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Letter To Abolish Software Patents In Australia
Ben Sturmfels writes "Over 500 members of the Australian software industry have have signed an open letter urging their government to abolish software patents. Signatories include free software luminaries Andrew Tridgell and Jonathan Oxer. In 2008 the Australian government began a Review of Patentable Subject Matter. While we missed the 2009 public consultation period, we hope to influence the government's response to the Review, due in February 2011. The letter will be presented to Minister Kim Carr in early August."
If you're in QLD, vote for the Greens above the line: https://www.belowtheline.org.au/qld/group_r.html
Here's why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhd1I7adhzM
I expect this will be the best year for the Greens in a long time.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The reason America is rich today is because,
1) It had virgin land to grow into
2) Then it had texas oil to sell
3) Then it had the worlds currency, growth in $ assets was all really money printed in the US.
4) Then under Bush it was fake insurance assets, CDRs and CDS etc. It tried to create bogus asset classes to soak up the growth in the money from the excessive borrowing needed to balance the trade deficit with Bush's unfunded spending.
It currently has none of these, Euro is a properly run currency (Greece is insignificant in the Euro). It uses more oil than it produces and it's land is all allocated, and those fake assets are sitting in the Federal reserve waiting to hit the $.
Their big hope is copyrights patents and so on, fake assets constructed from artificial monopolies. But all they're doing is making themselves less and less competitive. One mans monopoly is another competitive burden. It could only work if the monopoly was enforced everywhere with equal zeel, and nobody complained when companies like Apple pretend to invent stuff they didn't invent.
Australia is bowing to pressure here because their economy is so tied to the USA one, but EVERYONE needs to do this to prop up the US and many do not have the incentive that Australia has.
One can argue that slavery actually slowed down the development of the South, and made it too weak to wage a war with the North. Slavery,although immoral, can benefit a country, but only to a certain extent, since it's greatest weakness is that it cannot generate a great consumer market, which is essential to capitalism.
Since the rise of capitalism, when compared to contemporary capitalist societies, the ones that used slavery were not only economic, but also technologically and militarily inferior.
If you think the US industrial economy was based on slavery, there's no reason to believe you have any understanding of history. In the period of the struggle against slavery it was the Northern industrial states who took the side for freedom. Slavery was supported in the regressive states of the south. Slavery never contributed much to Americas industrial success.
re generate a great consumer market, yes Ford got that too, sell to workers and export to world, real products with an endless supply of raw materials, cheap energy, paid labor.
Cheap oil via client states in need of US protection helped too.
Now its just mercs and bankers feeding back into the political system that keeps the wars going as the M3 presses run.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The US economy is heavily dependant on exploiting undeveloped countries in this very day. To say that slavery never contributed to US economy, while in the same time your own corporations suck the very life out of countries with questionable humanitarian values doesn't do you must justice.
To translate that into a simple English: US thrives because it had given the opportunity to plunder the lands that were not plundered and after the WW1 most of the world was in debt to US.
Do you really think that the British empire was rich due to something else other than plundering the rest of the world? US is not much different in that respect.
>Slavery never contributed much to Americas industrial success.
That is only true in the narrowest possible reading of the concept. Those industries relied on farming to supply food for their workers for example. If that food was mostly imported - workers would have had a much higher cost of living, meaning they HAD to be paid more (because dead workers aren't productive), which would have slowed down industry growth. Among the most profitable of slavery-run farms were the cotton farmers, cotton isn't sold to the public- it's sold as a source material for the textile industry. If the cotton farms were PAYING their workers, their costs would have been higher - the cotton more expensive and one of America's most successful early industries would have been a GREAT deal smaller.
Even so you made a strawman attack - the disrespect for copyright and patents were the GP's point and did indeed have a massive positive impact on America's wealth and you ignored that to focus only on the point about slavery (an example given and not even part of the GP's main point) - and what's worse your strawman attack was rather pathetic as your argument is easily debunked with just 5 seconds of logic.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You don't have to sleep with your slaves. The United States are build on distributing stolen land as manna and mental reform of immigrants which were stripped of their cultural heritage.
Jeez, if there ever was an example of unfair moderation. My post has so many replies, and is still considered "Redundant".
Talk about reading what you want and missing what you don't want.
Here, I'll point out:
1) It had virgin land to grow into
This was when the US was being colonised. Before Shrub. By Shrub's time, all the land was owned.
2) Then it had texas oil to sell
This was when the US was building up its oil production. Before Shrub. By Shrub's time, peak oil in the US had passed.
3) Then it had the worlds currency, growth in $ assets was all really money printed in the US.
This was the handing over of the world currency (then in Pound Sterling) to the US, after WW2. Before Shrub. He didn't even have to get daddy to put him in safety to avoid THAT war. Later ones, yes, but not WW2.