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Swedish Filesharers Start 'The Piracy Party'
sp3tt writes "Tired of being called criminals, a group of Swedish filesharers have started a new political party, The Piracy Party (Piratpartiet in Swedish). The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws, reverse the data retention directive passed by the EU last month, and protect privacy with new laws. The party expresses no opinion on other subjects. The Piracy Party's webpage is so far only available in Swedish, at piratpartiet.se The party's goal is to get into to the parliament, which requires 4% of the votes, or roughly 225000 votes. Elections are held in September."
How much does it cost to rent a one room studio "summer home?"
And, what are the minimum residency requirements for voting in Sweden?
I wish I was Swedish! In the US a few years ago, I tried to convince some local Libertarians to run strictly on the "right to copy" platform. It seems most of those guys wanted to run on the "Smoke Pot" platform, which will generally get you nowhere except with stoners.
The big news here, to me, is that Sweden seems to allow minority opinions into their parliament (similar to Costa Rica and other countries). In the US it is near impossible to get a minority opinion into even a state legislature -- democracy and gerrymandering prevent the minority opinion from ever seeing the light of day.
225,000 votes is a LOT of votes. Does anyone know what the 18-30 male voting record is in terms of actually making it to the ballot box to vote? In recent local elections that I've witnessed (I like to watch), I haven't seen anything but blue haired ladies with walkers hitting the booths. I don't think I saw one person under the age of 40 at my booth (and I witnessed the voters for over 3 hours). I'm not sure how well this would work even if our voting system did allow for minority parties with minority positions to get elected.
Does bork bork bork mean "freedom to copy" now?
From The Inquirer: Its massage is that corporations are engaging in racketeering in the developing world and a few power hungry individuals and greedy corporate entities are infringing on privacy and integrity.
Got to hand it to the Swedes, combining political advocacy with pirates and massages.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
...would be a piracy pARRRRRRRRRRRty.
If their aim is to abolish immaterial law, then how do they reconcile that with protecting privacy? After all, that would be immaterial law, would it not?
I think this party would have much better support if they tried to reduce copyright terms to something more sensible like ~15 years, to see what affect competition with a more contemporary public domain would have on the market, before jumping headlong into abolishing copyright altogether.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
More pirates means less global warming
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Is that you don't have to go through all the trouble of fundraising. Just grab what you need when you need it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
People don't want to live in the environment these people are describing. They merely don't want their rights curtailed.
Would you like to live in an anarchy? No. It'd suck because there were no rules.
Likewise this would suck.
Instead they should just be holding back on patents, fighting for fair-term copyrights (e.g., 50 years maximum), and fair-use rights (purchased music is owned and can be copied by the owner as many times, but not redistributed unless all other copies are destroyed/included in the redistribution) and to not have spyware installed on the computer regardless of how they respond to the EULA. Basically, strong limitations on what the corporations can and cannot do, and some restrictions on the users to encourage responsible behaviour.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
Hopefully, most people on Slashdot are educated enough to know that "stealing intellectual property" is not even possible, by definition. (Well, maybe it is possible with some sort of memory erasing device.)
In particular, derivative works are often the sources of significant new ideas, but the current laws make that very dangerous. Punchline: Walt Disney's stuff was highly derivative, but if a new creator tried to do the same stuff to Disney, Inc., they'd slap him in jail sooooo fast.
However, the largest abuse is probably unlimited term extension for copyright. There is almost nothing left for "society" in that area.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That's great. It must be absolutely awesome to live in a country where there's more than two political parties.
Err, wait a minute.
*thinks*
...
I mean, it must be absolutely awesome to live in a country where there's more than one political party.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Or maybe it's, in Soviet Russia, state property pirates YOU!
Or something like that,... I digress!
Although I agree with many of their positions, they are a bit extreme in their desire to abolish ALL immaterial rights. Such rights, given that they are implemented the right way for a limited period, are useful to encourage invention and artistic production. The main problem of today is the excessive implementations of IM, not IM in itself.
One of their goals is to fire the current minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, and I whole-heartedly support this. He has implemented the "Bodström filters" in Sweden, and the country has thus joined the club of filter regimes (Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Bahrain etc.). He is also the man behind increased surveillance of phones, e-mail and other means of communication in Sweden, and he has been labeled as dangerous to society by many leading newspaper columnists.
The sad reality is that this "Bodström Shield" probably will be implemented in most of Europe rather than be dismantled. This is the unfortunate political trend of today, initiated by the Bush administration.
The Pirate Party says it will allow Mr. Bodström selling hotdogs outside the parliament building, at least in the winter.
The party stands no chance of reaching the required 4% to reach parliamentary seats, although Sweden has many such fringe parties. They may, however, affect the attitude of other parties, which may take a ride on the popular train of file sharing.
It would be like naming Al Capone for the US senate to ban the Dry Law.
Al Capone did not want to repeal prohibition. It's what made him money. Professional racketeers usually like the laws they're breaking, it means they're performing a service for which others will pay them.
To a Swedish Piracy Party?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
from http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=06/01/03/0045 243&mode=thread
Here is a loose translation of the Pirate Party's start page:
Phase 1: Gather signatures for the Election Authority
We need 1500 signatures before the end of February in order to enter the parliamentary elections for 2006. In order to have a small safety margin we shall gather 2000 before February 4th, that gives us time to finish the administrivia for the Election Authority (which is nearly guaranteed to dislike us, or what)
Just right now we are validating all the signatures. We have received over 4000 signatures in less than 24 hours. Right now we are going through the whole lot to verify that we can provide them to the Election Authority.
What is this about?
The Pirate Party aims to take up the roll of maintaining a balance of power after the 2006 election. There are between 800 000 and 1 100 000 active file swappers in Sweden, and they are all tired of being called criminals. We need to have 225 000 of them with us to cross the four percent threshold and land in the roll of power balance.
To get one fourth of a criminalized and angry mob with us is far from unachievable. It is that which we shall achieve in the coming nine months.
Are youse serious?
"You had better believe it. This is the real thing."
What is the Pirate Party's platform?
The Pirate Party's platform is the abolishment of immaterial property (copyright, patents, trademarks and patterns) and the derivative effects (extra fees on blank tapes) and is furthermore very strongly interested in protecting personal integrity (among other things that the data retention law shall not be implemented, and an expansion on the privacy of written correspondence to cover all communications, and a constitutional right to personal privacy.) We do not take a position in any other questions, especially not other politically divisive issues. (the point with that is that you should be able to vote for the Pirate Party without changing your position in the left-right scale of Swedish politics)
Furthermore we stand for that Thomas Bodström shall not accomplish new general tasks, as per his escapades with the data retention law
Which is the Pirate Party, Left or Right?
It is quaintly amusing that the Left accuses us of being for the Right while the Right accuses us of being for the Left. The Left reasons that culture is a generality, the Right that immaterial property create market damaging monopolies. Others simply don't care about Left-Right ideology and simply want to put an end to further hinderance of the advancement of technology and society for the sake of a short term profit.
The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws
So, er, if trademarks and similar are abolished, how do you make sure you're voting for the real Piracy Party, and not something with the same name but vastly different policies set up as a stunt by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau?
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Theft is any time that someone acquires property from someone without their permission.
From Webster: Steal v. t. "To take, and carry away, feloniously; to take without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another."
How exactly can I carry away so called intellectual property? Do do so (rather than to copy it and carry away a copy) requires that I deprive the original "owner" of that property. Making a copy of a dollar bill is not called stealing, it is called counterfeiting. Making a copy of a copyrighted book without permission is not called stealing. It is called copyright infringement. Knowingly violating a patent is not called stealing. It is called patent violation (or patent infringement). Passing off another's work as my own is not stealing. It is called plagiarism. Buy a dictionary already.
If a teenager stole my car every night and when joyriding but brought in back every morning before I left for work I would still consider it stealing.
...but you'd probably be wrong. They may have illegally borrowed your car, but if they intend to return it, it is not stealing, unless you count them keeping it for a time as "keeping it." In any case, copying something is not stealing it. That is why we have different words for different things. It makes these distinctions clear.
Although they do a good job of getting media attention, but their message is so extreme, a lot of people will write them off as crackpots and judging righteous IP reformer the same.
The downside of their proposal is that it is extremely profitable for big business, more so then for occasional filesharers. If there is no copyright, businesses will be able to rip of any Linux distro and sell it as their own (or any other piece of copyrighted work). This will rearrange the playingfield, but the ones with lots of money to invest have a big advantage here.
Copyright is a double edged sword: it protects the big evil business taking advantage of musicians and authors, but also protects independent musicians and authors from the big evil companies (if they are smart enough not to sign all their rights over for a cheap meal and a record deal).
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Why is that surprising? The webpages of the democratic/republican parties in the USA weren't available in Swedish last time I checked, either, so why should the webpage of a Swedish party necessarily be available in English? I'd think they have lots of more important things to do before doing a translation for a bunch of people who can't even vote.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I own dozens of copyrights. Its not hard to do, just write something. It doesn't have to be good, or popular, or make money, or anything else. You automatically have copyright on your creations.
I guess I'm the only one on Slashdot who thinks it's reasonable for record labels to want to make some money. I strongly agree that suing the grandparents of kids for downloading is going way too far, I strongly believe in the concept of fair use and I strongly believe in limiting the time span of a copyright. But when folks are downloading songs from the Internet that they have not paid a single bit of royalties for then it doesn't seem to me that the record labels are being unreasonable by being upset about that.
I know, I'm the only person on Slashdot who feels that both sides in this issue are somewhat wrong, so please feel free to flame me.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
Some Finnish:
...
N Verb Meaning
0 tehdä - to do
1 teettää - to have someone do
2 teetättää - to have someone have someone do
3 teetätättää to have someone have someone have someone do
N tee(tä)Nttää to (have someone)N do
And then there's one of my all time favourite dialogues, though not heavy on compound words:
"Älä räkkää kääkkää"
"En mä rääkkää kääkkääkään"
Roughly translates to:
"Don't pester the old man."
"I'm not even pestering the old man."
And the longest vocal structure in Finnish language:
hääyöaie - "(something you are going) to do during your wedding night" (and that was not an euphemism, it's the actual meaning of the word)
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Wouldn't it be better to create your own party in your own country to represent the same ideals? Here in the US I'd be willing to join such a party. Something that supports individual privacy, the right to reverse engineer, the weakening of IP laws (no software/genetic/business/etc patents and short copyright periods), encouragement of open standards, encouragement of open source, etc. I wouldn't call it the Piracy Party though. The Intellectual Freedom party would be could. You could do some good marketing with 'IF?'.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm even using the same name.... The Piracy Party.
And there's not a damn thing they can do about it.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin