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Pirate Party's North American Debut
adonoman writes "A 25-year-old Winnipeg businessman is the first Pirate Party of Canada candidate to run for federal election. At the same time, the US and UK pirate parties have put out an open letter to Anonymous requesting that they cease Operation Payback's DDOS attacks and focus on taking a legal route to fix intellectual property law."
pissing off one's oppressors is a good thing in itself.
How is that a good thing? If you mean oppressors in a figurative manner, making someone angry doesn't make you more right, and often it causes your side to lose support. If you mean literal oppressors, then pissing them off usually just ends up causing greater oppression. Anonymous and the Pirate Party are fighting a law. Laws are not repealed by going out and breaking more laws.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Legal means have been exhausted
Unless and until a dictatorship is in place, there is always a legal means: getting elected and changing the copyright laws.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Here in America, we have politicians that tell us to grin and bear the gloved hand of tyranny up our metaphorical rectums. This past week has been a tumultuous time for our country with millions upon millions angry, demanding the end to the usurpation of our human rights. These calls have fallen on deaf ears.
Canada, the great untamed frontier, still seems to have politicians who put people over policy. What a topsy-turvy world we live in that we Americans finally look northward for leadership!
Maybe it's time we held our own Boxing Day.
Laws are not repealed by going out and breaking more laws.
Of course they are.
Quite effectively, too.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
No, they're not stealing your property.
And no, pointing out the fact that copyright infringement isn't theft does not mean that I'm a pirate or that I endorse piracy.
And yes, that IS what you were going to claim.
O:P have replied to the Pirate Parties (link to pdf on their website), and basically told them to F off.
Unless and until a dictatorship is in place, there is always a legal means: getting elected and changing the copyright laws.
The thing is, can one or a handful of elected people make a change? In the States, Libertarian candidates actually get elected every once in a while, but I'm afraid nothing has changed.
But if one has quite a bit of money, it's amazing how the system just bends to your will.
The big corporate machines with all the cash will never allow anyone to change IP law.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Only when you can get positive media coverage out of it. Public sympathy is important.
"...there is always a legal means: getting very wealthy and changing the copyright laws."
FFY
Given Mr. Coleman's limited budget, to save save money, he only used a single campaign sign and posted it on the web. It's an interesting take on IP rights, given that the used another sign to create his.
Laws are not repealed by going out and breaking more laws.
Of course they are.
Quite effectively, too.
I actually have mod points at the moment, but instead of modding parent up, I want to reply in agreement.
I couldn't agree more. I'm sure Rosa Parks would as well.
I live in Britain and frankly, I feel disgusting at the way that ordinary people have been increasingly criminalised in recent years. Particularly since Blair, legislation has been more and more as a means of control. This is not a thought, it's a fact. Look at the statistics for the number of new pieces of legislation that came in under his tenure. I really don't like the way this country is going at the moment.
Now, I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs of piracy, but I will say this one thing. The world is changing. Record companies still desperately cling onto the old models, and it make me laugh at their blinkeredness. When music copying is so mainstream that any kid with a PC can copy a CD, it starts to become clear to everyone bar the music companies and the governments they lobby that one way or another, things need to change. Just in case some of those people are reading, I will give you a few clues to get you started: how much is a track worth to a buyer? What percentage of that does the artist receive? How much of that SHOULD the artist receive? How much would the buyer pay if he/she felt the artist would receive FAIR royalties?
You made a lot of money for many years, give artists a fair deal, reduce your ridiculous profits and you MIGHT survive, record companies. Otherwise, I hope every single artist out there makes a website selling their MP3s and every single record company goes totally fucking bust.
one should equate it to the masses in front of the guillotine back in 18th century. it is not wise, to keep ignoring their will, despite they having started to openly express it and become aggressive over it. last batch to do that, had their heads in a bucket.
Read radical news here
I think what it means is that it makes you feel good.
There is that but there is also the fact that if it makes your oppressors even more oppressive then they are likely to irritate even more people. This will improve your support and give your arguments even more weight.
An important step has already been taken in that direction in Canada: Access Canada, the body which licenses Universities to use copyrighted material, has raised its fees by almost a factor of three and also added additional, more restrictive terms. The result is that all the major Canadian universities have opted not to renew the licence. I now foresee a huge backlash amongst faculty and students as access to material will now either become far more restricted or expensive. Give it enough years and enough students should have been affected that there will be some change.
let me see. i have qualified in first 500 out of 1.5 million youth who took the national university entrance exam in my country during my generation (a very hard exam that people prepare for 3 years, like tokyo u entrance exams), i have entered a university that is in the first in my nation, and have been sending graduates to teach in schools like MIT (yeah the one in usa) for a long time. (actually my professor was flying to mit to give lessons, and flying back, while teaching us), i have quit college, not wanting to go on with a career, and out of nowhere, with nothing, i have learned coding/programming/databases and established myself as a professional in the field for 5 years now, with clients from all over the world.
during this time, i havent engaged in any illegal activity. havent been involved with the underground world, hacks, cracks, phreaks, and all that goes about it, despite i had ample opportunities, like any tech-savvy i.t. person that lives today.
but rip my freedoms off that way, and you will push a lot of people like me, to underground, with a cause. and, i assure you, pushing that many smart people that way, is not a good thing.
just saying.
Read radical news here
Why do we need to allow Flash to read the letter? It's a letter ffs, it should be in text or html format.
I just posted the PDF on our website
Yeah, I hate scribd too.
Pirate Party UK
Do you actually speak English, or are you just running this stuff through google translate?
FYI, "copyright" doesn't mean what you apparently think it means.
The media has a deep invested interest in the preservation of copyright as most of their business models revolve around it, be it in print, TV, radio or online. It's not about left wing or right wing, they're pretty much all pro-copyright mouthpieces. I think trying to win sympathizers, that is non-participants that still sympathize will not get you anywhere. It's about recruiting participants and making them aware how many of the people around them do it too. Raise the "status" of being a file sharer to something you openly admit to the people around you. The potential is huge, in Sweden it's up to 20% of the population now and roughly 50% in males 16-25. 20% of 300 million Americans is 60 million.
To take one example - and I'm not comparing copyright to Gandhi's fight here - Gandhi broke the salt law simply by telling everyone to make salt. The British arrested over 60,000 people in one month. ONE month. Every jail they had ran full and yet they still kept doing it and trading it, there was no end and no victory in sight. That's how copyright will fall too, through the sheer mass of people, not a few demonstrators doing it as a provocation but many doing it for themselves. Granted they did get public sympathy, but that was not the force that led to victory. There's a whole different power in mass civil disobedience than in just civil disobedience.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let me guess.
The bully is giving the teacher a cut of the money he takes from you.
And seriously, the real world isn't much different from the playground. What starts out as bullies testing their muscles escalates to companies flexing their legal strength, and countries proving their military might.
The entire world is about power and who has the most of it. When people are "looking out for number one", power is the only thing that actually works.
Throwing sand in someone's face could quickly get you detention/trade sanctions, but if that's all you have, may as well use it if you're going to be raped anyway.
If the end justifies the means, and the end is right, then the means are right.
If an action is "wrong" or "not right" that means you shouldn't do it. If it's "right" then that you are permitted to do it, or in some cases should do it. To say that some action is "not right" but that one "should keep doing it" is a contradiction.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat