Did you know that gay or lesbian partners of Australian permanent residents or citizens can apply for permanent residence of Australia?
The visa to apply for is called an interdependency visa. The visa is similar to the spouse visa (de-facto grounds) applicable to heterosexual couples.
If successful an applicant will initially get a temporary two year visa, with full work and travel rights. A person can also obtain a Medicare card.
Around two years after lodgement of the application, the Department of Immigration will assess for the grant of a permanent visa.
After a 10 year gap in trade mark cases, the High Court of Australia delivered two trade mark decisions in December 2009.
This article is a background story to a common mantra today about how giving something away for free on the internet can be a very effective business model. This is a technology commercialisation case study worth knowing. It has inspired millions of technologists and us as open source software law specialists.
