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Norway Liberal Party Wants Legal File Sharing
dot-magnon writes "The Liberal Party of Norway (Venstre) passed a unanimous resolution that advocates legal file sharing. The party wants to legalise sharing of any copyrighted material for non-commercial use. It also proposes a ban on DRM technology, free sampling of other artists' material, and shortening the life span of copyright. The Liberal Party is the first Norwegian political party, and the first European mainstream political party, to advocate file sharing. The Liberal Party's youth wing proposed the resolution."
Looks like I have to vote Venstere and Sponheim next election year :)
The DVD player software contains DRM software (though thoroughly ineffective, DVD-Jon has seen to that).
I've also heard there may be some DRM in OS X to prevent hackers from running Mac OS X on a generic PC -- but I'm not clued in on that area sufficiently to make a positive assertion of that.
Sure, you can argue that the DRM isn't active unless you have DRM:ed files, and it's the files that are the problem, and not the OS itself -- but the fact is that the DRMed files wouldn't be there if they weren't supported by software.
Wait until they actually do it first. They're not in government at the moment, and there's a small thing parties that get into power tend to do, I call it a 180 turn. They only have something like 6% of the votes, so even if they still want to, it could die in coalition talks. And beyond that, through the EEC agreement we're bound to implement EU directives like the EUCD, which noone thought was a good idea really. Good sign? Yes. But it's a looooong way from becoming reality.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Would you be willing to risk your life, your mothers life, your arthritic grandfathers pain, just to ensure the profits of the big pharma companies?
Well, you're doing it now, and you have no choice.
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The actual resolution is quite more general, it uses the word "åndsverk" which can be translated pretty much to "copyrightable work". E.g. our copyright law is called "åndsverkloven".
Their english translation:
"Ban DRM: The Liberal Party states that anyone who has bought the right to use a product needs a technologically neutral way of using it. This means that distributors can not control how citizens wish to play back legally bought digital music. The Liberal Party wants to prohibit technical limitations on consumers' legal rights to freely use and distribute information and culture, collectively known as DRM. In cases where a ban on DRM would be outside Norwegian jurisdiction, products that use DRM technology need to clearly specify their scope of use before they are sold."
Trying to stay very literal:
"Ban against DRM: The Liberal Party is of the opinion that all that have bought the right to use a copyrightable work must have technology-neutral opportunities to use that copyrightable work as one wants. This means that producers and deliverers of technology can not control how citizens for example should play back the music that they have bought. The Liberal Party will therefore prohibit socalled DRM (Digital Rights Management), which are technical limitations to limit the consumers' legal right to freely copy and use information and culture. In those cases where a ban is outside Norwegian jurisdiction, products that contain DRM technlogy shall be clearly marked."
Worse English, but it preserves a little more of the meaning.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A number of European countries have the government subsidizing the arts. However, the government doesn't keep too much track of how the money is spent. Just look at IRCAM in France, a multi-million dollar music and acoustics research laboratory, generously funded by the French state, but whose musical output is entirely free of restraints. Similarly, much of Ingmar Bergman's films were made with state subsidies, and that didn't stop them from being considered masterpieces from film buffs and critics.
The United States system prevents there being more than two serious parties. European countries tend to use proportional representation to solve the problem. In the United States, that doesn't work because our congresmen represent geographic areas - but the problem could be signficiantly reduced if we used a voting system like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_Voting or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method that didn't severely punish third party votes strategically.
Another potential tactic would be to promote subparties. The final elections are solidly locked down to Democrat or Republican, but the actual Democrat/Republican primaries are much more open - an organized "branch" of a major party could probably get their candidate nominated with an effort that is possible to achieve.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
My translation, done quickly just now, so errors are possible:
The Norwegian Liberal Party, equivalent to the Swedish Liberal Peoples Party, today took the program of the Pirate party and made it their own.
At the ongoing national convention a pronouncement was adopted unanimously, which excepting that it has fewer details is a direct translation of the essentials of the program of the Pirate Party with regard to cultural ecology, with further wording from the subheadings of the program. Intention to "encourage all non-commercial collecting, enjoyment, processing and dissemination of culture" - also the Pirate policy. The only part of the Pirate policy the Norwegian Liberals are not adopting is the repeal of the cassette tax.
The Norwegian Liberal Party sits in the opposition in Norway with 5.9% of the 2005 vote.
The Pirate Party welcomes the copying.
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Well, the liberal party in Norway is the smallest of the mainstream parties. In the latest election (2005) they got 5.9% of the votes.
c tion_results.2C_parliamentary_elections_1906-2005
The next party down the line is the Workers Communist Party =)
Election results from 1906 and onwards can (of course) be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venstre_(Norway)#Ele
The current law in Norway is pretty reasonable:
1. Download all you want legally
2. Break any copy protection on your own stuff (DVD-Jon won in supreme court)
3. Share what you own with your friends.
Just dont sell copies for money.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
There's a kernel module called "dontstealOSX" which stops you from running it on a non-Apple box. Unloading the module causes OS X not to run.
I'm not joking, either.
"Venstre" refers to the party's position on parlamentarism when the party was formed, in 1884. They were for it, Høyre (which means right), was against it. Nowadays, Venstre more of a right-wing party, and will typically collaborate with Høyre (which is a conservative party).
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
There is a subtle difference. Bad business models can't and shouldn't be outlawed, but that doesn't mean there should be laws on the books specifically supporting poor business models.
If I invent wonderful technology that acts as a huge catalytic converter, sucks in smog from cities, processing it into clean air, then putting it back into the atmosphere, should I have the right to require random people from breathing the cleaner air they did not solicit or ask for?
The analogy isn't 100%, of course, and I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of this particular analogy, but my point is that legislation shouldn't be used to prop up poor business models.
When it comes to comparing homicide laws with copyright law -- any law is based on a lot of balances. Will an introduction of a law harm or help society as a whole? Does a law represent the predominant values of those within its jurisdiction? It's clear that laws against murder are a clear benifit to society, irrespective of the fact that killing people, even en masse is technically very easy.
It's not as clear that free distribution of material is harmful in the same way, in fact, we feel that restrictions on redistribution are more harmful to society as a whole than the redistribution itself, which we even feel is benificial.
There's a big difference between the tangible and the intangible. But please do try to inform yourself better before dismissing pirate idiology as a knee-jerk reaction.
We in the Swedish Pirate Party have a well-defined ideology based on reform of copyrights, patents and privacy. If you take a few minutes to read our declaration of principles (available from this page, look at the bottom of the page for a link to the file), you can see it's not just a loose cloud of concepts, it's in fact a cohesive argument for reform (not abolition) of copyright and patent laws to fit modern society.
And if anything is knee-jerk, it's comparing the Swedish Pirate Party or Norwegian Venstre to communists. The Pirate Party has no specific political direction. I am personally of a similar general conviction of the Norwegian Venstre party -- centre-right. But the leadership of the Pirate Party contains people from all sides of the political spectrum.
This is a very good point. In fact, Richard M Stallman has approached the Pirate Party with these concerns in the past.
:-)
In fact, he will be speaking at Göteborg University in about a month, and will specifically take up what he thinks we're doing wrong.
I don't agree with him on these points, how appealing as they ever seem, though. Basically, he wants to legislate putting source code for proprietary software in escrow, and re
If a company creates something, they do have a certain right (in the liberal market economic sense) to do whatever the hell they want with it regardless of how poor their business model is.
The issue is not whether the creator has the right to do things with the work -- we're all agreed that he has that right. The issue is whether the creator has the right to prevent other people from acting equally as freely with regard to that work.
That sort of monopoly certainly does not inherently spring from the act of creation. Nor is it commonplace, really. For example, when sushi was introduced to American cuisine, the existing itamae didn't get to keep competitors from making the exact same food. Their hard work in creating the market was exploited by others and this is a fact of life and not a problem with the market or the law.
Authors do not inherently have the right to keep other people from making copies of their works. But just as the government sometimes grants monopolies to utilities in order to ensure greater public benefits than would be had from a deregulated market, it is sometimes acceptable to grant monopolies to authors provided that the public receives a greater benefit from this than they would if these monopolies, called copyrights, were not granted. The public benefits by having more works created and published but equally by having as few or no restrictions on what they can do with those works. So simply increasing copyright is not an ideal solution, since 1) there is an issue of diminishing returns as to how much creation and publication they encourage, and 2) that would run contrary to the public interest in having less copyright.
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago
Pshaw. If you want a free market then you have to be against copyrights, since they are governmental market regulation. Hell, they're basically a form of subsidy for authors, meant to benefit the public. So really, one would imagine that it would be socialists or communists that are in favor of copyrights, while free-market capitalists are against them. The only reason that the authors and publishers support copyrights is because they benefit so much from them, and they don't want to have to face the additional competition if they were reduced or abolished.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The Liberal party of Norway is a relatively small party that received only 6 percent of the vote in 2005, and has been shrinking since its creation. But unlike the Pirate Party of Sweden they do have 10 (out of 169) seats in parliament.
Well, looking at the earlier post in the thread, the platform is that "producers and deliverers of technology can not control how citizens for example should play back the music that they have bought."
So from this we can expect that authors would not be required to release works for all platforms, but cannot interfere, e.g. by using DRM, with attempts by their customers to make those works function on other platforms.
So you could not download a ROM and hack it, but you could buy a copy of the game, rip the ROM, and then hack it to run on a PSP. You could not force MS to release NT for the SNES, but if you bought a copy, you could try to get it to run on the SNES. That's how I'm understanding it, anyway.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You seem to be misinformed.
I don't know if anybody in this discussion is advocating a abolision of copyright.
The Swedish Pirate Party, which I am a member of, advocates a reduction in the term of copyright to somewhere betweeh 5 or 20 years after the work has been produced, as well as a reduction in scope of copyright only to cover commercial copying.
This is a far cry from abolishing copyright.
And as far as I know, Norway's Venstre doesn't want to abolish copyright either, they also want it reformed, not abolished.
Here's my translation for those that don't understand Norwegian:
Arne is interested in Japanese samurai films. They can only be bought from Japan and are all Region 3. Arne makes his DVD player (including his pc) region-free in order to watch the films.
Arne's 3 year old daughter plays wildly with the children-DVDs he's bought. Many have been damaged. Arne therefore makes back-up copies of the DVDs after he buys them. Since Arne is not very good with computers a colleague does it for him.
Arne has many DVDs. When he's travelling he transfers some of them to his iPod in order to watch them on the plane.
Arne has downloaded thousands of songs from various on-line shops. This has cost him a lot of money. Arne can't make a backup of all of them on his own, but he knows that it's important to make a backup. He therefore stores his music on an external service (such as mp3tunes.com) so that they won't disappear if his pc breaks down.
Arne uses some of the songs he has downloaded as ring tone on his mobile.
Arne's mother has been given a Creative player for Christmas. Arne has bought a lot of music on iTunes that his mother would like to listen to. He therefore converts said music so it can be played on his mother's Creative.
In USA Arne found the perfect game for kids. When he came home he found that the game was unusable because it was the wrong region. He thus wants to modify the Playstation so that his daughter can use the game.
Arne's wife is blind. Many of her favourite writers have published books that are only available as e-books. She wants to have them read aloud. This is not possible, so Arne uses a program found on the net to read aloud the books.
Note: I'm Danish, not Norwegian, so there may be some slight errors.
Also, who are Kripos and EFN?
VPS-like shared hosting, on under-crowded servers.
Ditto for Angelopoulos' films in Greece.
I believe that all boxed copies of Mac OS X are upgrade versions. Therefore, by installing OS X on a system that doesn't already have some version of Mac OS installed, you're violating the EULA.
Just so's you know, these are not a bunch of leftists as would be US liberals. "Liberal" in Europe means the same thing as "Libertarian" in the USA.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist