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Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years
ktetch-pirate writes "Five years to the day after he created the first Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge has stepped down as leader of Piratpartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party. The announcement was made in a webcast with Falkvinge and his deputy Anna Troberg, with Troberg taking on his duties effective immediately."
You know what would rock even more? If we could have both music and movies and and all the other art that we can spread across the world to everyone with a computer virtually for free as well as having the poor artists not starving.
An it would totally rock if everyone had access to all digitalized culture legally, so one wouldn't have to feel bad or fear a one in a million chance of personal economic disaster.
And we can. All it takes is a little socialism. Let the people decide what they like by downloading stuff and give those artists a living wage paid for with taxes.
(Another solution, even easier to administer, would be basic income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee )
Anyway... Socialism FTW and fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Peace.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
They shouldn't have announced it. Anna Troberg could have started calling herself Dread Captain Falkvinge and nobody would have noticed.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You are not entitled to the sweat of their brows or all the time out of their lives that it takes to actually learn how to play an instrument, become a good actor, etc.
Neither is the RIAA/MPAA, who gets about 90% of the profit from these artists with almost none of the work behind them.
It's way to easy to see the whole "piracy" issue as *just* two opposing viewpoints. And, to me, neither view stacks up. I strongly suspect both camps are being naive and manipulated. And here's my reasoning:-
My point here being that neither party is "completely" right. Copying doesn't reduce the industries revenue stream as much as claimed - though it doesn't make the impact the industry claims it does. I'll leave the value of promotion out of this - it's a red herring.
Why would an immensely profitable industry spend a fortune on a demonstrably pointless pursuit? The assertion that they are total idiots contradicts their success.
Follow the money is the method that should be applied. Do that and it appears obvious (to me) that the "industry" is spending vast amounts of money because it is a cost effective way for them to protect their income. The mistake pro-pirates make is believing the product is the income stream. IMO they are wrong and have been deliberately been fooled.
The industry is profitable and powerful because it controls distribution. The RIAA/MPAA campaign is not about stopping copying it's about stifling an alternative distribution network.
Since it's Sunday, and I have nothing better to do. Let me humor you with a long reply.
Yes, it would be great if we can have everything free. That's called the Star Trek economy. Once we have production-grade replicators or nth-generation Repraps, that will become a reality, indistinguishable from magic. Now, if all that we need to manufacture something is the work to haul some amorphous lump of matter and dump it into the replicator, then the value of money degrades to that of a household chores bribe: Hey, Junior, can you fetch me some dirt from the back yard. I promise, I'll drive you to the ballgame this Sunday.
That's it, as far as goods that we can hold in our hands are concerned. We're not yet at the Star Trek level as far as physical objects are concerned. Every single iPhone or Prius has to go through some form of manual intervention, a worker who has to assemble the bits and bolts. You can't just download the blueprint for a laptop and feed the binary data to any of today's state-of-the-art 3D printers. And even if you can, you still need special materials that you can't ask Junior to fetch from your back yard.
On the other hand, duplicating an eBook or an Mp3 is as easy as typing "cp *mp3 /media/My_Copy" or simply plugging in your iPod Touch and clicking the appropriate prompt button. As far as digital goods and objects are concerned, we are already at the Star Trek level. So the work needed to product a piece of music is limited to the very act of making the actual recording, not the reproduction. Once the master has been made, endless copies can be made.
So, I'm sure you'll ask, who'll pay for the initial step? Those hungry for novelty and innovation. If nobody wants to pay to hear a new version of the Goldberg Variations, then we're stuck to listening to the old recordings by, say, Glenn Gould, or until some bored amateur decides to record and foist on us her atonal version of Bach.
Don't underestimate boredom as a motive for innovation and progress. It's what made Wikipedia the dominant source of information in the Internet, millions of bored users deciding to contribute their little tidbits of information.
Yes, Wikipedia still needs money to operate its servers. But that is minuscule compared to the quantity of "free" editing and writing work contributed by bored users, trolls, and government agents. We don't pay for the pizza but for the pizza delivery.
I don't see how multi-generational welfare families are any morally worse than multi-generational wealthy families, yet tons more complain about the former than they do about the latter. Idle is idle. Both are a net drain on society, but in different ways.
You know what else we could do? Just put copyright back to place. To the good old days where you have to register your copyright and where it's only lasted 14 years.
We should limit copyright even more because with the internet it's so easy to publish. The limit should be 5 years now, with +5 years extend.
With a sane copyright law the artists and the publisher could come up with new ideas how to make money instead of be depended of an indefinitely state granted monopoly. What we have now is already socialism. It's worse, it's planed economy.
With the political power that such groups as the RIAA and MAFIA have and the laws behind them (100+ years copyright, DMCA, etc.) we could just make them government owned like in China and call them Office for Arts, Music, Movies.
With a limited copyright we could finally have a rich public domain, which is the most import factor for new innovation. Without a rich public domain there are no work available to build upon, for which all works we have now are build upon older works and ideas.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Swedish Pirate Party, and I've been so for a few years. I've voted for them in the three most recent elections (two for the Swedish parliament and one for the EU parliament).
I definitely believe that this is a good move. Rickard Falkvinge is a very charismatic person, but also a controversial one. He's enthusiastic, he knows how to reach the headlines and has done a wonderful job of founding the party and establishing an awareness of these questions in Sweden. The problem is that he lacks political tact. He's committed at least two really bad faux-pas, one statement in which he defended the right to keep but not buy child pornography and one time when he asked for personal funding from the party members, suggesting as they would be gifts they didn't need to be taxed. On top of that, there is a common view that the Pirate Party is Falkvinge's own private project and that he is something of a cult leader.
Therefore it is great to have Troberg on board as a leader. She is less technical and more personal than Falkvinge, but first and foremost she's much better suited to running an organisation than Falkvinge ever was. She will be able to handle people without driving them off, she's competent and she radiates credibility in a way that a party with the word "pirate" in its name needs desperately. Falkvinge was great for kick starting the party but Troberg is just the right person to take it to the next level. She has a tough job though - the party flopped in the 2010 elections and without a lot of hard work there is a risk the party will dwindle and be largely forgotten well before the 2014 EU parliament elections.