(Second in a series)
Last week's blog introduced the Swedish Pirate Party, which is acting as a model for a group of similar parties springing up in Europe (primarily), Australia, and South America. There is also a United States Pirate Party. All of these fall under the Pirate Party International umbrella.
Most of these parties are seeking the required membership to register as a bona fide political party in their respective homelands.
Their goals are similar: copyright reform, internet freedom, and end of all forms of censorship.
Let's take a look at copyright.
Copyright - The Perceived Problem
The Swedish (mother) Party claims that the current copyright system is "unbalanced" and therefore holds the view that file sharing (such as music, videos, etc.) should be decriminalized.
According to their Declaration of Principles:
"Copyright was created to benefit society in order to encourage acts of creation, development and spreading of cultural expressions. In order to achieve these goals, we need a balance between common demands of availability and distribution on the one hand, and the demands of the creator to be recognized and remunerated on the other.
"We claim that today's copyright system unbalanced.
"A society where cultural expressions and knowledge is free for all on equal terms benefits the whole of the society. We claim that widespread and systematic abuses of today's copyrights are actively counter-productive to these purposes by limiting both the creation of, and access to, cultural expressions.
"Privatized monopolies are one of society's worst enemies, as they lead to price-hikes and large hidden costs for citizens. Patents are officially sanctioned monopolies on ideas. Large corporations diligently race to hold patents they can use against smaller competitors to prevent them from competing on equal terms. A monopolistic goal is not to adjust prices and terms to what the market will bear, but rather use their ill-gotten rights as a lever to raise prices and set lopsided terms on usage and licensing.
"We want to limit the opportunities to create damaging and unnecessary monopoly situations."
Copyright -- The Proposed Solution
The Swedish Pirate Party Declaration of Principles goes on to say:
"When copyrights were originally created, they only regulated the right of a creator to be recognized as the creator. It has later been expanded to cover commercial copying of works as well as also limiting the natural rights of private citizens and non-profit organizations. We say that this shift of balance has prompted an unacceptable development for all of society.
"Economic and technological developments have pushed copyright laws way out of balance and instead it infers unjust advantages for a few large market players at the expense of consumers, creators and society at large.
"Millions of classical songs, movies and books are held hostages in the vaults of huge media corps, not wanted enough by their focus groups to re-publish but potentially too profitable to release. We want to free our cultural heritage and make them accessible to all, before time withers away the celluloid of the old movie reels.
"Immaterial laws are a way to legislate material properties for immaterial values.
"Ideas, knowledge and information are by nature non-exclusive and their common value lies in their inherent ability to be shared and spread.
"We say that copyrights need to be restored to their origins. Laws must be altered to regulate only commercial use and copying of protected works. To share copies, or otherwise spread or use works for non-profit uses, must never be illegal since such fair use benefits all of society.
"We want to reform commercial copyrights. The basic notion of copyrights was always to find a fair balance between conflicting commercial interests. Today this balance is lost and needs to be regained.
"We suggest a reduction of commercial copyright protection, i.e. the monopoly to create copies of a work for commercial purposes, to five years from the publication of the work. The rights to make derivative works shall be adjusted so that the basic rule will be freedom for all to make them immediately. Any and all exceptions from this rule, for example, translations of books, or the usage of protected musical scores in movies, shall be explicitly enumerated in the statutes.
"We want to create a fair and balanced copyright.
"All non-commercial gathering, use, processing and distribution of culture shall be explicitly encouraged. Technologies limiting the consumer's legal rights to copy and use information or culture, so-called DRM, should be banned. In cases where this leads to obvious disadvantages for the consumer, any product containing DRM shall display clear warnings to inform consumers of this fact.
"Contractual agreements implemented to prevent such legal distribution of information shall be declared null and void. Non-commercial distribution of published culture, information or knowledge - with the clear exception of personal data - must not be limited or punished. As a logical conclusion of this, we want to abolish the blank media tax.
"We want to create a cultural commons."
The Ethical Dilemma
The dilemma here is that the average Internet Citizen leaning in the Pirate Party's direction feels, or openly states that, and certainly acts as if, everything on the Internet is or should be free.
Free to read, play, download, share, or copy.
In an ideal universe, perhaps. One where no labor, no cost, no sweat, no talent, no work has to be invested in order to produce such download-able and share-able work.
The view of the Swedish society has long been that "the world owes me a living," and the political parties play along. Today, the Swedish worker who is ill, or too tired to report to work on any given day, is paid just as much as his colleague who does drag himself out of bed and reports for, and performs, his duty.
The Pirate Party makes a good point in the advantages of availability for all, but this cannot, and must not, be free. The creator, especially the Internet Creator, must be able to live on his labors, and if he were to post a work for purchase and this work was then bought once--and thereafter copied and shared with the rest of the world, he will soon starve to death. A fact that will stifle creativity more effectively than anything will.
A Balance
Any proposed laws or changes to copyright systems have to protect the Creator of the Work. Not necessarily any subsequent owners of such copyright (they are sometimes bought and sold as commodities, and treated as investment opportunities).
But, unless the Creator of the Work is paid for his labor, his talent, and his work, he will first cease to work, and then cease to live, and there is nothing balanced about that.
