black day, indeed.

[FoboldFKY]

Today, the final shread of faith that I had left in my government has finally disappeared. I am now sorry to be Australian.

I "know" why they're doing this. The same reason they got into politics in the first place. Power. Money. Fame. Although perhaps the wholesale "if you don't cave in, you can forget about trade and any kind of military protection in the future" line from the US government helped seal the deal.

What I do not understand is how these people sleep at night, knowing they have sold out every last Australian they supposedly represent. Do they lie in bed next to their loved ones and think "today I signed away my people's freedoms to foreign companies; what a great leader I am"? Or are they just so profoundly stupid that they can't see the plague they are about to unleash on us?

To the Liberals and Labor: you make me ashamed to even be the same nationality as you. If I ever hear you utter the word "freedom" again, I will be sick.

I'm going to cry in the corner now. You can rest easy knowing that you've betrayed us all.