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.

Comments

Demanding bandwidth?

[PurifyYourMind]

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?

Re:Demanding bandwidth?

[remahl]

We, through taxes. The government has already spent billions (SEK) on building up a good fibre network covering most of the country. However, they left it to the private sector to provide connections to individual households. This has resulted in a situation where most small towns have extremely good backbone connections, that can only be used by a few % of the population in those towns.

Public institutions, the government, 'län' and 'kommuns' should make sure that everyone has access to good communications (Internet or otherwise). Most people are more than willing to pay for that through their taxes.

Broadband connections may not be a human right, but having great communications definitely gives the economy an advantage and helps to boost research and development.

Re:Demanding bandwidth?

[jeff munkyfaces]

this is Sweden we're talking about, not the US - they already have clean water and free speech..

Re:Demanding bandwidth?

[FrYGuY101]

In some society's if you need something fix, you go to the fixer person, and he fixes it. And if the fixer person is hungry, he comes to you and you give him some food. Sure it's mostly african tribes, but who says capitalism is "right"? It's what we have, but I'm not sure it's a universal law on earth and from god that charging for services is "right".

I've found that the inherent problem in communism lie in scale. A village can subsist as a commune, as African tribes, an indeed some places in America even. A country, however can not. As a commune grows past the ability for everybody to recognize every other person, the free rider problem grows geometrically. More people assume they can get away with doing less and taking more without their neighbors retalliating, resulting in a tragedy of the commons type scenario. The fact that people will always seek to maximise their personal utility is, in fact, a cornerstone of economics.

So. Back to the topic. Why is capitalism a "universal law"? Because it's the only real way a large-scale society can function efficiently, by putting the burden not on the society as a communism does, but the individuals. It has nothing to do with the bible, but rather it's a pretty damn efficient way of making sure society does whats best for society most of the time, and for the most part it works.

If you want to get into socialism, or Laisse-Fair, that's a different subject, but the point stands.

Re:abolition of laws

[Kiryat Malachi]

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.

You don't seem to understand

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Let me guess...

[Aderym]

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.