Ashlee Vance notes for The Reg that the US and Australia have moved >< this close to signing another in the ongoing series of bilateral trade deals that the US is using to push its DMCA regime on the rest of the world. Sticking points are less the heinous nature of the intellectual property laws than imperialism by US drug-makers (and patent holders) as well as cultural imperialism

The carrot, as always, is lower trade tariffs. The stick is that open source may get the shaft again, as noted by the Linux Australia Position Paper on this trade agreement.

The paper argues that Aussie coders would be prevented by the proposed language of the agreement from participating in open source projects and that trade will in the end be hurt by the exclusion of basically everyone except the software giants (all of them US-based) from competing for software business.