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Pirate Party Coming To Canada
An anonymous reader writes "After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents."
Pirate Party Australia, join as a preliminary member today!
How we know is more important than what we know.
To elaborate, we have at least 4 (serious) political contenders who are in (or near) the center of the political spectrum here in Canada:
- The Marijuana Party
- The New Democratic Party
- The Green Party
- The Pirate Party (the new kid on the block)
These parties compete primarily with the Liberal Party (Canada's unofficial right-wing party); and the Liberal party is the only party that can offer any serious opposition to the Conservative party (Canada's unofficial neoconservative party), who tends to remain strong unless there is consistent and persistent and extreme scandals and incompetency during their terms in office (sorta like how the Republicans remain quite strong in the US despite their scandals and in-competencies).
For anyone interested in getting involved, check out the forum at http://www.piratepartyofcanada.com - Doesn't look like there's much going on yet, but hopefully that will change shortly...
You mean, since they are the first on the north american continent? Oh wait...!
-- Proud voter of the Pirate Party in the EU election 2009!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Um, no we don't. We have a centrist party and a fascist party. With the centrist party representing liberals by default. Believe me a conservative party and liberal party would be a serious step in the right direction.
I'd like to note that the summary is not entirely correct.
We are not saying that people should have the right to copy whatever they like, despite what public opinion might be. Copyright is an important tool for innovation, we just think that it has gone too far (death + 50 years? Come on!). That does not mean that everyone should be allowed to download as much music/movies/etc. as they want. On top of that, we are not saying "phase out patents." There are some members of our forums that are saying that, but it does not reflect the entire Pirate Party's desires.
Other than that, the summary is right.
The industry is used to having it their own way for too long, and they have to realise that their days of bleeding the customer dry are numbered.
To talk of bleeding the customer dry is lunatic.
The federal minimum wage in 1939 was 30 cents an hour. That would buy you one adult ticket to the movies or a single 78 RPM phonograph record.
Two tracks.
The roadshow production of Gone With The Wind would have been priced at $2 to $5 bucks.
The 78 was disposable. The light-weight tonearm with a diamond stylus doesn't come into general use until the mid or late fifties.
The federal minimum wage will rise to $7.25 an hour on July 24. The average U.S. ticket price for a movie in 2008 was $7.18.
The Video-on-Demand rental is $5.
You can do much better than that with a subscription to Netflix.
Amazon's Best Sellers in Music CDs will only rarely set you back more than $9.99. The mp3 single 89 cents.
The customer isn't paying more for entertainment in real terms than his great-grandfather did.