AUSFTA Wrap-up

So the Australian parliament has ratified the treaty between the USA and Australia on Free Trade. The only improvements forced through by Labor were to help the PBS - the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Unfortanately we've signed up to chapter 17 - Intellectual Property as is, despite lots of evidence that there's no benefit to Australia. We gain obligations to follow the US-style DMCA, but have no agenda to implement "Fair Use" in Australian Law. It's also debatable when software patentability has been widened by AUSFTA obligations, that's unclear right now without seeing any proposed new legislation. I need to link to Rusty's Tragedy of RProxy article here - a good reason to say that software patents aren't in Australia's best interests.

All this makes me a little sad - the looming Australian Federal election has muzzled debate on the AUSFTA, and what benefit or loss there will be to Australia. We're just running head-strong in to this without examining the outcomes - and we're signing up for life - hamstringing Australian parliaments in the future to correct any mistakes.

The only good thing that came out is that our community has started to speak up - people like Rusty, AJ, Brendan Scott, Kim Weatherall, OSIA, CyberSource, Linux Australia, and many others, have all provided input into the political process. We're going to have to start doing more of this, to prevent more rights being taken away from consumers and software developers.

| 23 Aug 2004 | #