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Why the UK Needs the Pirate Party
Barence writes "The UK Pirate Party wants to reform copyright and patent laws, abolish the surveillance state and increase our freedom of speech, and it's just been recognized as a political party. In this interview with PC Pro, UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson explains how he's planning to shake up the political landscape. 'What we really want to do is raise awareness, so that the other parties say "bloody hell, they've got seven million votes this time out," or one million votes, or enough votes to make them care and seriously think about these issues.'"
Its all about stir things up in a political environment that tends to see things from a 1987 perspective. Times have changed, media industry and politics understanding of it has not (at least not as much as it should have to be in sync with the world we live in).
It have worked quite well here in Sweden, the pirate party have woken up the other parties when polls started to show that they might even get into the Riksdag ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden#Modern_political_system )
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Very few people want "no copyright" but an awful lot of them want "less government"
Well said; we're getting to a point that 'piracy' is an inevitability...music, video, etc, is GOING to be shared, and the way interpretation of copyright law is going these days, any victory for the Industries gets one step closer to extreme government oversight and penalisation for things that, ultimately, end up being relatively minor. Copyright laws, as originally written and intended, were to prevent someone from taking the printed words or phonographed music of one person, and claiming it as their own, to make it a profit. It's been bastardized to excess now, though, and even though we've seen suit after complaint after appeal after suit on the whole subject, not a thing with copyright law or dealings related to infringement has seemingly changed EXCEPT to favour the Industries with increased prying by the lawyers with Government OK's in doing so.
In the end, it's a hopeless endeavor, make token efforts to put in limitations on physical media, and when they get cracked, take some solace in the fact that records are still being sold (or downloaded from iTunes), and that people will still flock to a movie theatre (probably for the popcorn)..
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
They don't have to win the elections.
If they get a few million votes and steadily increase share every election, even if they don't win the bigger parties might decide to adjust their policies a bit.
A lot of people say it's just a two horse race because of the "first past the post" system. Big fucking deal. That doesn't matter as long as you can influence the direction the horses are heading.
Fact is the big parties have changed over the years, so they can and do change.
If you keep voting for a party that you don't like, it's effectively saying to them "keep doing whatever you are doing". Why should they change if they keep winning most of the votes?
If they see their grip loosening, believe me, they'll do something.
and the economy will falter again.
Copyright (and other IP forms) are functionally equivalent to a form of taxation. It's transfer of money from one sector of the economy to another, and as such it does not affect the strength of the economy outside its comparative efficiency at generating value for the spent resources.
Perhaps you wish to claim that the copyright industries are extremely efficient at generating value for their consumers, much more than the value the consumer would have gotten from the alternate products he would have bought for those funds, but frankly, most breakdowns of where the money goes indicate otherwise. Which would suggest that copyright damages the wealth generation of an economy as a whole.
And of course, compared to a really optimized system of IP creation without monopoly effects and middleman funding, the economic outcome if utterly atrocious.
Sweedish pirate party is not unreasonable or extremist. They will abolish patents completely and make private filesharing legal, but they will maintain a 5 year copyright term for commercial usage. Seems reasonable enough to me.
Yes. Much like the way to get proprietary vendors to support open platforms and protocols is to launch a Free Software organisation, build an OS, popularise a Free license, etc. To some, it's extreme. To others, it's just the extreme balance to an extreme position taken by others.