Re: [Patents] [media] US exporting IP-laws to Australia

[Ville Oksanen <ville.oksanen@effi.org>]

Yeah,

Kim Weatherall has blogged the project quite extensively:
http://weatherall.blogspot.com/

For example, this industry raport is rather interesting stuff:
http://www.ustr.gov/new/fta/Australia/advisor/ifac03.pdf

Ville

Quoting 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."
>
>
>