Anonymouse

The Government should provide every Australian with a free email address and website hosting to ensure that each person has one, just as each person has a mailing address in real life. Actually, this is probably a bad idea. Perhaps a free domain is something worthwhile though: eg like http://firstname.lastname.state.au/ Copyright duration in digital works like software should be greatly circumscribed. Windows 95 is now obsolete and not sold by Microsoft. It is only 13 years old. What is the point of a 70 year copyright? You can consider any software made in the last 20 years and see which of it is still used. You will note that the software that is still used has generally been made in less than the last decade. Anything over a decade old is virtually unused and not worth copying (for pirates) or using (for consumers). This is unlike the original subject of copyright -- literary works (ie books) -- as these are basically timeless and can be picked up at any future point in time and read and understood as if written yesterday. (This is another contrast with copyright: software more than a few years old generally does not run on modern computers without significant effort.) Software should not be protected by copyright but by something akin to Designs registration. Software has more in common with the things traditionally protected by designs than it does with books. Source code is basically the plan. Object code is basically the machined part according to the plan. This is a perfect fit with the traditional conception of designs, including the period of designs registration, which is more appropriate for software than the copyright period. Software patents should not exist. These stifle innovation. Biological patents should not exist in their present form. Patents should only be allowed for certain invented uses of the genes, not merely discovered uses.