I'm with you on this one. I personally would be all for scrapping patents all together and quite possibly copyright as well.

The mouse on its own had little effect. The big deal was the GUI, the concept of windows. Had the mouse not been invented, some other form of pointer device would have (light pen was used already), and evolution would have led to the mouse sooner or later. Interestingly, the GUI as a concept was not patented and it allowed a very nice competition: from the mid 80-s everybody had their own windowing system (Amiga, Macintosh, Atari all had a GUI in '85, even the C64 had GEOS, Windows 1.0 came out and, of course, there was X). Then came the patents and litigation, from the XOR-cursor to the trashcan icon, petty little games for market share.

The more I read about the history of patents and copyright, the more I am convinced that they are not helpful. Among others, Dr Luigi Palombi's book, Gene Patents is a very interesting read. The first half of the book is about the fairly detailed history of patents and the politics behind every legislative change regarding to the patent law of individual countries. It's fascinating, and there's one thing which is obvious: it has never been the inventor what the patent system was all about. It was market control, through and through. Killing the competition, not to further innovation.

"Xerox PARC *DID NOT* invent the mouse. Engelbart did it also at SRI."

Um, Telefunken had a mouse with a ball before Engelbart had his with the wheels. That is, the German mouse was already like the (mechanical) mice we have today. See http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/misc/telefunken.shtml

> Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said "Israel should be wiped off the map"

Except that he didn't say that. Western news agencies said that he had said that, due to being morons who could not hire someone who could translate from the Persian and then copying a sensationalist headline from each other.

> And who is Robert Louis Kemp anyway?

You can find his autobio at http://www.superprincipia.com/About_The_Author.htm

> Where is his PhD from?

He doesn't have any. As he says:

"I know that there are some readers that would ask, why does Kemp not have a PhD? The truth is reader, I did not want to waste years trying to convince others of my ideas, or doing research for someone else, when my own personal research required that same enormous time."

According to his autobio, he has a Masters in electronics from Tuskegee University and he had all sorts of jobs at all sorts of companies from radar systems designer at Raytheon to webdesigner at Disney. The company list is impressive, NASA JPL, Hughes, Northrop.

This book must be the culmination of this process:

"Then, in the fall of 1989, I was led by the Holy Spirit within, to drop out of school for six months; thus I locked myself in a room and studied only physics and the Bible. And for a total of two years all I did was study physics and the Bible."

"the motive to hurt the RIAA trumps the motive to simply enrich the culture"

Hurting the RIAA, MPAA et al *does* enrich the culture.

Well, the LDP is not our Pirate Party.

We *do* have a Pirate Party Australia, www.pirateparty.org.au which a registered political party.
It can not contest the 2010 elections (due to timing issues) but it exists.

"Australian society [...] the majority of people well educated"

Um, you are kidding, right?

The majority of Australians are shamefully undereducated. There are severe problems with basic literacy skills among university entrants (including the true-blue Aussie, Anglo-Saxon whites). Australia is a country where 'academic' or 'intellectual' are derogative terms. The prominent social consensus is that academic elitism is to be persecuted by every means (of course, elitism is most welcome in sports). Arts are mostly a fringe interest of the "latte drinking lefties" and being an "artsy-fartsy" puts you into that group automatically. There are suburbs in Sydney with not a single bookstore or library.

We might be well-educated compared to some (but by no means all) third/second world countries and possibly one particular first world country but we're a far cry from most European countries.

"If you nullify software patents, then you call into question all that is hardware patents, because there is NOTHING that can be done in software, that can't be done in hardware."

You say that anything that can be done is SW can be done in HW too. Yes, that's true. On the other hand, if there are things that you can do in HW that you can not do in SW, then that means that unpatentability in SW still leaves a part of HW to be subject to patent.

A new way of doping the Si is a HW process that has no equivalent SW solution. It's not a mathematical abstraction, it's applying chemistry and physics in a novel way. So nullifying SW patents have absolutely nothing to do with it. If the Si doping is too low level, you can start coming up on the HW scale and at every level you will find HW solutions that have no SW equivalent. You can compile SW into
gates (and you can realise any logic circuit as SW), but anything to do with how you create gates, how you (physically) connect them and so on are things that has no equivalent in SW.