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Swedish Pirate Demo
Arioch of Chaos writes "In Sweden, May 1 is still a day when many people get out on the streets to take part in the traditional demonstrations. Today, the Swedish site Piratbyrån organised demonstrations in several Swedish towns, demanding more bandwith and the abolition of intellectual property laws. This picture is just great. More pictures here." Congratulations to whoever made the AYBABTU sign.
I can see how people are justified in demanding human rights like clean water or civil rights like free speech. But is bandwidth really something that humans need to the degree that it should be a "right"? And if so, who's going to pay for it all?
They think piracy is a right. They at the very least wish to get rid of copyrights so they can perform software piracy without a fear of getting caught. They encourage people to swap copyrighted works burnt on CD's on the demonstration, etc. "Piratbyrån" also means "The Piracy Bureau" in english. Miles from what the EFF stand for, for example.
I think there's a line between fighting for freedom (software patents and so on), and fighting for piracy, and these guys crossed it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Intellectual property laws existence is a violation of natural economic law itself. This law declares that when supply is infinitely greater than demand, and marginal cost per item is near-zero, the cost per item should be driven to near-zero as well.
Sound familiar?
There is a serious issue with IP law in the digital age; it's designed to prevent and deal with a whole different class of issues, ones that barely seem relevant when I can copy the entire Library of Congress's contents in a day or two. IP law is an attempt to impose an artificial scarcity on a commodity that not only doesn't need to be scarce, but by its very nature is easier to assume common.
Do you want *proof* that IP laws are quite probably unnecessary?
Look at Linux. Who would ever write a huge undertaking like an operating system only to give it away for free; to more or less mandate that it must be given away for no more than the cost of distribution? Apparently, lots of people. I know, from several years of working in the radio and music industries, more than a few musicians who could give a shit about their music being copied; as long as people are listening to it, they're happy.
As bandwidth becomes larger and cheaper, storage becomes larger and cheaper, etc, etc, we have to find a *better* way to encourage creation *and* consumption. Eventually, we'll have to do it for real objects, if we ever figure out how to do assemblers. But we need to acknowledge that our IP laws are broken in the modern era, and rather than trying to nudge and tweak and suspender up their sagging morass, we need to figure out a sensible approach.
Who cares about what worked for printing presses? Let's figure out what works for GB/s pipes and TB of disk.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Yes, because no-one is going to make things if other people can just take a copy without paying.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Linux is a bad example...the GPL exists and works BECAUSE of IP Law, the license gets it's strength from the fact that the only leagal way to copy or derive from a GPL'd work is by accepting the license.
If it were not for copyright law, you could just ignore the license and take the code anyway.
Now for the musician point of view, whilst those musician friends of yours might be happy having people listen to their music, whether they payed for it or not, how would they feel if the next mass produced plastic pop star made some record company millions by singing one of their songs without permission, accreditation or compensation?
IP and copyright are about more than some 15 year old kid downloading songs with Kazaa.
I can accept that there are problems with some aspects of current law (duration being the bigest one), but the original intent of the laws are sound. If an artist or coder wants to give away their work they can. Those that don't want to, shouldn't have to.
Advanced users are users too!
This is Sweden here we are talking about, not the United States. Now I know you may find it hard to believe, but there are other kinds of free governments than the one we enjoy here. We are a fairly private sector, pay-for-it-yourself kind of country. That's fine, but Sweden is NOT. They are far more socialist than the US. This means that they pay a LOT more taxes. Like around 65% income tax in the top brackets, not to mention other taxes.
Well, the flipside of the higher taxes is they expect more services. A free government is supposed to be one that serves its people. The reason that they take money from the people is to give them services that they all need and want such as transportation, public safety, health care and so on.
So, if people pay taxes to the government with the understanding they will be used to build broadband infastructure, it is not unreasonable to demand that they actually recieve the broadband as a result.
Just because we here in the US think that broadband ought to be in the hands of private (well, sort of private) corperations does not mean that the rest of the free world shares those views. What's more, if the US government levied a tax to provide unviersal boradband availability, as they levy a tax to provide universal phone availability, I would expect to recieve broadband as a result, as I expect to recieve phone service.
And one that some OSS people take rather seriously. It can be summarized as such:
Information is not a physical good, and shouldn't be treated as such. It costs virtually nothing to make a copy and spread information, and all of that cost is incured by the copier. Thus there should be no ownership of information, it should be free to all to promote progress and free thinking.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't problems with this point of view, but there certianly seem to be problems with the current views on intellectual property. This is a legit stance and one that can certianly be taken seriously. I don't think it's the right answer, but that doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss it as not serious.
A lot of posters here say "How can they demand the abolishment of IP laws? They must exist!"
Well. Piratbyrån (the bureau of piracy organization) has the opinion that the current IP-Laws does not help and/or protect content creators / artists, they protect the publishers, record companies and stifle innovation. Many artists only want to spread their music and play concerts (where many small artists make most of their money anyway).
An example of todays bad IP-laws; After the artists death the copyright is still valid up to 70(?) years after. That is not protecting the rights of the artist, that is protecting the rights of the owner of the copyrights. - and those are separate issues.
Piratbyrån is of the opinion that the laws of today is formed by and for the major owners of copyrights - such as publishers and record companies, and therefor they want to abolish these laws.
Please note that I am not a member of piratbyrån, if there are someone from piratbyrån here; please explain it a little further.
I saw nobody below the age of 16. Anyway, I was at the demonstration and I don't think we should remove any copyright laws. I think we should reform them. Copyright as we know it is more designed to make companys like the recording companys and microsoft richer. It is a result of several decades lobbying by already wealthy persons and companys. It is definatly past time to look over them again. But if we look past that, The real reason I was there was because the fact that private organizations founded by different companys shouldn't be allowed to do the law enforcement which is what the situation more and more looks like today.
At least as it applies to nations. Freedom, or at least a free society does NOT mean the ability to do whatever you want. That is called Anarchy, and has never worked for a society. A free society is one where the people control the government in an indrect way. That doesn't mean that they are free to do whatever, just that they are free to change the way their government works.
This isn't up for debate, this is what a free country means. You may feel that isn't enough freedom, but that doesn't change how the word is used. In your point of view, there would be NO free countries since they all tell you what you can and can't do, and levy some taxes. Under what seems to be your view, the only real freedom is Anarchy (the absence of government).
OK, first of all, let up NOT confuse true Marxist communism with any of what is going on in the world today - China et. al. are as faithful to real Marxism as StarShip Troopers the movie was to the book.
/. would let me put an HR here)
The fundamental limiting factor to Marxism is the idea the "the workers own the means of production", which fails miserably in an Industrial Age society, and implodes in an Information Age society.
Consider a chip fab plant - they cost BILLIONS of dollars to build. Now, how many people work at a chip fab? Even if 10,000 people worked at a fab, that would mean that each worker's portion of the plan would come to about 100,000 dollars. Compare that to a furnature factory - which set of workers has to be worth more?
And that is the key problem - some workers need to be worth more than other workers - anathema to the Marxist. And since things like chip plants, auto (or tractor) factories and suchlike cannot be funded by the workers, *something* must come in to fund them. So you either have a) rich people (again, anathema to Marxists) or b) "The State" come in to create the plants. But if "The State" owns the plant, the workers don't own it, and "The State" is not going to give it up.
That was what prevented the Communist nations from being able to scale - Marxism didn't work, they went to "The State", and inefficency prevented them from getting anywhere.
(-- boy I wish
That said, I agree with the parent - and this bunch of wastes of flesh are posterchildren for the free rider problem. And even if we assume the cost of copying software is 0, even if we assume that all electronic content should be Free (in the RMS sense), there is still the little problem that you simply cannot say "router = new Cisco; fiber = new Fiber;" - these are physical things that somebody had to expend resouces to create.
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