[LINK] RFC: Submission to the Innovation Review

[Glen Turner]

Roger Clarke wrote:

> Many of the harmful aspects of patent and copyright law derive from 
> international conventions and in particular from the spectacularly 
> inadvisable intellectual property chapter of the 'Free Trade' Agreement 
> entered into with the U.S.A. by the previous Government. An assessment 
> of the US-FTA provisions is in Clarke (2004) - Annex B to this Submission.

An interesting thought experiment is "what is the minimal change to
the patents system that would made it work correctly for software".
The answer turns out to be to allow concurrent or subsequent independent
discovery.

Interestingly, that's an answer the drug companies can live with.

The problem with the AUSFTA is that even if the US adopt this change,
we remain committed to a then-stricter regime.

-- 
  Glen Turner