Australia requests further shafting via DMCA, courtesy AUSFTA

US Digital Millennium Copyright Act keenly embraced

CANBERRA, Australia - Not satisfied playing deputy sheriff to the US in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and still clinging to masochistic glory of a former elected (Whitlam) Government bruised and bloodied from office by Washington orchestrations, Australians fell over themselves for the privilege of mass screwing by US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) under a free trade agreement (FTA) with the Americans.

With obscenely undignified haste, like drought-stricken sheep wrestling bales of alfalfa from graziers, Australians cheerfully dismissed the advice of numerous experts, advisors, study groups, and former international victims, falling smitten - nay, prone - before the US in an ingratiating begging and pleading for an FTA servicing, and now!

Analysis and reason lost amid deafening braes of Australian Statespersons in a political landscape as barren as any red-soil sheep station four-years into a dry spell, common sense and intellectual rigor rare as rain, debate and discussion flat and featureless as the dry dusty landscape.

It is no coincidence Canberra was once a sheep station.

Despite Canadian warnings that the US would flout agreements then litigate Australians into submission, despite ominous sacrifice of the entire Australian sugar industry (a mere show of good faith to the Americans!), the Australian Government spun ephemeral, if not waxed nauseatingly eternal, on benefits - like a shed full of wool weavers during a shearers' strike.

With elusive merit brandished like a swaggering shanty-town kid proudly bearing Coca Cola purchased with his last Peso, Australia's small-minded, narrow-thinking, short-sighted, heavily-and-successfully lobbied politicos aggrandized themselves as economic warriors bringing home the hog-tied United States mammoth.

To the resounding din of apathy - with the entire Australian population distracted by a feeding frenzy of consumer electronics and reality TV, and the the entire nation's press asleep at the wheel under direction of corporate editorial policy - the country's leaders wheeled in the US Trojan-trade Horse: aka notorious Chapter 17 Intellectual Property, copyright extension, Digital Management Rights (DRM) and, of course (well, kick me while I'm down, take my last dollar and throw me overboard) Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

One could be forgiven for lapsing into .. umm, sarcasm, poor judgment, swimming against the tide, seeing deceit where others see benefit, imagining not a Free Trade Agreement with America but a tiny foolish nation succumbing to covert economic imperialism, a bunch of tin pans trading nuggets for weevily flour, natives bartering their children's heritage for peppercorns ("Amazing, Dubya, they still fall for that one!"). One might, in confusion, wonder how America manipulates or coerces vibrant independent states into domination by aggressive, litigious, pervasive and mortally overwhelming trade suicide.

Is that Admiral Perry's gunboat anchored off Sydney's Opera House? .. no, just Chapter 17, I believe.

The damage?

As a mere prelude (the sugar industry was a sacrifice, that's different, ok?), Australian copyright just yesterday was 50 years from an author's death. Today, effectively, 100 years (70 plus..). New AND existing works, retrospectively (bugger your business planning). Dead authors' benefit? Zilch. Existing copyright owners - a windfall. And the intellectual, cultural and innovative incentive is ...?

Secondly, Digital Rights Management (DRM) potentially dwarfs the manufacturing, agricultural and mining profits already bleeding from American subsidiaries in Australia. While Chapter 17 of the AUS-FTA bites, an immense imbalance of trade looms as Australia wallows in its self-imposed, third-world, hole-in-the-ground (coal, ores, gas) economy in the face of an approaching cyber age.

In software, DVDs, Internet databases, MP3s, and digital television, Australians now lapse into vice-like control of information and media with 'single-play', 'single-copy' 'broadcast flags,' extending to rigid manufacturing restrictions on hardware (players, recorders, televisions) enforced by DMCA and US laws.

Australian autonomy, whereby lawmakers and their advisors had previously determined no case for strengthening anti-circumvention laws on digital technology, is now swept away - along with the major intellectual right of 'fair dealing. Perhaps 'Fair-use' is next?

Delighted American content producers now totally control another region of the world in a tactic of segmenting markets to eliminate competition.

Modify your DMCA-licenced Internet-visible equipment to usurp digital rights management (DRM) and the summons is in the mail - like the one against your IP address because your nine year old Suzie clicked vagrantly from an RIAA honey-pot.

Australians delight in relinquishing power and control of their national treasures by fervently selling infrastructure to global corporations (after a mere whisper of the suggestion in the ears of a greedy, weak-minded government), losing ownership of every public asset that wasn't bolted down.

Over several years of dark comedy the nation's flagship, publicly-owned telecommunications and the key to future (common-)wealth, suffers a war of attrition from government verbal and legislative assassins in an attempt to reduce its value so that "the people" might have the pleasure of giving it away to the lowest global bidder.

The most electorally-popular government since Silver-tongue Menzies ( Pig-iron Bob, to others) has rolled to US lobbyists revealing its soft morally-feeble core, as the obsessive trade relaxations of the past decade undo hard-won struggle and progress of its 200-year history.

In one final, fell, mindless, inexplicable, swoop the cornerstones of Australia's balanced regulatory systems - quarantine regulations, medicines, government procurement, and intellectual property rights (and the entirety of industries that flow from them) - have been thrust weaponless into the coliseum to face the trade equivalent of Jabba the Hut's Rancor.

Australia’s prized Pharmaceutical Benefits, that with Medicare distinguishes it from those sad nations whose ambulances and hospitals demand moolah before medical aid, stands exposed raw, naked and helpless before the rapacious giants of global pharmaceutics. As if the Australian public hadn't noticed - oh, yes, they haven't - Medicare itself is an endless target of who? ... yep, the Australian Government, as demonstrated in a recent campaign that saw its OWN advertising, in favor of private medical insurance, actively DENIGRATE its OWN public Medicare. Reaction from the great unwashed (and soon to be great untreated)? A mix of greed and zzzz.

The Howard government has single-handedly given away the farm, its arrogance and deceit surpassed only by the breath-taking stupidity of its charge, the Australian population.

In yet another tour de force of economic naiveté they (the Australian populace and its intellectually-bereft Government) imagine fair play from America, the good ole' USofA, that immense uni-polar crushing economic hegemony, a nation built upon an ultimate class weapon, a "reserve army of misery," the permanent unemployed underclass that maintains an icily cynical threat to every non-professional worker of their destiny, should they fail to toe the line -- in a world of rampant realist, "everyone-for-themselves and unfortunates-be-damned" domestic and foreign policy.

Dream on.