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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."
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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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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.
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.
Man, you manage to get many points wrong at once:
1. Was illegal for computer software since long ago, became illegal for music, movies etc. in the new copyright law of 2005
2. DVD-Jon was never in the supreme court, the prosecution dropped the case after having lost twice. Furthermore, his trial was before the 2005 law introducing the EUCD which added anti-circumvention to the law.
3. True, unless it's covered again by the 2005 anti-circumvention paragraphs - it preempts it explicitly.
Also you might want to read this (norwegian), which shows that nobody agrees on what rights we have exactly.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.