Intellectual Chattel

Here’s a few seemingly unrelated observations….

1. Attorney-General George Brandis has declared himself a strong supporter of Australia’s present copyright and trademark laws. He says they are “central” to the ongoing success (sic) of ‘Australian art, music, literature, film and television.’

2. The Harper Review correctly notes that ‘… Australians are enthusiastic adopters and adapters of technology and net importers of IP’. The review goes on to note that the rules governing IP enforcement ‘should be designed to operate in [Australia’s] best interests’. That is, they should be watered down.

3. The Productivity Commission is into a landmark year-long inquiry that would constitute Australia’s first economic analysis of the worth of its copyright and patent rules. Expectations are randomly distributed and the bookies don’t care.

4. The Trade Minister Andrew Robb is hostile to the idea of the Productivity Commission going anywhere near his free (sic) trade agreements that contain intellectual property provisions that favour our major trading partners, especially the USA. Specifically these agreements ensure that we the consumers of Australia pay tithes to American corporations.

5. However Joe Hockey the Treasurer has asked the Productivity Commission to examine Australia’s entire intellectual property system and its effect on investment, competition, trade, innovation and consumer welfare.

6. Previously I have argued that we should strengthen our patent laws, especially around enforcement, because this would help stimulate an export invention corporate culture (which we largely don’t have) and help stem the massive negative balance of trade that we have in technology related products.

7. But then I read about the attorney general’s support of copyright and I also note that decades worth of strong copyright protection rights hasn’t really created a success story in the Australian art, music, literature, film and television industries. We still have a massive negative trade deficit in content.

8. So I recant; I think we should water down all IP rights, including patents, to the point that we hardly take any notice of them. Then we can legitimately become a pirate nation and stop gifting cash to the Americans. How we would go about doing this without the Americans getting cross is an interesting challenge. After all, they did make our government buy fighter jets that cost $12.4 billion and that we didn’t need, just so the shareholders of Lockheed Martin could keep getting their distributions.