I agree that harmonising Australia's laws to suit they U.S. as required by the Australia US Free Trade agreement of 2005 is not in our interest.

However, rather than attempting to set up some kind of system to better commercialise Intellectual Property, we should aim to remove copyright altogether.

Let's not forget that it requires evil 'big government' to enforce laws to protect the intellectual property of private companies in the first place.

Why can't the government simply refuse to protect this copyright and then set up it own enterprises funded by all of us through our taxes aimed at producing Intellectual Property to be made freely available to all of us?

The astonishing success of open source software is the most obvious and striking example of how this could work. Without open source software the Internet would only be a small fraction of what it is today. Think of how much better than even this the Internet would be, if, say, 10 or 20 years ago the U.S. had refused to protect software Intellectual such as that of the rapacious Micrsosoft monopoly.

With the open source software which has emerged since, which is comparable, and often superior, to the copyright equivalents, most computer users would have had little reason to have gone on paying annual tithes to the likes of Microsoft. If a small fraction of the money saved had, instead, have been collected as taxes in order to fund the development of open source software, it is not hard to imagine, that software incomparably superior to copyrighted software would have been developed by now.

A good start would be for all Australian government agencies to begin to use open source software in preference to copyrighted software, starting with Open Office the open source equivalent to the Microsoft Office suite. We would achieve massive savings almost overnight, at the stroke of a pen.

cacofonix,

Open Source could not have survived without copyright. Without copyright, licenses such as the GPL would have no effect as people would be free to ignore them.

Copyright as a concept is not a "Bad Thing", instead it is the implementations that say copyright lasts for the life of the author + 70 years which are causing the issues.

As to mandating Open Source over proprietary, I would rather mandate Open Standards.

James Purser,

I think you are splitting hairs.

Don't you think the issue should be whether or not software should be freely copied? The Gnu Public License (GPL) is a license that is intended to encourage, rather than restrict, the copying of software. I realise that is 'restrictive' in the sense that all software derived from a piece of GPL'd software 'copyrighted' must also be GPL'd, which restricts the ability of a commercial proprietary developer to use GPL'd software. I understand that open source software advocates are divided as to whether or not this is a good thing. Another 'open source' style license is the Apache style license used by the Apache webserver which, I believe, the majority of webservers on the Internet uses. This license does allow software to be copied and adapted by proprietary software developer.

In the sense that the GPL is 'restrictive' it would need copyright laws for it to be enforced, however, it seems to me that if there were no copyright laws, then proprietary software license would not be enforceable either so it would not make any practical difference.

Of course, I agree, open standards should be mandatory. It is insane for anybody to allow their own data to be stored in a format that is kept secret as the near-ubiquitous Micro$oft Word proprietary format is.

However, my point still stands that massive savings could be made almost overnight with very little effort if packages like Open Office which can run on Micro$oft Windows platforms, and are compatible, through reverse engineering, with Micro$oft file formats, were used in place of the Micro$oft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access). With a little more time and effort, considerably more could be saved if Micro$oft operating systems were replaced with open source operating systems such as Linux for FreeBSD and if open source server packages such as Apache were used in place of Micro$oft's IIS.

The fact that so many large organisations have failed to implement such obviously beneficial changes, indicates to me that many of their decision makers have somehow been got at by Micro$oft.

cacofonix,

You're missing the point. If you remove copyright, you are not going to change the behaviour of proprietary software companies. They will still keep the source closed. What it will do is remove the ability for people to say "if you want to distribute this software you must include the source so that others can build on it".

I use Linux and Open Source in all my work, I'm typing this on a Linux laptop using firefox, I run a business based on linux. However I recognise that it is not for everyone. There are features in MS Office that Open Office does not have such as collaborative document building, something becoming increasingly important in business settings.

Oh and a pet peeve of mine, saying things like "M$" or "Micro$oft" is to my mind childish and does nothing to advance the debate in any useful way.

James Purser,

The issue is not whether not proprietary software companies choose to hide their code.

The issue is whether our governments should enact and enforce laws which make it illegal for others who have the means to copy the software, whether as source code or are as compiled executables. These laws can make criminals out of many people who you and I probably know who, in every other regard are honest decent, well-meaning and law abiding people.

If proprietary software companies are unable to find business models which allow them to profit from writing software without restrictive copyright laws, then why shouldn't government (which is, after all, ourselves in a properly functioning democracy) do the job? If you think about it, much of the software which drives the Internet has been written by developers on various public payrolls, anyway. Why shouldn't this be formalised and expanded?

Yes, I take your point that the Micro$oft Office suite may have features, such as collaborative capabilities, that Open Office is not easily able to emulate. As I pointed out before, they do have to reverse engineer in order to be able to handle the Micro$oft proprietary Word format and don't have access to the enormous revenue stream that Micro$oft enjoys because of its monopoly position. If they had more resources, provided by government as I have argued, they could easily provide a product that was superior to Micro$oft's offering in ever regard, even if they had to be compatible with the proprietary Word format.

In the meantime I still think that large organisations would still be vastly better off if they chose to live without some the nicer features on offer from the Micro$oft products during the period of transition.

Just as a nicotine addict must experience pain and discomfort when quitting smoking, those now addicted to Micro$oft products may also have to suffer some pain in the short term.

If larger organisations, particularly government organisations took the lead it would make it easy for the rest of us to follow.

James Purser and Cacofonix,

With respect to the absence of an open source equivalent to Microsoft Office' collaborative document building capability, surely it is only a matter of time (and probably not very much time) before a program compatible with OpenOffice .org is written.

In the mean time, why not look into the possibility of using the free open source program Virtual Box to run your existing Microsoft Windows XP under Linux?

Loaded under Linux on any computer that will run the particular distro you favour, with Virtual Box the driver issues that plague Windows become irrelevant, and your Windows that has been tied for full functionality to just one computer (the one it originally came with) becomes relatively portable. With just one initial activation, the file that is the virtual installation becomes copyable without running foul of the copy protection of which the profoundly irritating product activation is part. All you will need is 1GB+ of RAM.

You simply work in Windows for your collaborative document construction. Then, if there is a need, once completed you can convert the .doc format to .odt format by opening the completed Windows document in OpenOffice.org and saving in the .odt format.

Should your virtual installation of Windows XP ever contract a virus, well, you can just blow it away, and replace it by copying the backed up pristine installation file that resides elsewhere on your HDD, or one of your other (external?) drives. Windows doesn't know the difference, and the activation issue never arises again.

In committing to Vista, Microsoft may well have committed hara-kiri. There is so much re-learning involved that it is now worthwhile for individual users to bite the bullet and learn Linux. That's what I have done, and I'm a dinosaur. I very grumpy insulted-by-Microsoft dinosaur who has only ever used MY Windows in accordance with its EULA. Now I don't pay anything for software and can't be subjected to forced obsolescence.

The MIT third world $100 laptop project running Linux means millions more future Linux programmers.