On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 12:27:59PM +0800, Andrew Bailey <andrew at networkharmoni.com.au> wrote: > My take on it is that it shouldn't be dictated by market forces, mainly > because this has lead to the situation that we have today, cartels. > But rather with more consideration to the affect on society as a whole. > There really has to be some kind of public interest criteria involved in > the application of copyright law. Getting that right however is difficult. There IS, at least in the US. What generates cartels is the fact that we have copyright at all. Cartels are proxy copyright enforcers; the problem is that only one entity can sell a particular piece of music. Market distortion is inevitable. > For instance the entire "gene patenting" issue is about to become very > interesting in australia. At least one state government is going to > start agitating for changes to federal copyright law so that basically > public hospitals can continue to provide some of the genetic screening > test that they up until recently did provide for free. Now the owner of > that "gene patent" has signed an exclusive license agreement with a > private company, and no longer can these test be provided. How else would you incent companies to fund gene research? It's obvious genes should not be copyrightable ("discovered" not "created"), but tests are probably patentable. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp