Slashdot Mirror
Ask the UK Pirate Party's Andrew Robinson About the Issues
VJ42 writes "With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital Economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate Party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader, Andrew Robinson, has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply."
I do believe the policy is more about the shock value than a serious policy to be implemented verbatim. It is basically the polar opposite of current copyright use where it is used primarily for control until death and then some 70 years. I'd say it's easier to come to the table with the direct opposite to come to some middle ground than it is to make concessions from the beginning, no?
I bet you would find a rather large number of people who think that, for example, making a mix tape is entirely ethical and should be legal. Lots of people don't agree that artists should have ultimate control over their work. Also, who is being *forced*? not giving artists the privilege of ultimate control over the use of their published creations is not *forcing* them to do anything.
I hate that GPL argument. Sure it's technically correct, but the GPL was written with the intent of subverting copyright using it's own rules. The GPL would be unnecessary, and would most definitely not be common had the copyright system been much more lax during the last few decades.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
No.
:)
Basically, I disagree with everything you said. No, you shouldn't be able to retain permanent control over an idea. No, saving the GPL is not worth perpetuating our current broken copyright. And no, a world with drastically reduced creator control over their "intellectual property" would be on the whole far less controlling, instead of more.
Besides, how often does the GPL come up in non-commercial cases?
In a world with no copyright for "non commercial" distribution of work how is anyone who creates a non subscription fee based computer game or e-book supposed to make money given that the work will be freely available on file sharing sites?
Puzzle Daze is now my job
Can we have a 3 strikes for politicians so that when they've been caught with red handed with their hand in the checkout 3 times they're jailed and banned from ever entering politics again so that the likes of Mandelson would never have got to a position where he could single-handedly manipulate the Digital Economy Bill in the first place?
Why does your treasurer and campaigns officer, apparently under heavy pressure from the likes of Eric Priezkalns, feel that spending almost all of the party funds on the upcoming general election is the right way to go, given that, realistically, the PPUK will not make much of an impact in these elections? Don't you think that the better approach is a long-term one, and blowing all the money available to the party right now on the upcoming elections would be resources badly spent, when they could be better used to garner long-term widespread support/publicity, and apply long-term pressure?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I think BSD license would be a lot closer in subverting copyrights using it's own rules. GPL clearly states that if you GPL'd code, along with the binaries you need to make your own source code available too. Having the source code available is something the author wanted and is using his right over his work. Without copyrights anyone could take anyones code and never release the modifications or even relicense it under non-compliant license like BSD license.
Why do artists get to control their creation after they sell it? Manufacturers don't. Crafts makers don't. If I sell you a car I can't tell you how fast to drive it, where to drive it, or what brand of oil you can use for oil changes. Just because something is "artistic" or "creative" (a property that is ill defined and could apply to anything) should not give you special rights. You made something, you sold it, they can now do whatever they want with it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Why do people believe that I can give the fact that I wrote a story or a song away? Shouldn't the first issue in any copyright negotiations be that the author's right is non-transferable?
If author's rights are transferable, the "new author" (a publisher, for example) will not write the sequel to the original book, nor write the next song of the original author. In fact, the author is only discouraged to write anything if somebody else can steal his rights.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Unless every piece of software is open source, which is the goal of the Gnu project. Then copyright would be meaningless.
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Should creators have rights over their work? Yes. For a limited time. The problem is that the time is no longer limited and it is not the creators who are asserting rights, but huge third parties who are small in number. Small numbers of players in a marketplace means the consumer is screwed.
Mickey Mouse should have been free LONG LONG ago but is not. Much very old music such as "happy birthday" is still being used as a weapon against people everywhere instead of being released to the public as it should have been long ago.
The problem isn't that authors are being forced to lose control of their work -- it's that they are not. Worse, the authors ARE being forced into losing control of their work in favor of large copyright publishers.
Your idealism in in some of the right places, but to see the problems, you have to first see reality as it is practiced.
You've quickly gone from forum member to party leader in about half a year. It appears your background is graphic arts and music, not politics. How do you plan to convince your voters that you are competent and qualified? On top of that, your site only lists three core policies. Voting (to me) shows more than support. It shows I am confident in that person or group as leader of my country. As if by voting for you, I genuinely hope you are to be the next Prime Ministers, replacing Gordon Brown. Right now, privacy and copyright are important issues but possibly more important are things like foreign policy that might govern how you feel about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or about the social programs in the UK. Could you extrapolate on your core issues to give us an idea of how you stand on the other major issues that will be debated among the more popular parties? I agree with you on your stated issues but being a one issue voter can result in disaster for the whole country, do you mind giving yourself more depth than just privacy and copyright?
My work here is dung.
So if I use 3-4 years to learn an instrument, 1 year to write songs, 2 months and 10 000$ to rent a studio and record an album, I should only get paid 20$ for one CD which the buyer then can copy and sell as many times as he wants?
The difference between music/movies/books and almost all other merchandise, is how easily it can be copied and distributed in an unlimited amount. In the case of a Car, the only thing copyrighted/trademarked is the design, because that is the only thing that can be copied an unlimited number of times for a small price. If I had made a car and you bought one, copied it several times and sold the copies, you would still have to spend money on buying materials, pay people to assemble the car, run commercials and the like. You would therefore have to charge a prize that would allow you to cover your costs, and I would be able to compete on a relatively equal basis.
If on the other hand you bought my CD, ripped it and sold it online, you would be able to charge much less than me, because you would not have to pay for musicians, studio time, advertisement, etc. etc.
The GPL is an anomaly caused by strong copyright. If it was easier to merely contribute to the public domain and copyright had realistic fair use then the GPL would be unnecessary.
I agree - politics basically works by middle ground. In many cases, it's an argument to moderation fallacy, and it's poor for many reasons (including the fact that it rewards people for taking extreme positions), but despite being a fallacy, it's how politics works.
If some people say "Copyright should be life plus 70 years, be extended whenever Mickey Mouse might become public domain, we should have laws criminalising telling people how to circumvent protections even if you legally bought the material, and anyone suspected of downloading should be banned from the Internet", and on the other hand you have an already compromising and reasonable stance, say, "Copyright should last 50 years, and maybe some of these other laws are too strict", what will happen? We won't get "Ah yes, the latter guy talks sense", instead at best will be a compromise between those two positions.
Also it's worth remembering that even the Pirate party's "extreme" position still believes in copyright for commercial use (IIRC, 10 years for the UK party?) The OP refers to the GPL, but most outrages of GPL violations seem to be about commercial use, in my experience.
In addition, they still have other terms we have to agree to like EULAs and terms of use.
The only plausible argument for EULs being a valid contract is based on copyright: namely, you need permission to even copy it from disk to memory, so you'll be committing copyright infringement if you don't accept the licence.
So if it was no longer copyrighted, you could simply use it without accepting the licence.
which the buyer then can copy and sell as many times as he wants
No, that wouldn't come under non-commercial.
If you take such an extreme view, it makes it easier for opponents to dismiss your group as dangerous extremists and prevent you from getting invited to the table at all.
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That's missing the point that the opposition is taking the opposite extreme view already, and they're not only at, but very much controlling the table.
I see the point you're making - but most of those questions are only relevant for a party forming a Government.
There's no chance of that happening here - I don't mean that in a "they won't get that many votes" sense, but I mean in the sense that they don't have enough people even standing for election. So such a thing is impossible.
It's still important I think to have policies on a wide range of issues, because if you had one as your MP, you'd still want to write to him, and hope he has an opinion on more than a single issue, and such things would be voted on in the Commons.
But let's be fair - individual MPs are not expected to come up with solutions to the economy, or immigration problems. (As an aside, I'm not sure what uncontrolled problem you are referring to - although I appreciate that these might be questions asked by your typical Daily Mail reader, so it's useful to have responses to them.)
This question is loaded, and very misleading.Why should authors be allowed to profit off Artificial Scarcity? - that is, why should society allow copyright holders to make unlimited copies at zero/fixed cost, but charge for each digital copy as if it is scarce? Nobody disagrees that Artists should be remunerated for their works, but as the reference points out: forcing artificial scarcity into the digital medium via Law is morally questionable, and very different to the question of whether Artists should be paid for their work.