Friday, 30 September 2011

ACTA Update

Seems the USA push to extend their own broken laws on The Rest of the World has reached a critical step. Also seems NZ will be a signatory. Remains to be seen how well the treaty will be honored or the extent to which it obligates us to alter our laws to suit large US-based manufacturers.

One of the concerns - iirc - was that generic medicines may become illegal as "counterfeit" products. Looks like it's gone from the final version of acta but the interest in this is very big and it is now in TPPA. Block it there are it will show up someplace else unless NZ makes a firm statement that no such provision will pass or, if passed "on the sly", will not be enforceable.

And in other liberty news, NZ FOSS folks brace themselves for the rollout of MSs secure boot process, which has the potential to remove your ability to replace the pre-installed operating system. There is another way to securely boot your computer - replace windows. There is no reason to hand over control of your computer to MS just to secure yourself from flaws in MS software ... especially since it won't work.

On the upside - maybe we can get a beef-up to our anti-competition laws, say, set the fines to a percentage of a company's net worth, then milk Microsoft Corporation to fund our national debt. Just a thought.

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