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Advice On File Sharing For a Swedish MP?
theper writes "A little over a week from now, I have a dinner planned with an old friend and a member of the Swedish parliament. I know a thing or two about the internet, piracy and file sharing, and she's asked for my advice on new legislation on that subject. Her (and her party's) stance is not very controversial: Rights holders must get paid one way or another, and at the same time record companies has to change their old business models and must do more to keep up with technology. With this kept in mind, what advice should I give her?"
IANAL (in Sweden or anywhere else), but I imagine that illegal file sharing in Sweden is illegal because it is in violation of Sweden's copyright laws. If this is the case, then any changes that your friend tries to make to the law should address all of the behavior governed by copyright law, not just file sharing. Part of the reason that file sharing has been such a big issue is that, when it became commonplace, existing legislation was ill-suited to it. So we have vast numbers of people engaging in behavior that is generally considered to be illegal, and companies are suing many people that have, by most accounts, done nothing wrong.
If you favor increased freedom to file share for consumers, then you should advocate increased freedom to share in general. New legislation should anticipate that new technologies will be created. That way, maybe there won't be another big mess twenty years from now.
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Ask her how she thinks "pirates" can be shut down without interfering with legitimate traffic. Ask her if she knows about the recent Media Defender DoS. The *AAs, aka "rights holders", are criminals that continue to abuse laws to shut down all alternate distribution channels. Any power given to them will be abused in a similar way. From there you can move the discussion to the benefits of free publication and copyright reform.
For a more concrete analogy, treat copyright violations like traffic violations. File trading would be like speeding - almost universally ignored, and when you get caught it's a citation, not a misdemeanor or a felony.
Selling unauthorized copyrighted material? That's a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the magnitude. Think of the point at which "speeding" becomes "reckless driving".
Manufacturing bootlegs for fraudulent sale/counterfeiting? Felony. Call it drunk driving.
Note how these are all crimes against the state, not civil matters. Just like in traffic, individuals don't get to sue unless they are ACTUALLY damaged - I don't get to sue a guy speeding past me just because he may have caused me damage in come incalculable way.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Nice categories.
Sort of related, I recently had dinner with three people who used Oink extensively before it shut down. I mentioned that the one user who I knew very well had basically stopped buying music after Oink shut down. She used to spend about $1-2k/year on music, but since Oink's demise she cut back to about $50/year. She didn't do it out of spite. She did it because she could no longer sample broad ranges of music under the guidance of a knowledgeable community's recommendations. The free and legal methods for sampling music are obviously quite limited in order to prevent piracy.
Back to my dinner. The other two users (none of the three knew that the others used Oink before this night) were almost shocked, because they had done the exact same thing. They used to find music they liked on Oink and then buy it. Now they just don't buy music.
A bunch of angry and closed-minded people like to respond to this type of post on Slashdot with disbelief or simply an accusation that the poster is a filthy thief. I, personally, never used Oink and I also buy about one album per year because I only care about a couple bands, so I'm close to being completely uninvolved with the music industry. Since long before Oink, however, I've known a lot of people who have downloaded songs for free, and in most cases the free downloads resulted in them buying more music. I'm sure a ton of downloaders don't buy music because of it, but I'm also sure that a ton of those don't buy less music because of it. Deny it or not, the fraction of people who buy (or bought) more music because of free downloads is substantial, so much so that I'm not convinced the music industry really has a net loss due to piracy for personal use.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
And please show her this youtube'd old Rapport news broadcast from Swedish National Television. It's from the 70's and the music industry says they want a DISCO FEE because the new DISCO music is killing the [old] music industry. Sounds familiar? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdjcSGo1hJg
Tell your friends about xenu.net
"Happy Birthday To You" is not in the public domain. The copyright holders make thousands (if not millions) of dollars off the song every year. From the Wikipedia article,
The Summy Company registered for copyright in 1935, [...] Based on the 1935 copyright registration, Warner claims that US copyright won't expire until 2030, and that unauthorized public performances of the song are technically illegal unless royalties are paid to it.This is one of the really good examples of how messed up our copyright laws are. That's why I used it. An important part of our culture is locked up.