Ross Gittins, the Sydney Morning Herald's chief economics writer, has some interesting things to say about the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. While all the hullaballoo in the Parliament has been been over the possibility of drug companies harrassing 'generic' drug manufacturers through dodgy patents and artificially keeping the prices of pharmaceuticals high.
But there's a whole raft of ramifications in areas other than just pharmaceuticals. Gittins says;
Australia's businesspeople see it as about eliminating the barriers to exports and imports between the two countries, which they regard as a good thing. ... To the Americans, however, the deal is about something most Australian businesspeople don't take much interest in - intellectual property rights.
Forcing the US system of patents - patently one of the worst in the West - onto the rest of the world appears to be the new economic/hegemonic stunt the American government is trying to pull. As Gittins states;
[The] US Congress has allowed America's IP law to be debauched by powerful commercial interests. Big American drug and software companies have turned the patent system into an anti-competitive rort.
Think about the Sonny Bono amendment to give Disney another free 20 years of Mickey Mouse, the very same Disney who uses expired copyrights ruthlessly to make many of its schmaltzy movie versions of age-old classics like Snow White. But especially think about the issue of patenting software. It's not only ludicrous, but dangerous. And not just for developers users and supporters of Linux or Java. Probably every developer of any software - free, proprietry, shrinkwrapped, download, shareware and/or bespoke - inadvertently infringes someone's stupid software 'process' patent. There's so many now, covering all sorts of entirely obvious areas that every software developer uses.
This system of absurd patents is now potentially imported, lock stock and barrell, into Australia home of many free software initiatives and developers. I hope the ALP were thinking about more than pharmaceuticals when they were drafting their amendments.
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