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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."
It seems Pirate Party UK's one of the core policies is reformin copyright and patent law so that non-commercial file sharing would be legalized. While certainly a noble goal, shouldn't content producers, artists, programmers, and basically anyone producing something have a right to their work?
This is not only limited to music, movies or other kind of entertainment - among other things, it also affects open source coders who release their code under GPL. If there weren't copyrights, there couldn't be GPL either, nor Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivative Works and Share Alike licenses. In this exact case copyright is used to allow the author to make sure he is attributed and his work isn't misused.
Wouldn't the world be less controlling if the authors actually had some saying over their works instead of being forced to lose control over their work?
Does the UK Pirate Party collaborate with pirate parties from other countries? If so - which ones?
The only thing I want to know is whether or not there are going to be some candidates standing for the pirate party in the general election, and if so in what seats? It'd be interesting to see how well they do.
In Principle I really support what the Pirate party works. But in practical sense, there is a left-of-center ground for compromise. Copyright probably needs to go back to what it was around 130 years ago when it was a sane compromise. Now that ever happening in the western world is next to impossible unless there are large scale changes in governments. I'm sorta in favor of the idea that Copyright be fair, not non-existent. And not perpetual, and not in favor of massive IP holder trusts.
I'm wondering if you had any trouble getting members for the party as opposed to what is happening in Australia. The pirate party here is suffering from member apathy, no one is going as far to fill out the paper work in order to help the party get the numbers needed to register as a political party. Has the UK pirate party had any similar issues?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Given that we have issues of such national and international importance do you not feel that another party, campaigning on such a narrow platform will only dilute the real change that is needed which is the ousting of labour and the restoration of faith in the institution of parliament and the fact that it should be working for the whole population of the UK and not the vested interests of politicians?
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
What is your stance on erosion of privacy in UK? Will your party only follow the path of Intellectual Property rights, or do you plan to fight for freedom of speech, against invasion of privacy online and in daily life, censorship and other vital freedom-related problems.
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My mother would never vote for a party called "The Pirate party". An image of Captain Pugwash springs to her mind every time I mention the word.
Us nerds and geeks get it, but how does The Pirate Party aim to convince normal people that this political party is more than a modern Monster Raving Looney Party?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
(for the yanks, it was and is a genuine political party)
Knew all the old crew (Sutch, Hope, et al) well, great social events and parties, no hope of ever actually winning, just thumbing your nose at the system.
Why is the UK Pirate party any different, apart from the lack of great social events and satirical candidate names? Oh, and the lack of any other decent policies to counter the insanity worked by the likes of Harman etc.
Whereas a vote for the BNP (British National Party, often called British Nazi Party) really would be a protest vote, as more than a handful of seats might actually go to them, and NOTHING would shock british politics more than a notable proportion of the population electing wannabe Hitlers to the House of Commons.
This is not a troll, this is a serious question.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
There is nothing they could do even if they ran the government and the PM was your Tuesday golf buddy. Last I checked UKGov don't have a say in the US legislative process by constitutional decree.
Also the DMCA notice is almost identical to the demand letter you would send to a British publication doing the same thing so writing it shouldn't really be an issue to write it. The fact they wont pull it without the DMCA, unlike British counterparts, is to protect themselves from civil liability - pulling it without one could be viewed as an admission of guilt by courts.
(In order of importance)
1. How are you going to improve our Schools and Hospitals?
2. What is your stance on the "War on Terror"?
3. The economy is facing another nosedive before the end of the year, how are you preparing for it?
4. How are you going to tackle the uncontrolled immigration problem?
5. Do you have any plans to control anti social behaviour?
(loads of other more important questions later)
4432. What will you change in copyright law, whilst still making sure that the 2 years+ unemployed bloke next door can come up a new idea and use it to get out of the rut that he's currently stuck in?
Summation 2
While I don't take a hardline stance that all copyright should be eradicated, playing devil's advocate for a moment, you can't say that artists wouldn't produce worthwhile work in the absence of copyright, because we already know that for hundreds of years they did just that. Some of them did very well for themselves, too.
Charging for performances (for music artists, gigs, for movies, make the cinema experience actually something worthwhile to compete with the home cinema experience, for painters, exhibitions, etc); patronage (actually corporate sponsorship in this day and age would be more likely, and we've already seen how lucrative that can be for artists); asking your fans for donations (much easier now than ever where anyone can set up a page on the internet to accept donations and can use blogging/micro blogging tools to get their message out).
Removing copyright would, of course, mean that artists had to survive on merit rather than having a god-given right to make money, but I honestly can't see how that would be a bad thing. If the ones who don't care passionately about what they do just slink off into the night, has society been cheapened by their loss? Maybe not so many artists will be able to live the millionaire lifestyle, but again, the ones who are only in it for the money are probably not a great loss (and nobody guarantees the rest of society to live a "comfortable" lifestyle but they seem to still turn up for work every day...).
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?
Even with copyright there is no guarentee that you will make money. At least in a "capitalist" economy. The other thing is that plenty of people "give away" plenty of stuff right now. Sometimes without expecting any financial reward, sometimes asking for donations, sometimes to encourage sales of something else (even the same content in a different form).
Voting for the BNP is not a "protest vote" - this is not a warm and cuddly hippy protest option like voting for the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Voting for the BNP is voting for an extremist party, a party that grew out of the National Front (look all these up on wikipedia) and until they were forced to change by European law this year had as part of their constitution a ban on people that weren't "white" from joining the party membership.
To my mind that's quite an extreme position for a party to take if it declares its goal to be getting political power, ruling over people of a variety of different ethnic groups. I think voting for the BNP is a dangerous way of expressing your protest at the current political system. The BNP is serious about some of its extreme politics, and is likely to get some seats and have real influence in UK politics if people start voting for them in the misguided belief that they are just offering up a protest to the system.
Presumably you have already been paid by one of the aforementioned British newspapers/sites in exchange for your time and effort in producing these photographs?
Why do you feel you deserve to be paid a second time for the same piece of work, even though you have put in no additional time or effort?
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
Is fielding candidates the best course, for a single issue group like yours?
As well as the PPUK there is a lobby group: Open rights group & a business coalition: Coadec. To change policy we need to work through all these channels.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
The "Pirate" in The Pirate Party's name implies the duplication of digital information. One side of the "Pirate" argument, mostly being represented by large digital distributors such as the Music Industry and Motion Picture Associations, believe that our society needs strong legislation enforcing Artificial Scarcity into the digital medium via treaties such as ACTA. In other words, they appear to hold the view that only certain rights holders should have exclusive legal right to make and sell unlimited digital copies for fixed cost, just like any physical good for sale. On the other side of the debate we have the "Pirates" who appear to hold the view that digital information should not be treated as a scarce good, that digital distribution is just a natural property of any digital medium and should be available to everyone.
How does the Pirate Party intend to allow those wishing to distribute original creative digital works to make a profit without legislating artificial scarcity into the digital medium?