Personally – on the basis of those natives I’ve met – I tend to view Oz as a land of rampant individualists; I am surprised that they let this sort of thing go on:

From [www.csamuel.org]

Linux Australia has published the first draft of their position paper on US – Australia “Free” Trade Agreement and Open Source

This talks about some of the possible chilling effects of the AU-US “Free” Trade Agreement, including many interesting things such as the fact it will prevent Australian consumers from buying DVDs from the US by making it illegal to use a region free DVD player, not what I’d call helping free trade.

There is also a warning on the introduction of software patents through this (although they may already be possible under current statutory instruments) including the fact that had Dan Bricklan been able to patent Visicalc in 1979 then any future spreadsheets until 1999 would have been illegal or required a license from Visicalc. Of course, as we’ve seen in lots of other areas, where there is a monopoly it’s not the market that gets to set the price for such things..

Here is a really illuminating, unambiguous warning on all of this from Bill Gates:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

And one final, rather chilling, warning from the paper.

Note that the US has constitutional protections which limit these laws when they conflict with “freedom of speech”. Australia has no such limits.

Read more at [www.csamuel.org]