examinator: "Question ....how long do you think patent (intellectual property) goes the same way"

Never. Patents are purely a intra business arrangement. Governments stance on patents see to be: "don't ask us to spend money, don't ask us to come up with solutions". What the government wants is for businesses to thrash out a patent law that is acceptable to all, that has regularity involvement is self funded, and that doesn't loose them any votes. Fair enough, I say.

Part of the problem in criticising patents is you can't point to some aspect of the law and say "that is absurd" in the same way you can in, for example, the length of copyright. Patents as formulated now work very well in some industries. We would not have modern drugs without patents.

The problem is feature creep. Businesses have paid clever lawyers to extend patents into areas that weren't around when they were formulated (such as software), or were seemingly explicitly excluded like business methods. It is the lawyers and judges that did this, the pollies didn't change the law. That old excuse about unpopular decisions you often hear from Judges "we only implement the act" doesn't apply here. They are the ones who turned patent law into the ass it is today.

The only way this is going to be fixed is by business thrashing out a compromise and handing it to the government on a platter. Naively, I would have thought incidents like Microsoft being forced to stop selling Microsoft Word as happened last month http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10308013-75.html would change Microsoft's attitude to them. But no, it seems Microsoft is still as welded to them as ever. While that is the dominant business attitude things aren't going to change.

And as I said, unlike copyright law patents only hurt/help the people who control them - business. Movements like open source have formulated their own defences against them. They have built up patent war chests, and added clauses to open source licenses like "sue one open source user and your rights to use any open source product is revoked".

Well I have never bothered to download a movie, but it seems to me that
there is a very simple solution.
If you wanted to send such a file to a friend or you ran a site that
provided the movies you could put it through PGP encryption.
It is a free program and very secure.
Then the film companies computers would not be able to detect what
sort of file it was.
Probably someone is already doing it as it is so obvious.
The ISP could not tell either.

It looks like a losing battle to me.

Copyright law was fine when it was the same a patent law. Everybody was happy while it was just a commercial arrangement between publishers - book publishers, music publishers, software publishers, tv broadcasters, and so on. Well, fine in the sense that is was a workable arrangement for the publishers. It was never about the artists.

The first copyright law arrived soon after the first printing press. The sequence of events was roughly: the printing presses arrived, the powers that be tried to crush this threat monopolising them, this failed and the press owners won their freedom only to find themselves in new a dog eat dog world of unbridled competition, they clamoured to be re-regulated and they got their way in a form of government granted monopoly dubbed copyright.

Back then copyright was 7 years. It has since been extended to life + 70 years, but interestingly economic studies say 5..20 years (depending on what is being protected) is optimal, so our ancestors got it right. It is we who have stuffed it up.

Anyway, what has changed isn't the law itself, or the way it is draw up. The way it is draw up remains much the same as patents - the government expects business to hand them the new law on a platter. What has changed is digital technology has turned every voter in into a publisher. It ain't just businesses any more, yet so far it seems (and this 3 strikes law is a great example), the pollies haven't figured this out. They are still let business set the copyright law agenda. We new arrivals, the voters, don't have a seat at the table. And because we don't, effectively businesses now have carte blanch on writing laws to screw us over.

I think this will take a generational change to fix. The people being screwed over - our kids mostly, have to replace the currently crop of neanderthals. It is said revenge is a dish best served cold. I hope so. It will be bloody near frozen when our kids get to sample it.

Great summary of, and insight into, a complex issue, rstuart.

I'm rapidly becoming your biggest fan.