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

What?

[gravesb]

The political process working for the people?

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is that technology for unlimited copying is here -- and the laws preventing private exploitation of this technology are outdated and counterproductive.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:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:What?

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:What?

[pv2b]

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.

Re:What?

[emilv]

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

Re:What?

[Khaed]

Movies will still survive through private patronage or government subsidies

Please God, no. The last thing I want is for the government to be paying for movies to get made. There are a lot of movies made that absolutely fucking suck and I don't want tax dollars going towards subsidizing that. Or music, or books. I don't like it when the government bails out farmers or airlines, either.

If the government pays for movies to get made, not only are you paying for the movies you like, but you're paying for every movie that you think stinks. The idea of the next Gigli coming out of taxes is horrid. and I've seen the way governments run things, if the government made movies, most of them would be Gigli quality with a Waterworld budget.

Re:What?

[pv2b]

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.

Re:What?

[CRCulver]

Government subsidized movies. Oh boy! I bet those will be entertaining (/sarcasm).

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.

Re:What?

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:What?

[cpt kangarooski]

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.

Re:What?

[pv2b]

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.

Re:What?

[corbettw]

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

That explains why the Swedish movie industry, instead of the evil capitalist studio system in Hollywood, USA, dominates the global market for movies.

Re:What?

[joto]

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.

Re:What?

[pv2b]

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.

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.

Get ready

[tehwebguy]

WTO complaint in 3..

2..

Re:Get ready

[mmcuh]

WTO complaint? About a program of a political party in a member state? That hasn't been implemented in any way? From a party in opposition? Not to say that the lobbyists and noise-makers will not lobby and make noise to make sure that no other mainstream parties follow Venstre, but I doubt the WTO will have anything to say about it any time soon.

How dare those communists...

[heretic108]

...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

Re:Software?

[pv2b]

This probably got addressed already, but Apple only provides DRM-free versions of their operating system.

Mac OS X contains plenty of DRM. FairPlay technology which restricts copying of songs purchased through iTunes (or more precisely, prevents playback unless the DRM technology is used to unlock the file).

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.

Wish we had medium size political parties

[MaizeMan]

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.

Re:Wish we had medium size political parties

[Chandon Seldon]

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.

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.

Re:tyranny of the majority

[KonoWatakushi]

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.

Re:tyranny of the majority

[Ajehals]

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.

Re:tyranny of the majority

[Arker]

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.

Re:tyranny of the majority

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Hey, great idea! Let's put the politicians in charge of ALL medical research! I'm sure the Bush administration would do a swell job allocating money to promising areas like stem cell research, birth control methods, the morning after pill (that they improperly kept the FDA from approving for over-the-counter), etc.

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.

Re:Software?

[Kjella]

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.

Terrorist State

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before Norway is declared a terrorist state?

Re:Software?

[3vi1]

Damn... When I started to read your post, I thought for sure it was going to say: "If DRM is outlawed, only outlaws will have DRM".

Re:Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slightly Exaggerated

[Brian Cohen]

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.

Re:The current law in Norway is pretty reasonable:

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Technological neutrality

[cpt kangarooski]

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.

Re:Software?

[corychristison]

You seem to be misinformed.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Technological neutrality

[drsmithy]

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.

Ban on DRM is a terrible idea

[Spy Hunter]

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.

Re:Ban on DRM is a terrible idea

[pv2b]

Norway isn't a member of the European Union.