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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."
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.
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."
Pirate Party Australia, join as a preliminary member today!
How we know is more important than what we know.
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/
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).
Arrr.... it's not gay if it happens on a boat.
> 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".
The ninja party has always been around, you just can't see it.
No industry could survive something like that
The movie industry continues to rack up massive (and record) profits year after year, they're doomed if movie trading ever hits the intertubes...
Trolling is a art,
The RIAA and MPAA are a big problem for copyright supporters, since they are admittedly the most outspoken spokespersons for copyright, yet they represent everything wrong with copyright. Don't get me wrong, they also represent a whole lot of what is right with copyright, but oh so much that's wrong with it. There is the greed, there is hard bargains with artists, there are the no court appearance lawsuits, and there is the DRM, but at the same time, there is a lot more to copyright. There's the culture, the inspiration, even the images of celebrity and stardom that encourage others to participate. There's the satisfaction in knowing that you have some input, via the free market, in the art you experience.
We need to stop looking to scuttle this for petty revenge against the **AA. If the pirate party supports a reasonable, reformed copyright, and they understand exactly how much we owe copyright to date for our culture, then they have my vote, despite their name (I would check, but the page is slashdotted). If they wish to undermine copyright, if they are foolish enough to believe that, as the summary suggested, that sharing is somehow less damaging just because money isn't changing hands, then I suggest they give their party points some long hard thought. If they want to simply take down the **AA, then I will fight them every step of the way, because that is, frankly, a simply idiotic approach to change.
How would I go about it? I would leave it to the market. Copyright doesn't grant you a free pass to money. You first have to earn it through creation or investment, and even then, it still has to go through us regular people in order for it to make money. If we don't want the **AA to make money, then it won't. Pure and simple. Sure, they'll kick and scream, but with enough support, even the government will be forced to turn a deaf ear, lest their political careers be over.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It's all very well saying that if the content is good people will go out and buy it anyway - but once you make it legal, mainstream hardware manufacturers will come along with P2P-enabled set-top boxes which will bring convenience to the mass market, and there will be no reason for anyone to go out and buy any content. It would destroy the content creators overnight, and then we'd get no quality content.
It would destroy the content industry not the content creators. Not that artists wouldn't be affected but it will not kill the arts. And, in any cases, if protecting IP rights involves any of DRM, communication monitoring, restrictions on technological development, taxes that go mainly to companies and a handful of top (already rich) artists then I'd rather see the whole entertainment industry die.
per dolorem ad astra
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.