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.

Forrest Gummp

Just to put my level of tech knowledge in perspective, I am a Committee Member on the Linux Australia committee, I run my own hosting service as part of my business, this hosting service is based on linux and other Free and Open Source Software.

At home I run a multimedia centre built upon Gentoo linux and MythTv as well as an asterisk install for VOIP and email and web for my personal blog.

I also run FreeBSD and Solaris under VMWare-Server just for mucking around with.

Wow!

The real downside of this stealing of intellectual property is the dunbing down of the entire planet when we need infinitely more inventions to cope with the the problems we have created for ourselves.

Who is going to bother inventing anything if it takes enormous amounts of capital to do so?It just makes the original thinkers slaves to big business.

Neither of the major parties give a toss.Even if you do invent something we have no manufacturing industry or or intellectual infrastructure to refine the process.The Scandinavian countries can do it with their small populations and limited resources,we cannot have everything and achieve nothing.

YES! Australia is an innovative Nation... if she could just get over herself and engage with ALL.

Productivity? We need to get back to the Aussie focus.

"Ladies and Gentleman, what is it to be an Australian?"

I was at least partly pleased as I toured the villages of Vietnam. I was proud to see (at least a few) Australians share, exchange and transfer their intellectual knowledge with the Vietnamse people, through education, micro-small enterprise and training aid development networks at village levels.

WHY? - 30 years (since the war). I wanted to see how much the world had actually contributed to helping the Vietnamese progress in re-building a completely war torn country of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese People are among the most innovative peoples on this globe, but what can a country do without infrastructure.

Village Community Health, Crime Prevention and Anti-poverty strategies are key innovative componants for people living in that country. As villagers, these strategies are primary elements in re-building the social infrastructure especially.

In this context I see our knowledge and innovative spirit as something special and to be shared with neighbors and trading partners everywhere.

Just as interesting. Did you know?,

Vietnam is a country that had been INVADED more than 1000 times by China, historically. This was before the multi-nationals, and countries like Japan, France and others entered as nations, participating in the "Vietnam War".

I mention this only because of the war in Iraq and to draw notice on the impact the war is having on the future generations of families and children.

In terms of 'trading our intellectual property' and its associated “harmonisation” requirements... I think we need to do more than weighing up how many "pork chops" we sell on the US barbie, when it comes to having the opportunitiy to debate innovatively about the value of our role in the world and what this means to the communities we influence, at all ground levels.

Who are we as Australians and how are we choosing to be innovative.

http://www.miacat.com/
.

I think the article misses the real point. IP laws are not the problem. Commercialisation is the problem. Australian industry is incredibly conservative and short-sighted. Australian inventors with good inventions invariably find that they have to go overseas to get funding.

As with everything in this world, the law is not the main stumbling block. Culture is the real problem.

A number of links or threads which may be of interest in regards to cacofonix's earlier posts which question altogether the concept of intellectual property laws are:

1. "Copyright Jails - The criminalisation of copyright infringement" at
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5068
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5068#59399

2. "Cultivating the Creative Commons" at
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3008
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3008

3. "Music pirates can be deluded no longer" at:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=141#16420
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=141

4. Question Copyright
http://questioncopyright.org

5. The Australian Pirate Party
http://www.ppaustralia.org

6. Pirate Party International
http://www.pp-international.net

---

Another discussion forum which may be of interest is "Can Australia ever be self-reliant for national defence?"

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=860

This discusses the thesis of Dr Andrew Ross in his groundbreaking "Armed and Ready" of 1995 which shows, contrary to popular myth, that Australia was an advanced technological and industrial nation by 1942. It was so advanced that in March 1942, even before the Battle of the Coral Sea, which, according the mythology, saved a defenceless Australia from invasion, the Japanese Army, who well understood Australia's capabilities vetoed a plan by the Japanese Navy to invade Australia.

Much of the 'IP' which made this possible was created by government bodies including th Munitions Supply Board. It was because of their research and guidance that Australian secondary industry was able to grow in the inter-war years to meet the threat. Why this successful model of creating IP in favour of leaving nearly all of it to the private sector has since largely been abandoned is a very pertinent question.

---

Forest Gump,

Most interesting about OpenBox. What are the hardware specs of your machine? I would be amazed if I were able to run it wit an acceptable level of performance on my rather dated 2.4 GHz Intel Debian Linux box.

James Purser,

You seem to have very strange priorities for a supposed leader of the Open Source community.

The economic and practical case for government bodies to immediately commence to ditch Micro$oft and a large number of other proprietary software products seems overwhelming to me.

A feature of political life these days seems to be that powerful vested interests seem to find ways to compromise and co-opt those who ostensibly stand opposed to them. Sadly, this now seems also true of many avowed advocates of Open Source software.

dagget,

I'm a little confused. What priorities should I have?

I joined LA because I felt that Free and Open Source Software offered a choice, a viable alternative to the lock in offered by companies like Microsoft. I still feel that way. However I do not believe that replacing one lock in with another is the best way to go, and thats what people who want to mandate FOSS in government are demanding.

A governments duty is to produce the best outcomes for the people, and while in many cases yes Open Source can do that, there are some where it can't, that's just a fact of life. We should not be mandating anything other than best tool for the job.

cacofonix “ we should aim to remove copyright altogether.”

Payment of copyright is to the originator or owner of the work. The music writers are paid copyright fees, distinct from royalties which go, in the case of music, to the performers of the work.

If I invent / originate a piece of music or document which someone then utilises to earn income from (example a magazine reproduces an article written by me to help sell their publication), why should I not be compensated for my originality?

Re “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.”

Darn it, I thought the USA government, in the form of the Federal Trade Commission, was pursuing Microsoft to actively seek its breakup and separate the operating systems from the application systems. I would also note the first anti monopoly laws were enacted by the USA as the Anti Trust laws specifically targeting Rockafella (Esso), Edison (diverse Electronics and cinema) and JP Morgan (Banking) etc.

Having used the opensource applications, it could be said, that which is free often has little to recommend it.

I note, AshtonTate failed to secure copyright for Dbase because they were not the "true originators" of the program language.

I own my own software applications. They are protected and I go to extreme lengths to ensure usurpers cannot steal the products which I have spent considerable time and effort developing and from which I expect to be adequately compensated (this is, of course, commercially more sustainable than simply designing for others to merely deploy for free).

Whilst the internet and the modern ease of duplication has presented a range of copyright issues, which have been progressively dealt with through the normal legal processes, that is a function of who controls and benefits form distribution.

Denying fair reward to the copyright holder or originator is to legalise piracy and theft.

Same goes for patents and all other forms of "intellectual ownership".

Col Rouge,

Firstly I am curious as to what Open Source apps you have used and what it was that put you off them.

Secondly, yes the US Justice Department was aiming for a breakup right up to the election of George Bush who put a stop on that idea.

Thirdly, I agree that patents are useful in for physical inventions, however to my mind software patent are just to broad and prone to abuse to make a usable system. Instead we end up with business processes masquerading as legitimate inventions.

I am not denying your right to select how you want the software you build to be distributed, thats your decision. I just feel that aspects of the system you rely on are flawed.

Oh and a little pointer, Open Source has proved itself to be quite financially viable. It's just that the focus has moved from supplying the software to supplying a service and customisation.

I'm always fascinated when people begin to make artifical distinctions between different types of technology. Physical machines should be patentable but software should not? How do you justify such a position? Is it because you work in software, so you feel you should be free to do what you want, but those making hardware should be subject to patent law? Sounds like a double standard to me.

How about an inventor who develops software to make a machine work more efficiently? For example, if I come up with firmware that controls a fuel injection system, where the clever "bit" of the invention is in the fact that I control the injectors in such a way as to save fuel, should I receive a patent for that software?

The fact of the matter is that you are confusing the issue of whether an invention should be patentable with the issue of whether an invention is inventive. Software can be just as inventive (or even more so) than any mechanical widget.

Gekko,

You already have IP protection for your software. All software is covered by copyright, something which does not protect physical inventions.

As you know, copyright protects the expression of an idea, but not the underlying concept. This means that someone is free to reimplement the ideas embodied in your software, but not copy the exact code. In reality, copyright only stops people from making duplicates of your software.