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Norway Liberal Party Wants Legal File Sharing

Posted by kdawson on from the pirate-party-platform dept.

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."

12 of 563 comments (clear)

  1. What? by gravesb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The political process working for the people?

    --
    http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
    1. Re:What? by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Movies can't exactly be performed live and neither can software.

      Movies will still survive through private patronage or government subsidies. A number of important films that are acclaimed as triumphs of cinema were not expected to generate any profit, but the auteur was able to secure funding by people who appreciated his vision. And as for software, the point of the OP remains. People might not necessarily be paid for the duplication of software, but they may nonetheless be paid for its creation. Look at Google sponsoring Free Software projects.

    2. Re:What? by pv2b · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except that:
      1. Music isn't the only thing that can be copyrighted. Movies can't exactly be performed live and neither can software.
      2. Since the invention of the printing press there has been technology for nearly unlimited copying save for a small cost for the actual copy. The xerox allowed for private individuals to make copies. Copyrights exist exactly for this reason, saying technology makes it pointless means you don't know the first thing about them.


      There's a big difference between the printing press, the xerox machine, and file sharing.

      The printing press meant that organisations could suddenly print large numbers of copies of a single work. Production of copies wasn't the largest cost any more, it was the actual production of the content. Rightly, copyright was instated to prevent other bookprinters from profiteering off somebodyelses work. To this day, the Pirate Party does not condone or support copyright infringement for commercial gain.

      The Xerox machine was a revolution in copying technology, but was very limited in its scope. It took considerable work to copy books with a xerox machine. It's self-regulating in that way. There wasn't really any pressure to update copyright laws because the societal impacts of the Xerox machine weren't nearly significant enough.

      With file sharing and the Internet, suddenly anybody can make infinite copies at neglible cost of any information that can be stored digitally.

      This is a *good thing*, and is a fact of life -- and the status quo can't be maintained through outdated legislation.

      You make good points that making money off movies might be hard in the future, but the fact is that the big bucks in movies comes from movie theater tickets. The DVD sales are just extra cream on top, and those crappy cams and telecines you see on file sharing networks are definitely no substitute for the real thing.

      Sure, DVD sales may diminish, but that's always been extra cream on top -- not the main bottom line.

      Either way, if you start trying to charge for something that's more convenient than file sharing, they will come. It worked for All Of MP3 (shady non-compensation of artists aside), and it would work for the movie industry too. I for one would rather pay a few dollars to watch a movie in DVD-quality using streaming downloading (entirely possible with technology today) than having to wait a few hours to get it off bittorrent. Instead, the content industry has made their own "legitimate download" services more cumbersome than the illegal alternative, and it'll be their undoing.
    3. Re:What? by emilv · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A big part of the Swedish movie industry is funded by the government.

    4. Re:What? by pv2b · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Then can you explain why companies holding intellectual property try to prevent its theft? They pay money to create something that can easily be copied, why should they not have exclusive rights on its distribution?
      If you actually go back and examine the logic of that statement it borders on the absurd.

      Are you seriously suggesting that if a company has a poor business model it's anybodies fault but their own?

      The companies holding intellectual property do just that, *hold* it. They're not on anybodys side but their own, in fact, I could argue that they're damaging to society.

      I see no reason to continue to support this "industry" based on reinforced outdated legislation. Do you really it's a good idea for a single company to have rights of redistribution to something that's so trivial to redistribute, that millions of people around the world are doing it without even batting an eyelid?

      We don't need the companies help to redistribute things any more. If they don't like it, they're welcome to take their profits, close up shop, and pull out. Culture will find its way without them, even better than before they arrived.
    5. Re:What? by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Guess what, most European countries already have had governments subsidizing films for decades and decades, and the result has hardly been Gigli meets Waterworld. Try to remember that your country isn't the only one on Earth and that there are places out there where things are different.

    6. Re:What? by pv2b · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now try to tell a writer how they're going to get paid, when it will be perfectly legal to scan and post a book after sale number one. Once more, for the learning disabled; Copyright is not about money at all, it is about the author getting to decide how to distribute their work, not a bunch of I want it free'ers.
      Please tell a writer how they're going to get paid, when there's no guarantee that the manuscript he sends out to a bunch of publishers will be accepted or not.

      Not tell him what a great chance he could have of making *some* money by putting his book out on Internet, and selling hardcopies to interested parties.

      This business model works. I have bought several books (technical books, but the idea should extend to fiction too) using this exact method.

      Sure, you can't get paid for every single person who reads your book. Just like the way you can't get paid by every single person who listens to your music as they walk past you on the street. The Internet has made everybody a street performer, whether they like it or not. The only way to stop that from happening is not to perform.
    7. Re:What? by joto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure, I'm all in favour of having a system whereby people who create stuff, gets paid. However, the current copyright system is not sustainable by any means. Digital technology has changed the landscape, and there's nothing we can do about it, no matter how good the arguments in favour of intellectual property rights are.

      We have always shared intellectual property:

      • If you heard a joke, you have probably told someone else. Telling jokes you didn't make up yourself is not, and have never been illegal. What if you could send someone a whole book as easily? Or an entire library? With digital technology we can!
      • If someone taught you a tune to play on a musical instrument, you would probably teach it to someone else. Doing that is not, and has never been illegal. What if you could send someone a complete musical recording as easily? Or all the musical recordings made in Spain between 1920 and 1935? With digital technology we can!
      • If someone taught you a cool mathematical technique, you would probably tell it to someone else. Doing that is not, and has never been illegal. What if you could send someone a whole computer program as easily? Or all the computer programs ever written that will work on a certain brand of computer? With digital technology we can!

      The creator of something ought to be able to set the terms of his creation.

      Sure, (s)he can either keep it a secret, or (s)he can show it to others. Artificially restricting the terms under which it is copied is something that is an interesting idea, and might have worked in the past, but unfortunately, it no longer works. You can't keep teenagers from having sex either. Perfect digital copies is a revolution in how we communicate ideas. And even though intellectual property rights was a good idea before digital technology existed, doesn't mean it will continue to be so forever. Intellectual property rights will end some time in this century.

  2. How dare those communists... by heretic108 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...refuse to close the barn door, and make those fraudulent claims that the horse has already bolted!

    Anyone in their right mind can see the horse clearly inside its stall within the barn, lazily chomping out of its nose-bag. If you can't see it, your vision must be impaired - get to your nearest RIAA office and book in for the next available seminar.

    I'm sure there must have been a lot of ferry operators put out when the Channel Tunnel opened up to connect road traffic between the UK and France. But in that case, the ferry operators didn't have any significant pull with government, so the tunnel went ahead.

    To borrow Russel Crowe's line from Master and Commander, we have to choose the 'lesser of two weevils':
    1. Widspread infringement of intellectual property
    2. Increasing concentration of intellectual property amongst an elite oligopoly which is working to mutate the intellectual property regulations into a force which increasingly represses expression, invention and communication and squashes competition
    --
    -- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
  3. Re:tyranny of the majority by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A similar argument should be made that IP rights to pharmeceuticals should be overturned, so that any company should be allowed to produce knock offs of drugs. Agreed.

    That would certainly bring down prices for consumers quite a bit... for existing drugs. However, it would disincent pharmeceutical companies to make the mammouth R&D investments needed to discover new ones. What mammoth R&D investments? At best, this would would kill the mammoth advertising expenditures, which arguably should not exist in the first place. Most of the (minimal) investment is in researching replacements for existing high-margin drugs, which are dissimilar enough to avoid patents but functionally identical.

    In any case, these companies most certainly don't have our health or best interests in mind. Investment in medicine should be driven by need rather than profit, and the existing system is clearly a massive failure.
  4. Re:tyranny of the majority by Ajehals · · Score: 5, Insightful

    See, I don't get this argument. Ignoring any principals and/or pro-anti patentability stances, are you suggesting that if the pharmaceutical companies didn't get the huge amount of protection they get the would simply close up shop? they would go from making less money, to making *no money*?. As I understand it pharmaceutical companies benefit from all sorts of things they don't pay for, from R&D at universities, through to government subsidies. They make a huge amount of money, making less, or having to collaborate wouldn't be a bad thing for the users of their products. And anyway, what use is a treatment for a disease you have if you cant afford it?

    Oh, and what about the fact that some drug companies research and development aims are geared toward high value markets (dieting and beauty for example, which can be addressed through other means) rather than areas that would help large sections of the population with actual illness (where a drug may be the only option)? The market forces involved force company's to do what is best for their bottom lines, most of the time, Not what is best for society as a whole. With a shift of our IP related legislation, maybe that would change.

  5. Ban on DRM is a terrible idea by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't believe that people are seriously considering a ban on DRM. I suppose I should have realized that it's natural to try to fix a problem by making a new law, but when the problem *is* the law, you should fix it by repealing the problematic law, not making more.

    There is absolutely zero need to ban DRM, for one simple reason: DRM doesn't work, has never worked, can't ever work. All DRM schemes are fundamentally flawed, at a deep technological level. The only course of action necessary is to remove all laws protecting DRM, thus making it completely legal to make, distribute, even sell software and/or hardware for the explicit purpose of breaking DRM. Completely legal copies of DeCSS, FairUse4WM, QTFairUse, BackupHDDVD, etc would be available everywhere. Entire companies could be founded to muster the resources to perform sophisticated attacks on DRM hardware and software (perhaps even a brute force cryptological attack would be feasible in some cases with enough resources). Modchips, firmware hacks, replacement toner cartridges with DRM lockout chips, etc would all be readily available.

    In such an environment, all DRM would be futile. After a few more thwarted schemes, even the most stubborn holdouts in the RI/MPAA would have to see the light. DRM would go away of its own accord, and it would all be the result of *repealed* laws instead of new ones. Fewer laws on the books is a good thing.

    --
    main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}