🚀 go-pugleaf

Would you pay $1,000,000 for a $20,000 car?
So why would you pay $25 for a 50c CD?

This is the root problem and the solution is to enforce
competition.

Any technology that is the equivalent of a restraint
of trade should be treated as such.

Low priced printers and expensive ink is a barrier
to entry for new manufactures.

If I built a non IT product and gave it way at less than the cost of 
production with the intent to make it next to impossible for new 
manufactures to get a foot hold in the market, the ACCC would put a
rocket up my arse. Yet this is the norm in many IT businesses.

Why are the IT industries allowed to get away with it? Why should we
enshrine their right to do it in laws we will never be able to change?

Most IT patents are for the bleeding obvious after very little thought.
The reality is that the IT and research industries as a group are grossly
inefficent. There are thousands of IT companies and hundreds of drug
companies doing exactly the same research. Hence each development costs
thousands of times what it should. No amount of economic wanking can deny
this. We don't get products a thousand times quicker, they are if anything
slower since the talent is spread thiner, communicates less and goes
repeatedly down the same dead ends. To aggrivate this first past the
post licensing and pure private profit is why 99% of effort goes to drug
research when 99% of the good has come from innoculations.

Competition only works as a ruling economic theory if you can ignore the
costs of failure and the hidden inputs (rape of the environment, blighted
lives, another companies bankruptcy etc). Competition is good but ask any
big IT company and their main concern is avoiding it.

Think of the M$ blight. Think of the enourmous numbers of programmers
engaged in wasted, brain damaging learning curve caused by one companies
deliberate bastardization of standards.

The days of little old publishers needing protection is long gone. The
cost of manufacture and distribution is now effectively insignificant.
Record companies destroy old inventory rather than discount it.

They did not cry when the new technology enabled them to put thousands of
musicians out of work. Why should we cry now when new technology prevents
them from making megabucks for very little effort or risk. For the cost of
a few thousand entertainment jobs new life could be injected to a part of
social life that has gone from universal participation to near universal
passive consumerism.

Personaly I would rather see a thousand small movies than a few Megabuck 
monstrosities, see music back in the hands of individual bands instead of
the pulp merchants, see book distribution based on merit not lowest common
denominator.

Technology has marched on and the old empires should not be shored up with
anticompetitive legislation. The point of critical mass was reached long
ago. No copyright protection is required to keep a vibrant IT industry.
Only the big boys need it and they are not supplying anything of
importance. It is support, customization, individual development and a
strong University based R&D system that is the future for the small IT
businesses. Allow the current environment to continue to develope and
small businesses (the bulk of the employers) will be wiped out.

Copyright should be designed to protect the hard work of individuals and
give a social payback when the work goes relatively quickly into the
public domain. 

Now mainly massive corporations benefit and they are bribing anyone who 
listens to try to stop anything ever going public domain again.

The time has come to say that corportations should have less "Human Rights"
than humans. At the moment they have infinitely more since very few people
have the resources to fight back. Its not the rightness of your cause but
the depth of your pockets that determins the outcomes of commercial
litigation.

These is not a minor issues. They completely swamp any purceived value in
the actual FTA. The Americans are currently trading in their personal
freedoms wholesale for the illusion of an increase in security. This
paranoia has to be fought, before they export that to us as well.

The history of the USA is full of tyrany, fascist puppet governments and
support for terrorists. The exploitation of the weak and powerless is part 
and parcel of their social darwinist outlook. Thats why right wing
religion fits so well with the Republican pary, Work Mach Frei and heaven
once you are dead. Religion in America is the new slavery, self imposed
and very cost effective crowd control. Dont think for yourself do
what WE tell you and you will be rewarded in the after life (very very
cost effective).

Might and christianity makes right, just ask any right wing arse hole with
his finger on the button. I am far more scared of a Yank preacher with
the bomb than I am of any Iraki. You wont be safe until a successfull
Presidential canidate can publicly say she is an atheist.

If you think the courts or a piece of paper will protect your rights
read a history book or two.

As one of the sensible contributers to this thread has already said, fight
while you have the strength to fight. Lay back and wait until you
have started to suffer and it will be far too late.

The FTA is just the thin edge of the wedge of the rank American outlook
being enforced on the Australian public.

The only real difference between 1930s Germany and here and now is that we
should know better, but it does not seem that we do.

Geoff Johnson