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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.
I for one am sick of these neo-pirates perverting the time-tested ideals of classical piratism. Copyright and patent reform? What happened to grog, wenches and plunder? For shame on these people, ruining the good name of pirates.
US legislators appear to have forgotten that during the early phases of US growth, the US refused to acknowledge any foreign intellectual property - European books were copied and published in the US with no royalties whatsoever, and it was no less a person than Rudyard Kipling, all of whose works were stolen in this way, who described the US as a country of pirates. The US was one of the last developed countries to sign the Berne Convention, which it did not do till 1st March 1989. So you could say that the US only formally ceased to be a pirate itself 20 years ago.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
As an official in the Swedish Pirate Party, I can only wish our Canadian brothers and sisters a heartily welcome up onto the barricades, and the best of winds.
We are changing the world together.
The Pirate Party is coming to Canada.
It's likely to split the non-neoconservative vote even further into obscurity.
Pirate Party Australia, join as a preliminary member today!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Most of the time when I go to the cinema it is not because I can't wait to get to watch the movie for free but because I enjoy watching it on a big screen.
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/
Probably not.
I can already get a movie as soon as it's out in cinemas. You may rest assured as soon as it's released somewhere on this planet, a torrent is created shortly afterwards. That's already how it's done. Do you think "allowing" this to exist in a country would change it one little bit? How can you spread it earlier than at the same time you get to see it at all?
Yet, people still go to the movies and they still buy DVDs. Why? Simple. I don't have a THX system at home and neither do I have a huge screen. And certainly no 3D machine. If the movie is good enough, I wanna see it like that! But is it worth the 10 bucks or more? I'm not gonna waste 10 bucks and 2-3 hours of my life on a movie when I don't know if it's worth it. 9 out of 10 times it's not. And, being a statistician, at that odds I'm on average better off if I don't go.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Conversely, I'm entirely willing to pay to watch a movie, but I hate movie theaters.
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...
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.
Like copyright law, patent law was never meant to prevent the duplication of a product, process, or idea. It was only meant to prevent the duplication FOR PROFIT.
I personally met one individual who patented a method to modify carburetors to increase fuel mileage. He sold his patent to GM. The man still worked on cars, and modified those big Chevy Impalas to get 30+ MPG. If he worked on your car, he could not accept payment. Doing so would have put him in violation of patent law. But, doing the very same work for his own amusement was perfectly legal.
It's a shame GM wasn't putting that patent to use 40 years ago, when they bought it. They might not be bankrupt today.......
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
> 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.
The ninja party has always been around, you just can't see it.
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.
Ugh don't get me started. Last time I was in a movie theater (It's been a couple of years now) it was ten bucks for a ticket and half an hour of trailers and goddamn television commercials before the movie started. These days the only thing that could even remotely tempt me back to the big screen would be a new David Lynch flick.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
I disagree, somewhat. The US needs ANYONE to run against the two established parties ON ANY PLATFORM, and to WIN offices around the country.
Granted, if the Pirate Party came here, they wouldn't win seats in Congress and the Senate, they certainly wouldn't win the presidency. But, if (in states where judges are elected) we started seating judges, mayors, and state representatives, the two parties would take notice. And, it wouldn't take a lot of them, either. Our politicians may be crooked as all hell, but that doesn't make them stupid. They can read grass roots movements as well as anyone.
Aren't we all sick of the same old crap we get from the two inbred parties yet? If not - well - I've heard that people get the government that they deserve. Maybe that really is true.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Do musicians need to reach out the same number of people at the same time with their live performances? I think not.
One music performance involves a lot less crew than the production of a movie, so a lot less people need to share in the profits. Besides that, people are willing to pay a lot more for a live performance than for a movie.
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.