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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."
It also proposes a ban on DRM technology
The article only mentions music - what about software? Would Apple and Microsoft have to provide DRM-free versions of their operating systems?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The political process working for the people?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
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.
WTO complaint in 3..
2..
-- lol pwned
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.
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.
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':
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
From the wikipedia article (assuming it hasn't been to horrible vandalized by my fellow slashdotters yet) I'm not sure if I would describe this as a MAJOR political party with maybe one twentieth of the norwegian vote. Still a bigger organization that the Swedish Pirate Party, perhaps this is a positive sign of things to come. Makes me wish we had political parties somewhere between the the wacko fringe (Green, Reform, etc) that no one takes seriously and the big two which both seem to owe too much to the **AA to ever consider taking a position like this one.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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
How long before Norway is declared a terrorist state?
Well, I think there's a big and clear difference between writing software for a platform generally as opposed to adding DRM which not only isn't needed to make the software function, but which in fact deliberately impairs functionality.
-- 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.
"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.
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.
I disagree fundamentally. There is no pro-"subsidization" at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The entire concept of intellectual "property" requires that a society enforce certain totally artificial rules in order to encourage people to do things that they would, presumably, otherwise not do. They are demanding that everyone pay money to the government, in the form of taxes, for enforcing restrictions on individuals' physical-property rights that only benefit a very small number of content monopolies.
You have no fundamental right to control what another person can do with information. There is an essential difference between someone breaking into your house and stealing a bunch of manuscripts on your desk, and between copying something that they bought legitimately from a publisher. The idea that I can publish and sell you a printed sheet with something written on it, but at the same time prohibit you from photocopying it (or, for that matter, making it into a collage or papering your catbox with it) is completely artificial. It represents an assault on one right -- that of being secure and having control over one's own possessions -- in exchange for a vaporous goal of engineering society in a way that a minority feel is beneficial. Sounds a lot like communism to me.
That some of the same political parties who support a re-evaluation of intellectual "property" laws also support other measures, some of which are redistributive or socialist, does not necessarily imply that anyone who is anti-IP is a communist. To say that is dishonest and discourages meaningful discourse; frankly it borders on McCarythism. There are many people, myself included, who are unconvinced of the merits of the current IP law framework and system, but who are sharply critical of redistributive ideologies.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
If that would be the worst thing to happen from abolishing copyright law, then I'd say that we'd be pretty lucky. After all, preserving the GPL is not more important than dealing with the massive problems surrounding everything else.
That being said, I don't think that abolishing copyright is the best thing to do, but I do think that serious reform is needed.
-- 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.
Slippery hill argument!
What if I owned a PSP and wanted to play the New Super Mario Bros. on it? Would I be justified in warezing the rom and hacking my PSP's firmware to play it, so long as I sent my $30 check to Nintendo Norway? Could I request Microsoft release NT3.5 for my super nintendo so that it's cross platform?
moox. for a new generation.
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.
Norsk Venstre isn't socialist. Don't confuse socialism with social liberalism. :-)
:-)
If anything, by US terms, they're closer to Libertarians than anything.
Whether that makes you for or against DRM is up to you. But holding opinions depending on who happens to share those opinions is counterproductive.
By the way, I hear enjoys breathing air. Maybe you should consider that next time you take a breath?
No, nobody bothers to do it now, because as a society we spend an awful lot of resources enforcing a framework of laws which allow them to produce art on speculation and then sell it like aspirin tablets, over and over, and prohibit people from making further copies of something they've already purchased. With a framework like that in place, there's no reason to try and build an audience and sell serials. You'd be a fool to, particularly if you're a publisher (where starving writers will send you manuscripts for free on the sheer hope that you'll decide to read a page while blowing your nose or wiping up a coffee spill with it and maybe give them a contract).
But that doesn't mean it's a good system, or that on the whole -- when you include the costs of the current system, generally taken for granted -- that an alternative system that was more directly market-driven wouldn't be preferable.
And it's not as though direct-patronage systems don't work, they've obviously worked fairly well in the past; it's also well understood that subscription services work very well in many media, where you pay less for any individual unit of information than to a continuous stream of information -- the value of such services would likewise be unaffected.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why not? Considering that in your example Nintendo still got their fair price for the game, can you think of anything that's actually ethically wrong with your scenario anyway? I can't.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Does this mean that software bought to run on a Windows PC should also run on a Mac, Linux PC, whatever?
No, it means it should not be artificially restricted from doing so.
This is a completely separate issue from _requiring_ software to be multiplatform.
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.
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?" `":" #");}
Progressive thinking indeed. One of the largest parties in Norway, Fremskrittspartiet, who got 22% at the last parliamentary election in 2005 and had the largest support of all parties last year (35%), wants to ban Islam in Norway and stop refugee immigration. The government in Denmark cooperates with Dansk Folkeparti (13% of the votes 2005), who opposes a "multiethnic Danish society" and opposes the separation of the state and the christian church. They have produced this nice pamphlet http://www.danskfolkeparti.dk/cgi-files/mdmgfx/var e1-big-141-1-25862.jpg ("Denmark's future - your country, your choice").
Norsk Venstre may seem like reasonable people, but they are in the minority. Norway and Denmark, just like the rest of the world, have a huge surplus of idiots.
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