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."

Comments

Near-exact copy of a Swedish Piratpartiet document

[pv2b]

Interestingly enough, this is an almost word-for-word translation of the Swedish Pirate Party's declaration of principles.

The Swedish Pirate Party didn't explicitly permit this copying, except for declaring their pages to be "No Copyright". I guess Venstre practice what they preach, and the Swedish Pirate Party has also come out with a statement saying that they welcome this act of copying. :-)

More information about this (in Swedish) from Piratpartiet can be found here.

Re:What?

[pv2b]

Yep, working for the people who want to get stuff for free.

Now the people who aren't going to get paid for their work... that's a different matter entirely.

This mentality is behind a lot of misconceptions when it comes to pirate politics.

As Pirates (I am a member of the Swedish Pirate Party) we believe there is no inherent right in getting paid for copies. We do however believe in a right to charge for performing a work.

If artists who are out to make money stop producing due to copyright reform -- good riddance. There'll still be plenty of music and culture left, just as there has always been.

To take one example, in the Music Industry, even the big labels don't see recorded music as a product any more -- but rather as advertising for other events and products.

The fact is that technology for unlimited copying is here -- and the laws preventing private exploitation of this technology are outdated and counterproductive. With new technologies, people and products are made redundant. This happens all the time -- today nobody sees the sharp decline in sales and production of horse-whips after the widespread adoption of the automobile as a bad thing for example.

Re:tyranny of the majority

[pv2b]

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.

Yes!

In fact, the Swedish Pirate Party (of which I am a member) uses the pharmaceutical industry as an example of an area where patents are harmful.

The pharmaceutical industry today spends more money on advertising than on R&D, and also receives a very large bulk of its funding through government grants and other subsidies.

Getting rid of the patent system would be a big win for society at large. Maybe then we'd get more drugs for things like AIDS and not as many drugs for erectile disfunction. :-)

Speaking of AIDS drugs, a lot of people in the third world can't afford AIDS treatment because of the artificially inflated drug prices due to patents. Are pharmaceutical patents really worth their cost in human lives?

No -- let the governments continue to fund pharmaceutical research -- maybe more than before, and get rid of patents. It's better for everybody in the long run, except for Big Pharma.

Not impossible, just different.

[Kadin2048]

There are business models that can allow for the production of books without DRM or copyright, but they're different than the systems we're used to. You can write and publish serials, rather than books, and use the free publicity that copying gives you to your advantage: tell your audience that if you don't get paid x, the next installment won't be released. There are a few authors (notably, Steven King) who have experimented with approaches like this (although his was slightly different). Writing in such an environment is less of a solitary activity, where the writer closets him or herself away and returns after some time with a book to hawk, than an interactive one, where the writer needs to constantly maintain the relationship with his benefactors.

In truth, there probably wouldn't be as many books written, but I'm not sure that's necessarily bad per se; I think our current system encourages the overproduction of many forms of "art" basically on speculation, far more than the market really demands and is willing to pay for, which is why there are so many out-of-work artists of various stripes, e.g. authors who have written books that nobody wants to buy. An approach that resulted in nothing being written without a market for it would result in less pages produced annually, but it would lead to only the stuff that people were actually willing to pay for getting written.