[media] US exporting IP-laws to Australia

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@ugent.be>]

Hello,

<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/29/1080544412567.html>

Favorite quotes:

In addition, says Schuurman, the cost of fighting a patent litigation 
battle in the US has dropped considerably. "Claims are now actually 
decided by a judge and only about 3 per cent of cases go to trial," he 
says. "Therefore, costs have been limited dramatically. In most cases, 
costs are less than $US2 million."

and

 "The (DMCA) legislation removes the ability to use reverse engineering 
to make products compatible with existing products," Howard says. 
"There are two negative effects of this. It reduces competition: 
effectively no one who writes software can be compatible with existing 
proprietary software. It's also bad for security and privacy: people 
won't be allowed to analyse protocols to see whether they're secure 
because that's considered reverse engineering. Thus, we see that this 
legislation will protect vendors from bad publicity as well as 
competition."