Last week, Caspar Bowden testified at a hearing in the European Parliament, and presented a report on the NSA surveillance to the European Parliament's Committee for Fundamental Rights LIBE.
As a Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party, I have just published a short book (108 pages) on copyright reform together with Rick Falkvinge, who is the founder of the first and Swedish Pirate party.
The studies mentioned here seem to paint exactly the same picture as a number of studies that we refer to in that book. File sharing is not hurting revenues for the cultural sector. When we look at statistics for the last decade, with rampant file sharing on the internet, we see that more money is going into film, music, books, games and other culture than ever before, and that a larger portion of it is going to the artists and other creative people involved (as opposed to middle men such as the big record companies).
Two weeks ago we had a book launch for "The Case for Copyright Reform" in the European Parliament, and I have distributed a paper copy of it to each of the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).
Now all that remains to be seen is how many of my colleagues in the parliament will actually read it, but that's another story.;)
If you are interested in checking out the book, you can download "The Case for Copyright Reform" (for free, obviously) from http://www.copyrightreform.eu/ You can also order a paper copy at cost price via print-on-demand, if you prefer that.
It is time that we start looking at copyright legislation in a fact-based manner, as opposed to the IPR fundamentalist way that has been dominant in this policy area so far on both sides of the Atlantic.
I took part in the vote as a Member of the JURI Committee in the European Parliament, and I can correct you on a few points.
The amendments to a report can change its meaning completely, and the amendment that we lost was a rather important one. Therefore it is wrong to say that it was and "obscure" amendment, and imply that it was not important.
The report is a legislative report that will turn into a binding directive and then national law once it is adopted, so it is not the question of a non-binding (or "own initiative") report this time.
I don't really think that any parliamentary immunity will be necessary in connection with spreading this document, but as a Member of the European Parliament I can confirm that I have it, in case it turns out to be useful.
/Christian Engström
Member of the European Parliament
Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party), Sweden
This is where we have located the servers of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Part of the reason is that the ISP Bahnhof has taken at stance on privacy issues that we are very happy with as pirates. But of course part of the reason is that it's a pretty cool looking data center.:)
You can find a couple of pictures from when we installed our servers in the data center here.
/Christian Engstrom
Vice Chairman, The Pirate Party, Sweden
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has a very interesting answer to the question of where the laws of nature come from. He suggests that what we think of as "laws" is actually better described as "habits" of nature. This is the essence of a very controversial, but entirely scientific, hypothesis called morphic resonance.
According to this hypothesis, the laws of nature do in fact evolve. For things like how atoms behave and cosmological stuff we wouldn't be able to observe any such change, since the "habits" that control them have been engrained for literally billions of years.
But for instance in the biological realm, the change would be observable. This makes the hypothesis testable in a scientific way. So far, a number of experiments have been carried out, and while it is far to early to say that the results conclusively prove the hypothesis of morphic fields, results are very encouraging. It appears that the laws of nature do in fact evolve over time.
If you are at all interested in the questions of how self organizing systems evolve and where the laws of nature may come from, I strongly recommend that you visit the sheldrake.org website to get a first overview of the hypothesis. The next step would be to get hold of and read Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past for a more detailed description of the hypothesis and the experimental data that suggests it.
Personally, I regard this as the most interesting book I have ever read in my life. Your mileage may of course vary.
PRESS RELEASE
From SIS, Swedish Standards Institute
August 30, 2007
Office Open XML - SIS invalidates the vote
The swedish working group at SIS, Swedish Standards Institute, Document description languages SIS/TK 321/AG 17, decided in a vote on August 27, 2007, to vote yes to making Office Open XML an ISO standard. Today, the board of SIS decided to invalidate the vote.
The reason for the board's decision is that the SIS has information indicating that one of the participants of the working group cast more than one vote. This is not compatible with SIS rules, which stipulate that each project sponsor has only one vote. Thus, the decision has been taken solely based on SIS rules. The decision does not reflect a position on the subject matter.
Furthermore, the board considers it impossible for practical and formal reasons for the Swedish working group to arrange a new vote before September 2, 2007, when the global vote will be finished. If a new Swedish vote cannot be arranged, Sweden will abstain from voting.
Background
The proposal that Sweden has had under consideration is, briefly, about definig document formats for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. Office Open XML has its origins in the need to store electronic documents long term, and to be able to migrate files between different applications. The ISO vote will be finished on September 2, 2007.
SIS is an independent non-profit organization, where the members' needs and wishes decide the direction for the standardization work. The members come from companies, organizations, and authorities.
For further information etc...
Please feel free to share, improve, or use this translation as you wish. Sharing is caring. Arrr!:)
PRESS RELEASE
From SIS, Swedish Standards Institute
August 30, 2007
Office Open XML - SIS invalidates the vote
The swedish working group at SIS, Swedish Standards Institute, Document description languages SIS/TK 321/AG 17, decided in a vote on August 27, 2007, to vote yes to making Office Open XML an ISO standard. Today, the board of SIS decided to invalidate the vote.
The reason for the board's decision is that the SIS has information indicating that one of the participants of the working group cast more than one vote. This is not compatible with SIS rules, which stipulate that each project sponsor has only one vote. Thus, the decision has been taken solely based on SIS rules. The decision does not reflect a position on the subject matter.
Furthermore, the board considers it impossible for practical and formal reasons for the Swedish working group to arrange a new vote before September 2, 2007, when the global vote will be finished. If a new Swedish vote cannot be arranged, Sweden will abstain from voting.
Background
The proposal that Sweden has had under consideration is, briefly, about definig document formats for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. Office Open XML has its origins in the need to store electronic documents long term, and to be able to migrate files between different applications. The ISO vote will be finished on September 2, 2007.
SIS is an independent non-profit organization, where the members' needs and wishes decide the direction for the standardization work. The members come from companies, organizations, and authorities.
For further information etc...
Please feel free to share, improve, or use this translation as you wish. Sharing is caring. Arrr!:)
The Swedish standards body SIS just issued a press release (pdf in Swedish) where they say that the vote has been declared invalid by the board of SIS, and that Sweden will abstain in the international vote (unless they manage to organize a new national vote before September 2, which the consider unlikely).
According to the press release, the reason for the decision was a technicality (that information suggested that one of the members had voted twice).
- Well, be that as it may, say I, but perhaps the uproar against the decision both in Sweden and internationally had something to do with. In any case, it sounds like a very fortunate technicality.;)
Congratulations, record companies, for coming up with yet another reason not to buy your products. To a consumer that is toying with the idea of buying a song rather than downloading it for free, watermarking could potentially be an even larger disincentive than DRM.
DRM: If you buy this song, you run the risk that you won't be able to play it on the hardware that you have now or will have in the future. Total risk exposure: 99 cent
Watermarking: If you buy this song, you run the risk that it somehow ends up on the filesharing networks with your name written all over it, and you get sued to smithereens by the RIAA. Total risk exposure: a gazillion dollars
Why would consumers find this so much more attractive?
I am not talking about a "trade war", but merely putting pressure on them
And if they refuse to yield to the "pressure", what do you do then? The choices you have are either escalating, or backing down and admitting defeat.
I think you're underestimating the Chinese. They have been grappling with the threat of trade sanctions for decades. They, if any, understand the game, and can tell a bluff from a viable threat. And the US can't produce the latter against them.
China is 12th place (after 11 very small economies) with a 10.5% GDP growth rate.
The US is in 148th place, with a 3.4% growth rate.
But even without taking the relative growth rates into account, China is already too close to the US i size to make economic warfare a realistic option. Washington can huff and puff and maybe make some symbolic gestures, but that's about it when it comes to China.
Or Europe, for that matter, should it ever come to that. See this table. And if you live in the US, please persuade your political leaders never to threaten anybody with economic santions if they haven't read it too.:)
We [the US] don't have to play their game either. Trade is a 2-way negotiation. We don't have to accept all their imports if we don't like their IP treatment.
True in principle, of course. As a sovereign nation, the US is perfectly free to start trade wars with whomever it wants.
But a good rule of thumb for statesmen, is to show restraint in starting wars that you cannot possibly win.
In trade wars, size is all that matters. If a big county and a small one start imposing trade sanctions on each other, both countries are hurt, but the smaller one is hurt more. If there is a big enough difference in size between the two sides, the strategy can actually work. US trade sanctions on Cuba hurt Cuba a lot, but have no significant impact on the US economy. Therefore, the US has been able to keep up the sanctions for about half a century. (But it should of course be noted that this strategy has failed to achieve the primary goal of unseating Castro, even after all that time.)
But in the case of the US vs. Cuba, the US economy is about 300 times as large as the Cuban one in terms of GDP.
With China, it's an entirely different ball game. The relevant figures from the CIA Factbook are:
US: population 300 million, purchasing power parity GDP 13,000 billion
China: population 1,320 million, ppp GDP 10,000 billion
That's a considerable advantage for China in terms of population, and almost parity when it comes to economic strength. Add to this the fact that China's percentage of the world's total GDP is rising, whereas the US percentage is declining, and we can skip directly to the bottom line:
There is no way the US can win a sustained trade war against China.
And it's not just China, of course. There is a long list of countries that the US is trying convince to change its copyright laws to better suit US corporate interests. In fact, as the BBC article US copyright lobby out-of-touch points out, the majority of the world's population lives in countries that are being implicitly threatened with trade sanctions by the US over intellectual property issues.
To those of us living outside the US, these threats are just silly. The US economy accounts for 20% of the world's GDP (ppp adjusted), the rest of the world has 80%. Who do you think will win the trade war "the US vs. the rest", if push comes to shove?
When a British newspaper ran the famous headline "Fog over the channel, continent isolated", the empire was already on the decline, even if nobody had noticed it yet. The US threatening the rest of the world with trade sanctions to uphold its views on intellectual property, smacks of just the same attitude helped hasten the demise of what once was the greatest empire on earth.
In VMS if you had a file named article.txt, each time you modified and saved it in editor, a new version was created named article.txt;1 article.txt;2 article.txt;3 and so forth. So after a long session of edit and saves you could end up with a hundred copies of file in your directory. A lot of clutter in the directory but easy access to older versions of the files.
And to get rid of the clutter, you just used the PURGE command. I really loved this aspect of VMS.:)
At glindra.org, I have published a set of open source command line utilities for Windows and Linux, that implement the VMS commands dir, copy, rename, delete, and purge.
All the programs support VMS-style file version numbers (in the same way that Emacs does). Other aspects, such as option names that can be truncated as long as they are unique, and suboptions within parentheses, are also inspired by VMS.
The utilities are not an attempt to emulate VMS exactly, however, but an independent design that is based on principles that I happened to like when I came across them under VMS.
Please feel free to have a look at them if you are interested.
Novartis fighting India over generic drugs
on
Biology Goes Open Source
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You are quite right when you say that patent may be good for the pharmaceutical companies, but are terrible for the rest of the world.
In India, Novartis is using all its legal muscle to challenge a provision in the Indian patent law that has made it possible for India to develop a strong generic drugs industry. This has made affordable medicines available not only in India, but to other developing countries as well. If Novartis wins the case, this could mean that access to affordable drugs in the third world will be drastically reduced.
India, which amended its patent laws for TRIPS-compliance in 2005, introduced a clause to ensure that pharmaceuticals did not block the entry of low-cost generic drugs. A year ago this clause blocked Novartis' patent application for its anti-cancer drug Gleevec. Now, in a major case that will have a profound effect on the affordability of essential medicines in India, Novartis is challenging this unique Indian provision.
...
If Novartis succeeds in this unprecedented challenge, India's status as the primary supplier of low-cost essential medicines to the developing world will be jeopardised.
...
This marks the first time the world over that a private entity has challenged the prerogative of a country to implement the TRIPS agreement in accordance with its public health priorities. Should Novartis succeed in its challenge, it will not only mark a significant step back in the struggle for affordable medicines, but it will mark the first time that the demands of a private multinational corporation have overridden a sovereign country's right to protect the health of its people.
So if anyone thinks of Novartis and the other big pharma companies as a bunch of good guys, he should think again.
This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.
I'll be happy to.
The Swedish Pirate Party has a proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. The proposed system has the potential to cut the European governments' spending on drugs in half, while still giving more money to pharmaceutical research.
As an extra bonus, we (the developed world) would no longer have to insist that millions of poor people in third world countries die of preventable causes, just to keep the profit margins high enough for the big pharma companies. This is in effect what we're doing today, through the patent system.
Please feel free to have a look at the proposal. Your comments will be welcome.
Christian Engström
Vice chairman, The Pirate Party (Sweden)
what do you think the ratio of new drug research is to profits? For a major drug company? Conversely, what do you think the ratio of marketing vs profits? Got a clue? No? Feel free to go do a little googling.
In case the grandparent poster is Google impaired - a condition that medical science has yet to find a cure for;) - I'll be happy to supply some links:
Here are the Financial Highlights from the annual reports of Novartis, Pfizer and AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing and profits.
So the standard argument for granting patent monopolies and allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for the patented drugs - that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs - is simply not true.
The organization Doctors Without Borders gives an example of how pharmaceutical patents affect prices i a recent press release:
The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.
In this particular case, the price with patents was a hundred times the price without patents. How can 15% spent on R&D justify a markup by 10,000% on the final product?
To the western world, pharmaceutical patents mean an enormous waste of money. In the third world, it's lives that are wasted instead. It's time to think about an alternative.
And alternatives exist - plenty of them, in fact. Nobel prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz has made one proposal. The Swedish Pirate Party has made another (or essentially the same, actually). Economist Dean Baker has collected four others, that also run along the same lines.
It's time to open up a global discussion about the effects of pharmaceutical patents, and the alternatives. Today's system is not only grossly immoral, it is also expensive and wasteful. It's time for a better way. Pharmaceutical patents kill.
The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.
By allowing the pharmaceutical companies to keep their prices artificially high, the patent system kills people every day, particularly in third world countries. And it's completely unnecessary.
The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.
They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.
So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.
But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.
I actually feel that we Slashdotters have reason to feel a certain amount of pride about this award. As others have pointed out, what they're really celebrating is "The Internet Culture", rather than some unspecified "you" in general.
From the article:
It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
This is exactly what people like Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture) and Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) have been saying all the time.
The magic and fascinating thing about the Internet isn't that it makes it more convenient to purchase pre-packaged content from big media corporations (although that is good too), but that it makes new forms of cooperation between people possible, on a scale never seen before.
The examples used by Benkler in The Wealth of Networks include the ones listed in the article, but he also mentions Slashdot as another example of the same phenomenon.
So, yes, I do feel that we all have reason to feel just a tiny bit proud about having received this award. The award has gone to the internet culture that we have all taken part in fostering and promoting, and it is great to see that being recognized by the mainstream media in this way.
Once the greenback stops being the de facto currency of global trade, it will decrease in value sharply, and US spending power with it. The natural inheritor of that throne is the euro; not only is it based in a group of stable democracies with no expansionist ideals, the EU market is what, double or triple the size of the US.
The EU market isn't quite that big, but the argument you're making is valid anyway.
In the excellent CIA World Factbook, we find that the purchasing power partity GDP numbers for the US, EU and the world are:
In other words: EU and the US each have 20% of the world's economic power.
This is all fine and well, but the problem is that the US is behaving as if it was still 1945, when the US was the economic giant of the world, and nobody else came close.
Especially in IP matters, the US has pursued a very agressive course against most other countries in the world. So far the US has managed to get away with this strategy, but it hasn't made the US any new friends around the world.
Looking at the GDP numbers and thinking about how the percentages will shift in the future, it's not obvious that the attitude "do as we say, or else..." will work indefinitely. If you want to behave like a bully and dictate the terms for everybody else, you'd better be considerably stronger than everybody else if you want to get away with it. And the US ain't, to put it bluntly.
It is quite possible that the RIAA/MPAA dictated strong arm tactics of the US government may one day start to backfire. When it does, that could be start of some very interesting times.
That's what one lawyer said, but there is no chance they go through with the case.
I'm quite sure you're right. The problem of the MPAA and others abusing their powers can't be adressed through either the soap box or the jury box, no matter how much money someone is prepared to spend.
But through the ballot box I think it can, at least in Europe.
If somebody here knows Mr. Hogan personally, please feel free to direct his attention to the Swedish political party Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party). We are standing for parliament in the September 17 national elections in Sweden, and we have a realistic chance of gaining entry into parliament and securing a position where we hold the balance of power.
If we succeed, we expect to turn the tide not only in Sweden, but eventually in all of Europe.
We could urgently use USD 50.000 to fund the printing of additional ballot papers (which we have to pay for ourselves under the Swedish system), as well as other items. Money goes a very long way in Swedish politics compared to the US, but some is still useful.
I appreciate and respect the fact that people with funds don't want to be approached by strangers begging for money all the time, so we won't be making any attempts to take contact directly.
But if Mr. Hogan - or anybody else - wants to stick it to the MPAA in a way that they'll really feel, he is more than welcome to contact me to discuss the matter. My email address is christian.engstrom@piratpartiet.se
Smaller donations are also very welcome, and can be made via Paypal and other means. For more details, see www.piratpartiet.se
How do you propose to solve the Free Rider Problem or do you mean to suggest that Swedish taxpayers should fund a disproportionate share of the worlds' medical research costs while giving away the fruits of that labor?
Good question.
The answer is that Sweden couldn't possibly do this alone. If nothing else, the US would hit us so hard with economic sanctions that we'd be forced to stop before we could even begin.
But if Europe does it together, there is nothing to stop us. US companies would be free to manufacture pharmaceuticals researched and developed in Europe, but European companies would be equally free to take advantage of the research carried out in the US.
Even if the US would keep the patent system (and it will, for the foreseeable future) the US patents only cover manufacuring and marketing in the US. European companies would be free to do whatever they wanted in Europe.
Europe is big enough, and spends enough money on pharmaceutical research, to refute any claim that we are freeloading on others. And if other nations wanted to freeload on us, that wouldn't be a problem under our proposed system. Indeed, it would be the objective!
And more importantly, in the real world: Europe is big enough to withstand any attempts at economic sanctions from the US. When you are talking economic warfare, size is all that matters. The smaller player get hurt the most, and will eventually have to surrender.
But the European Union is just as big as the US in economic terms. The excellent CIA Factbook has the answer, as ever.
Europe and the US each have 20% of the world's GDP. The rest of the world has 60%. And "the rest of the world" includes Brazil, India and China. Who's side do you think they would be on in a scenario like this?
So to summarize: You're quite right that Sweden couldn't do this alone. But Europe can.
And once we have Pirate Parties in parliament in most of the member states, we will.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week, Caspar Bowden testified at a hearing in the European Parliament, and presented a report on the NSA surveillance to the European Parliament's Committee for Fundamental Rights LIBE.
Link to the report: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/libe/dv/briefingnote_/briefingnote_en.pdf
Link to the Youtube-video with Bowden's statement and the following Q&A (63 min): http://youtu.be/qa83l2_ZzEo
No, it was the payment service providers Visa, MasterCard and PayPal who took the decisions to block, not the Swedish banks.
As a Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party, I have just published a short book (108 pages) on copyright reform together with Rick Falkvinge, who is the founder of the first and Swedish Pirate party.
The studies mentioned here seem to paint exactly the same picture as a number of studies that we refer to in that book. File sharing is not hurting revenues for the cultural sector. When we look at statistics for the last decade, with rampant file sharing on the internet, we see that more money is going into film, music, books, games and other culture than ever before, and that a larger portion of it is going to the artists and other creative people involved (as opposed to middle men such as the big record companies).
Two weeks ago we had a book launch for "The Case for Copyright Reform" in the European Parliament, and I have distributed a paper copy of it to each of the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).
Now all that remains to be seen is how many of my colleagues in the parliament will actually read it, but that's another story. ;)
If you are interested in checking out the book, you can download "The Case for Copyright Reform" (for free, obviously) from http://www.copyrightreform.eu/ You can also order a paper copy at cost price via print-on-demand, if you prefer that.
It is time that we start looking at copyright legislation in a fact-based manner, as opposed to the IPR fundamentalist way that has been dominant in this policy area so far on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is a better way.
I took part in the vote as a Member of the JURI Committee in the European Parliament, and I can correct you on a few points. The amendments to a report can change its meaning completely, and the amendment that we lost was a rather important one. Therefore it is wrong to say that it was and "obscure" amendment, and imply that it was not important. The report is a legislative report that will turn into a binding directive and then national law once it is adopted, so it is not the question of a non-binding (or "own initiative") report this time.
Thank you for a very clear explanation of the opinion. I took the liberty of republishing it on my blog: http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/explanation-of-the-ecj-opinion-on-internet-blocking/
I don't really think that any parliamentary immunity will be necessary in connection with spreading this document, but as a Member of the European Parliament I can confirm that I have it, in case it turns out to be useful.
Member of the European Parliament
Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party), Sweden
The elections for the European Parliament are on June 7.
That's what we're focusing all our efforts on right now. It's an entirely realistic goal, and we're planning to make it.
Vice Chairman Piratpartiet
Candidate for the European Parliament
This is where we have located the servers of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Part of the reason is that the ISP Bahnhof has taken at stance on privacy issues that we are very happy with as pirates. But of course part of the reason is that it's a pretty cool looking data center. :)
You can find a couple of pictures from when we installed our servers in the data center here.
Vice Chairman, The Pirate Party, Sweden
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has a very interesting answer to the question of where the laws of nature come from. He suggests that what we think of as "laws" is actually better described as "habits" of nature. This is the essence of a very controversial, but entirely scientific, hypothesis called morphic resonance.
According to this hypothesis, the laws of nature do in fact evolve. For things like how atoms behave and cosmological stuff we wouldn't be able to observe any such change, since the "habits" that control them have been engrained for literally billions of years.
But for instance in the biological realm, the change would be observable. This makes the hypothesis testable in a scientific way. So far, a number of experiments have been carried out, and while it is far to early to say that the results conclusively prove the hypothesis of morphic fields, results are very encouraging. It appears that the laws of nature do in fact evolve over time.
If you are at all interested in the questions of how self organizing systems evolve and where the laws of nature may come from, I strongly recommend that you visit the sheldrake.org website to get a first overview of the hypothesis. The next step would be to get hold of and read Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past for a more detailed description of the hypothesis and the experimental data that suggests it.
Personally, I regard this as the most interesting book I have ever read in my life. Your mileage may of course vary.
According to the press release, the reason for the decision was a technicality (that information suggested that one of the members had voted twice).
- Well, be that as it may, say I, but perhaps the uproar against the decision both in Sweden and internationally had something to do with. In any case, it sounds like a very fortunate technicality. ;)
Congratulations, record companies, for coming up with yet another reason not to buy your products. To a consumer that is toying with the idea of buying a song rather than downloading it for free, watermarking could potentially be an even larger disincentive than DRM.
- DRM: If you buy this song, you run the risk that you won't be able to play it on the hardware that you have now or will have in the future. Total risk exposure: 99 cent
- Watermarking: If you buy this song, you run the risk that it somehow ends up on the filesharing networks with your name written all over it, and you get sued to smithereens by the RIAA. Total risk exposure: a gazillion dollars
Why would consumers find this so much more attractive?And if they refuse to yield to the "pressure", what do you do then? The choices you have are either escalating, or backing down and admitting defeat.
I think you're underestimating the Chinese. They have been grappling with the threat of trade sanctions for decades. They, if any, understand the game, and can tell a bluff from a viable threat. And the US can't produce the latter against them.
Yes.
Say what you will about the CIA, but their World Factbook rocks. Here is a table with countries according to GDP growth.
China is 12th place (after 11 very small economies) with a 10.5% GDP growth rate.
The US is in 148th place, with a 3.4% growth rate.
But even without taking the relative growth rates into account, China is already too close to the US i size to make economic warfare a realistic option. Washington can huff and puff and maybe make some symbolic gestures, but that's about it when it comes to China.
Or Europe, for that matter, should it ever come to that. See this table. And if you live in the US, please persuade your political leaders never to threaten anybody with economic santions if they haven't read it too. :)
True in principle, of course. As a sovereign nation, the US is perfectly free to start trade wars with whomever it wants.
But a good rule of thumb for statesmen, is to show restraint in starting wars that you cannot possibly win.
In trade wars, size is all that matters. If a big county and a small one start imposing trade sanctions on each other, both countries are hurt, but the smaller one is hurt more. If there is a big enough difference in size between the two sides, the strategy can actually work. US trade sanctions on Cuba hurt Cuba a lot, but have no significant impact on the US economy. Therefore, the US has been able to keep up the sanctions for about half a century. (But it should of course be noted that this strategy has failed to achieve the primary goal of unseating Castro, even after all that time.)
But in the case of the US vs. Cuba, the US economy is about 300 times as large as the Cuban one in terms of GDP.
With China, it's an entirely different ball game. The relevant figures from the CIA Factbook are:
That's a considerable advantage for China in terms of population, and almost parity when it comes to economic strength. Add to this the fact that China's percentage of the world's total GDP is rising, whereas the US percentage is declining, and we can skip directly to the bottom line:
There is no way the US can win a sustained trade war against China.
And it's not just China, of course. There is a long list of countries that the US is trying convince to change its copyright laws to better suit US corporate interests. In fact, as the BBC article US copyright lobby out-of-touch points out, the majority of the world's population lives in countries that are being implicitly threatened with trade sanctions by the US over intellectual property issues.
To those of us living outside the US, these threats are just silly. The US economy accounts for 20% of the world's GDP (ppp adjusted), the rest of the world has 80%. Who do you think will win the trade war "the US vs. the rest", if push comes to shove?
When a British newspaper ran the famous headline "Fog over the channel, continent isolated", the empire was already on the decline, even if nobody had noticed it yet. The US threatening the rest of the world with trade sanctions to uphold its views on intellectual property, smacks of just the same attitude helped hasten the demise of what once was the greatest empire on earth.
And to get rid of the clutter, you just used the PURGE command. I really loved this aspect of VMS. :)
At glindra.org, I have published a set of open source command line utilities for Windows and Linux, that implement the VMS commands dir, copy, rename, delete, and purge.
All the programs support VMS-style file version numbers (in the same way that Emacs does). Other aspects, such as option names that can be truncated as long as they are unique, and suboptions within parentheses, are also inspired by VMS.
The utilities are not an attempt to emulate VMS exactly, however, but an independent design that is based on principles that I happened to like when I came across them under VMS.
Please feel free to have a look at them if you are interested.
You are quite right when you say that patent may be good for the pharmaceutical companies, but are terrible for the rest of the world.
In India, Novartis is using all its legal muscle to challenge a provision in the Indian patent law that has made it possible for India to develop a strong generic drugs industry. This has made affordable medicines available not only in India, but to other developing countries as well. If Novartis wins the case, this could mean that access to affordable drugs in the third world will be drastically reduced.
There was an article at OneWorld South Asia about the case recently:
So if anyone thinks of Novartis and the other big pharma companies as a bunch of good guys, he should think again.
I'll be happy to.
The Swedish Pirate Party has a proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. The proposed system has the potential to cut the European governments' spending on drugs in half, while still giving more money to pharmaceutical research.
As an extra bonus, we (the developed world) would no longer have to insist that millions of poor people in third world countries die of preventable causes, just to keep the profit margins high enough for the big pharma companies. This is in effect what we're doing today, through the patent system.
Please feel free to have a look at the proposal. Your comments will be welcome.
Christian Engström
Vice chairman, The Pirate Party (Sweden)
Here are the Financial Highlights from the annual reports of Novartis, Pfizer and AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing and profits.
So the standard argument for granting patent monopolies and allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for the patented drugs - that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs - is simply not true.
The organization Doctors Without Borders gives an example of how pharmaceutical patents affect prices i a recent press release:
In this particular case, the price with patents was a hundred times the price without patents. How can 15% spent on R&D justify a markup by 10,000% on the final product?To the western world, pharmaceutical patents mean an enormous waste of money. In the third world, it's lives that are wasted instead. It's time to think about an alternative.
And alternatives exist - plenty of them, in fact. Nobel prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz has made one proposal. The Swedish Pirate Party has made another (or essentially the same, actually). Economist Dean Baker has collected four others, that also run along the same lines.
It's time to open up a global discussion about the effects of pharmaceutical patents, and the alternatives. Today's system is not only grossly immoral, it is also expensive and wasteful. It's time for a better way. Pharmaceutical patents kill.
For example, in a recent press release they write:
By allowing the pharmaceutical companies to keep their prices artificially high, the patent system kills people every day, particularly in third world countries. And it's completely unnecessary.The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.
We can look at the numbers for Novartis, Pfizer or AstraZeneca.
They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.
So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.
The Swedish Pirate Party has one proposal for an alternative system. Many others have suggested other alternatives.
But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.
From the article:
This is exactly what people like Lawrence Lessig ( Free Culture ) and Yochai Benkler ( The Wealth of Networks ) have been saying all the time.
The magic and fascinating thing about the Internet isn't that it makes it more convenient to purchase pre-packaged content from big media corporations (although that is good too), but that it makes new forms of cooperation between people possible, on a scale never seen before.
The examples used by Benkler in The Wealth of Networks include the ones listed in the article, but he also mentions Slashdot as another example of the same phenomenon.
So, yes, I do feel that we all have reason to feel just a tiny bit proud about having received this award. The award has gone to the internet culture that we have all taken part in fostering and promoting, and it is great to see that being recognized by the mainstream media in this way.
The EU market isn't quite that big, but the argument you're making is valid anyway.
In the excellent CIA World Factbook, we find that the purchasing power partity GDP numbers for the US, EU and the world are:
US: 12.31 trillion
EU: 12.18 trillion
World: 60.63 trillion
In other words: EU and the US each have 20% of the world's economic power.
This is all fine and well, but the problem is that the US is behaving as if it was still 1945, when the US was the economic giant of the world, and nobody else came close.
Especially in IP matters, the US has pursued a very agressive course against most other countries in the world. So far the US has managed to get away with this strategy, but it hasn't made the US any new friends around the world.
Looking at the GDP numbers and thinking about how the percentages will shift in the future, it's not obvious that the attitude "do as we say, or else..." will work indefinitely. If you want to behave like a bully and dictate the terms for everybody else, you'd better be considerably stronger than everybody else if you want to get away with it. And the US ain't, to put it bluntly.
It is quite possible that the RIAA/MPAA dictated strong arm tactics of the US government may one day start to backfire. When it does, that could be start of some very interesting times.
But through the ballot box I think it can, at least in Europe.
If somebody here knows Mr. Hogan personally, please feel free to direct his attention to the Swedish political party Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party). We are standing for parliament in the September 17 national elections in Sweden, and we have a realistic chance of gaining entry into parliament and securing a position where we hold the balance of power.
If we succeed, we expect to turn the tide not only in Sweden, but eventually in all of Europe.
We could urgently use USD 50.000 to fund the printing of additional ballot papers (which we have to pay for ourselves under the Swedish system), as well as other items. Money goes a very long way in Swedish politics compared to the US, but some is still useful.
I appreciate and respect the fact that people with funds don't want to be approached by strangers begging for money all the time, so we won't be making any attempts to take contact directly.
But if Mr. Hogan - or anybody else - wants to stick it to the MPAA in a way that they'll really feel, he is more than welcome to contact me to discuss the matter. My email address is christian.engstrom@piratpartiet.se
Smaller donations are also very welcome, and can be made via Paypal and other means. For more details, see www.piratpartiet.se
Christian Engström
Vice chairman, Piratpartiet
The answer is that Sweden couldn't possibly do this alone. If nothing else, the US would hit us so hard with economic sanctions that we'd be forced to stop before we could even begin.
But if Europe does it together, there is nothing to stop us. US companies would be free to manufacture pharmaceuticals researched and developed in Europe, but European companies would be equally free to take advantage of the research carried out in the US.
Even if the US would keep the patent system (and it will, for the foreseeable future) the US patents only cover manufacuring and marketing in the US. European companies would be free to do whatever they wanted in Europe.
Europe is big enough, and spends enough money on pharmaceutical research, to refute any claim that we are freeloading on others. And if other nations wanted to freeload on us, that wouldn't be a problem under our proposed system. Indeed, it would be the objective!
And more importantly, in the real world: Europe is big enough to withstand any attempts at economic sanctions from the US. When you are talking economic warfare, size is all that matters. The smaller player get hurt the most, and will eventually have to surrender.
But the European Union is just as big as the US in economic terms. The excellent CIA Factbook has the answer, as ever.
Europe and the US each have 20% of the world's GDP. The rest of the world has 60%. And "the rest of the world" includes Brazil, India and China. Who's side do you think they would be on in a scenario like this?
So to summarize: You're quite right that Sweden couldn't do this alone. But Europe can.
And once we have Pirate Parties in parliament in most of the member states, we will.