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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."
I'm a DAMN proud Canadian right now
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
If we had proportional representation then the pirate party(and other minority parties) would have a chance at being represented in the house.
Instead we have rep-by-pop, which will be the status quo as long as the Conservative Party and Liberal Party continue to rule.
If everyone can get a copy of a movie as soon as it's released in Russia and share it for other people to download, won't that negatively affect attendance in cinemas and DVD sales in other regions?
Your question is interesting and one which many people ask themselves. I think it's more like people have one wallet to use and instead of spending money on music they kind of like they spend it on other things - just because they can get it by downloading. The total economic output is however more or less constant. I can only refer to my own spending statistics so feel free to contradict me. I don't put that same money in my savings account! I use it to go to the movies (5 of them past 6 months), fuel my car, go on vacation.
So the recent legislations in e.g. Sweden and the rest of Europe has nothing to do with economics, but rather only distribution of money and "fairness" to the companies. Of course, to succeed they must squash many citizen rights and deploy surveillance to keep citizens in check. One could argue that the win from such legislation really is nothing in comparison of how trampled the citizens become. Of course, the new legislation opens up a can of worms to further reduction of rights sort of like Pandora's box. We end up moving in the wrong direction if what we want is democracy. //S
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
US legislators appear to have forgotten that during the early phases of US growth, the US refused to acknowledge any foreign intellectual property
Why do you think that they have forgotten? Quite the contrary, I believe that they're fully aware that present-day American economy has changed a lot since then, and large parts of it now depend on strong protection of "intellectual property".
It doesn't make sense to value foreign IP unless you plan on pulling a big take from selling your domestic IP abroad. The U.S.'s position has coincided with its economic interests, not its moral opinion.
Right now China doesn't care much about copyright and patents, but you can bet in 20 years from when they have ceased trying to catch up to the superpower and effectively *are* the superpower, that they will be among those rallying for stronger enforcement.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. ... It ... wants to phase out patents.
Of course. What better way for people to be robbed of their intellectual property and the fruits of their hard work than to find that they cannot patent it, so it will be ripped off by the nearest corporation with the deepest pockets.
The Pirate Party of Somalia is similarly opposed to the notion of private shipping and of the notion of the personal liberty of seamen without payment, feeling as it does that the contents of shipowners bank accounts should be freely available to all gun-toting, Allah-fearin' liberators of other people's wealth.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
My thoughts on this. First of all, the part is irrelevant, they have no chance of electoral success, they probably will only even run candidates in a handful of ridings. Even if they did run in all 308 ridings, they have no chance to get more than, at best, 5% of the vote in their best riding (and even that is a stretch). Our system, which has been confirmed by several recent referendums, essentially makes any votes for them "wasted" in a few ways. I'd still recommend anyone vote for them, if they support their principles.
As for my thoughts on copyrights in general. I'm a generally libertarian leaning Conservative. I don't like how the RIAA/MPAA is conducting themselves. I don't like the abuses of patent systems, and I think copyright lasts way too long. I'd be completely in favor of reform of those.
That being said, I feel the general idea of copyrights and patents is a sound one. IMO, people should have ownership over ideas and works that they create. An aspect of ownership is the right to deny use of your property to others.
I see this in a similar manner as land ownership. Land ownership is a similarly abstract concept. One can only "own" land based on the collective agreement of the population, and the government. Likewise, even if one is not using a tract of land one owns, one can deny access to it from others.
That being said, like a typical goodthinking Slashbot, I hate DRM, think the RIAA/MPAA are a bunch of thugs, and feel that copyrights last way too long (I think patents last about the right length, but stupid crap shouldn't be patentable). I don't, however, feel this gives people a right to pirate whatever they feel like, nor do I think it invalidates the idea of copyright, in general. (For my background, I'm a 22 year old white Canadian male who buys his games, music and movies, and buys a great deal of them.)
I'd be interested in seeing well thought out disagreements, of course. I'm also sure my thoughts and my analogy could be worded much better. I'm usually terrible at getting my point across.
My problems with patents is that as more and more people work in a certain field, the change of independent discovery of an idea increases drastically (especially the so-called "ideas" one sees patented these days). In the software world, any reasonable competent programmer comes up with any number of ideas during the course of their work (sometimes also referred to as "reinventing the wheel", although perhaps on a smaller scale).
Programming software therefore is rapidly becoming a huge patent minefield, one which is not easily avoided since reinventing the wheel is pretty common in software development. Taking time to study patents to see if none were violated would make the cost of writing even the simplest software prohibitive. It would be like writing a message (like this one), except I'd have to check with the patent office if certain ways of expressing my thoughts (like one does in programming) aren't someone's exclusive property.
In my opinion, the entire of idea of patenting something is assuming that you or your company are so smart that it could not possibly have been discovered by the other 6 billion people on the planet (whether they already did it before you which is often the case, or discover it independently later).
First and foremost, they oppose any kind of censorship and totalitarian government.
Then comes the goal to move from the imaginary "intellectual property" scheme back to what copyright, authors right and the freedom of ideas once were meant to be.
They are not for the exploitation of artists. That is what the **AA is for.
This TFS(ummary) is probably the worst summary of a party program I have ever read. :/
Maybe some people are just so used to parties an programs being meaningless because they all belonged to the same industry lobbies anyway, that they do not pay attention to them anymore.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm not so sure. First, I think patents don't provide an incentive to invent. People don't invent in order to get patents, they invent in order to get solutions to problems. What patents are supposed top do is to make those inventions public knowledge, and enable other people to build upon them.
However, I'm doubtful that even this part works well. Say a company has made an invention, and now has to decide whether to patent it or keep it secret. Now if the invention is non-obvious enough that you don't expect anyone to re-invent it until the end of the patent protection, you certainly won't patent it. It would only give you disadvantages: Short term, because you'd pay patent fees for a protection which secrecy would give you for free, and long term because after the protection period ends, your idea is in the wild, while with secrecy there's a chance you can protect it much longer.
Therefore you will patent only inventions which are
In both cases, the knowledge would have become public knowledge anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm not sure I would describe the Pirate Party of Canada as "serious". Their website appears to contain no manifesto. It does link to the "International Pirate Party" website though, so I looked there ... but the section of that website to do with policies simply points you to a web forum where a bunch of people are arguing about what that should be.
That leaves the original Pirate Party of Sweden. What are their policies? At least they do have some. Unfortunately they are self-contradictory and poorly thought out. For instance they believe that copyright should not apply for "non commercial use", ie, file sharing should be free. But what counts as commercial use then? They appear to think that, for example, a musician who writes music for a video game should get paid (and the law would enforce that) but the creators of the video game themselves probably won't get paid, depending on the whims of their customers. That makes absolutely no sense, because then the musician just wouldn't get hired at all. They also want to abolish pharma patents, and their proposed replacement is "government does all research". Somebody needs to study some basic economics, starting with Adam Smith.
And most people have forgotten that hunter-gatherers didn't recognize the ownership of land since it was unnecessary for their migratory societies. Yet today we recognize individuals can maintain control over a section of the earth merely with a piece of paper that says so.
Technology has changed what is considered valuable. The domestication of plants and animals required investment to develop land and therefore provided incentive for protecting pieces of land. The printing press diminished the significance of the physical act of writing, and placed more importance on the ideas conveyed. Automated mass production has elevated design above the skill of manual craftsmanship. Now, the internet once again has changed the structure of the economy, further intellectualizing and virtualizing the resources we desire.
Generally, people "pirate" the creations of giant marketing machines. They pay for virtual clothes for virtual people in virtual worlds. We are transitioning into an ethereal realm, where identities, economies, and communities can't be covered by the laws designed for the physical world. The legal concepts under development aren't just there to stop the downloading of the latest pop music, intellectual property protects our DNA code, purchases, travel habits, and other information individuals consider private.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
> intellectual property protects our DNA code, purchases, travel habits, and
> other information individuals consider private.
What universe do you live in? You have it exactly reversed (or, I really didn't understand what you meant to say). Large corporations have patented the human DNA of individuals for their own gain. They haven't started to sue the children of the people whose genes they sequenced, but if Monsanto can succeed in suing an organic farmer whose crops were contaminated by their patented genes (the link is for a more recent Canadian case, but they already won a similar case in the US!), it isn't unthinkable that it could happen in the future.
Other large corporations, Google, for example, keep all kinds of records of people's web preferences, credit card purchases, and tons of other "information that individuals consider private", and if anyone is protected by IP rights in those cases, it's the corporations, not the individuals!
IP rights only extend to "creative works", and there has yet to be a court system which defines "deciding to buy something" or "deciding to click a particular ad" as "creative".
With proportional representation the party leaders choose who represent you and you have no way to say no to a scummy person. Also independents effectively cannot be elected.
For STV (like BC-STV, the BC method that was unfortunately defeated), that's absolutely not true. A voter can rank the candidates in his desired order. If a party fields a scummy person, you could choose to just not rank that person (effectively ranking him last), and if enough voters do that, then that person won't be elected, no matter the wishes of the party. The same thing goes for independents: they can run as independents, and voters may rank an independent like any other candidate.
Nineteenth century capitalism collapses when everything you make can be copied and shared at will. Government funding all research isn't such a bad idea, comparing to the pharma monopolies we have now.
It's not uncommon actually. Switzerland developed in the same way. Eventually these countries start to produce their own IP and protecting it makes sense.
So the argument goes: We had to crap on everybody else's IP right to get where we are but now that we are here we will bully anybody else into submission who dares to take the same route...
Say what you will, that attitude is still 100% pure, unrefined hypocrisy.
Also, rep by pop is not entirely immune to scummy party hacks.
Rum, wenches, and plunder. Grog is watered-down rum, used by the Royal Navy starting back in the 18th century (but not totally phased out until the 1970.) Pirates aren't nancy-boys like the RN and can handle their rum straight.
The pirate party's goals are too narrow. What the US needs isn't a political party solely devoted to IP and patent issues. What the US needs is a viable national 3rd party devoted to restoring a government for the people, by the people, ruled by the constitution. The issues that concern the pirate party would be covered if copyright went back to being a means for contributing to the public good i.e. copyrights that actually expire and go into public domain instead of perpetually feeding a corporations coffers. Rolling back corporate influence in government and lawmaking would result in an environment more conducive to IP fairness and privacy by default.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
This is going to be mod troll or offtopic or whatever.
I'm getting a little sick of Americans advocate they live on the biggest democracy of the world.
You think democracy is the option between just 2 parties. You pretty much have that biparty system since I can remember. How do you people allow a system where private lobby's can legally donate millions for politician campaigns. How can such a system not been totally compromised?
A party like the pirate party will never had significant expression on the US.
With things like ridiculous patents and trials of house-wife's over 22 musics, I think it pretty much tells who is in charge in the US.
Money.
Concerts are the analogy to movie theaters, but it becomes difficult for musicians to reach out to so many people at the same time. Some thing that may work for movies does not necessarily work for music. What troubles me is that lots of people point out the problems with the music industry's business model, but I never see them suggest any alternatives. I wish to live forever, but because I see no possible alternative to death, I try to not complain about death, and just live life.
That's not really my point. I'm not saying distribution is the only service the media companies provide. What I'm saying is the way they expect to be remunerated for these services is by placing a surcharge on the costs of distribution. I'm saying that the business model is fundamentally linked to distribution. And I'm saying that as real world distribution costs approach zero, it's going to get harder and harder to enforce the state monopoly that is copyright.
I'm not saying that the media company's position is wrong: neither because of falling distribution costs, nor any other reason. What I'm saying is that, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation, I think that a surcharge on distribution is rapidly becoming unworkable.
And for that reason, I think they're inevitably going to lose this fight.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Between CBC's coverage of Canadian Pirate Party and this slashdot post, I had a chance to ask Elizabeth May about the idea of a Canadian Pirate Party.
http://r4nt.com/article/green-party-vs-pirate-party/
She says Green Party policy is copyrights should expire in 12 years (as opposed to Canada's effective 100 year copyright durations).
I know the Green Party doesn't push this aspect of their platform very hard, but it would be nice to have an elected MP speaking on economically optimal copyright durations, as opposed to what is "right" or "wrong" with downloading MP3s (yawn).
YouTube video of Elizabeth May on The Pirate Party and Copyright. Also recycleable (and CC licensed) at Internet Archive.
If The Pirate Party runs against Greens, then copyleft voters will have their vote split. Given Canada's first-past-the-post system, that guarantees we'll never have an elected MP pushing for shorter copyright duration.
They do need to be paid. But the idea that they have to be paid "in a conventional [I'm assuming you mean artificially recreating the scarcity of physical goods] way" is a non-sequitur.
So pay for what is scarce. Pay for the labor, not for the work itself. As another post here said, the plumber doesn't get royalties every time you use your toilet; why should IP be any different?
1. Financing of the artists' production costs
They have every right to put their money wherever they wish. Its not my place to tell them what or where to invest their money. But it does become my place and right when they want me to pay to have their investment protected via immortal copyright or wasteful public spending.
2. Facilitation of access to studios, sound engineers and other such capital
While its true that a professional recording studio is needed for the ultimate in recording quality. With todays tech its possible to make a great demo at a "no I wont go bar hoping tonight" limited budget. At which point when the recording execs hear the demo we refer back to 1.
3. Marketing and promotion
Refer to point 1.
4. Selectivity: a record label only signs a minority of artists that they think are good. They filter out bad artists so that the public doesn't have to.
I didn't ask for this public 'service' nor do I want it. I'm very good at filtering out what I don't like without assistance thank you.
The **AA have made such a large amount of money on the distribution model of their goods that they feel entitled to it. They aren't, at least not to the degree they currently enjoy. Their industry will survive, music will be made, and artists will make a living. Just not in this current form, no one is taking away an artists right to perform live and charge whatever they wish. We only wish to make it so that in a few years it becomes public domain so that another artist may take their turn at spinning straw into gold.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
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.
Much as I agree with the sentiment, I feel it is too little to form a political party on; a proper party program should address all or most aspects of running a society, possibly based on a shared worldview. What is copying movies going to do about the army, social security or the war in Iraq, just to mention a few thing? In my view one shouldn't start with the right to copy music files and then add the rest as an afterthought; one should start with some more general principles, like equality under the law and whatever, and then derive the right to make copies from that, along with all the other issues out in the real world.
But it is fully understandable that people feel nothing but loathing for politics and political parties as things are. I think at the bottom of it is not just the general, selfserving smarminess amongst politicians, but also the fact that they don't even seem to make an honest effort; so many of them are just narrow minded, incompetent windbags who are in it for the money and nothing else. I personally would vote for anybody that can convince me that he or she is going to simply do a good job in the interest of the country and the people; never mind whether they are God-fearing family people or promiscuous Satanists, staunch Capitalists or Communists, as long as they are honest and competent.
I am a Canadian and will support and vote for the pirate party. While I'm neither here nor there regarding copyright law, I am strongly in favor of iron-strength privacy protection, patent reform, and throttling the newfound arrogance our government has displayed recently.
And, hey, if they throw in a little telco reform, they've got a lifetime member here.
Go pirates, go!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC