1994_02_february_leader27feb

Significant reforms have taken place in the Federal Parliament in the past four years, but last Thursday it was still a whiteboard jungle. Many of the reforms were hailed as major steps to lift the quality of debate in Parliament to produce meaningful Question Times.

The televising of Parliament was seen as a way of civilising Parliament. With the television cameras beaming down, it was argued, MPs would act with more decorum. Far from it. They were on show and the behaved like showbiz personalities. Sitting hours were changed. Committees systems were changed. Electronic voting is mooted. With the move in 1988 to the bigger House, the majesty of the architecture did not reflect in the quality of the debate.

In the past month, what was seen as fundamental changes to Question Time were made in the wake of the Blewett report. Instead of all Ministers and the Prime Minister attending, a roster system was applied. The Prime Minister attends on Monday and Thursday and other Ministers attend on roster. The aim was to free the Prime Minister to attend to other matters of national importance and to enable MPs to target particular Ministers on other days to seek and presumably receive genuine answers to genuine questions seeking information about matters of public importance.
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1994_02_february_double

The world’s largest computer software company, Microsoft, has lost a major patent case which will prevent it from marketing its successful DoubleSpace program in future software.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Microsoft Corporation, was ordered this week to pay Stac Electronics Inc $US120 million for patent infringement.

Microsoft said it would appeal the verdict. But in the meantime it will remove from its best-selling MS-DOS software the infringing “DoubleSpace” feature, which allows users to store nearly double the amount of data and programs on their hard disks.

DoubleSpace is only on DOS version six and later. People with these versions are unlikely to be affected.
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1994_02_february_column28feb

The Business Software Association of Australia has announced that the time for warnings is over. It says illegal copying of software costs its members $400 million a year in Australia. It will now spend 75 per cent, rather than 50 per cent, of its Budget on litigation, cutting education from 50 to 25 per cent.

It will raid premises under what are called Anton-Piller court orders which enable the raiders to seize evidence, which can mean seizing computers. The BSAA is willing to pay a $2500 reward to people who dob in a pirate.

On its face it seems that the software publishers are like the British Navy, patrolling the seas and upholding the law by boarding parties if necessary, and that the copiers are flying the Jolly Roger.

Well, the British Navy has a long history of defending unjustifiable monopolies which enrich the few at the expense of the many. Now the software publishers are self-righteously going on the warpath to defend the plunder they make under a far too-generous monopoly.

The copyright monopoly which runs until 50 years after the author’s death, was originally there to give authors (and their children) reasonable return for their written work, and as the works of, say, Dickens and Wordsworth show, to ensure the public ultimately gets a return when the works come into the public domain.
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