Swedish Pirate to EU Parliament!

Great Debates
21

I have to be frank and say that I am skeptical that creativity is being significantly impaired because someone isn’t allowed to adapt “Toy Story II” without Disney’s permission.

There’s a strong argument to be made that copyright length has been set too long; eventually, things do have to fall into the pubic domain. That said, “I should be able to make money using Disney’s characters” is about as lame a counterargument as I’ve ever heard. No offense meant, Kobal2, but we seem to have countless artists, filmmakers, songwriters and authors pumping out new works without infringing on Disney’s copyrights or anyone else’s. “Inspired by” is not even remotely close to copyright infringement. If a self-proclaimed artist cannot produce original work without borrowing so heavily from others that he lands in court over it, maybe he’s just a shitty artist.

The vast majority of the time, yes, that’s exactly what I believe to be the case.

I’m all for doing away with malware and corporate theft and stringing up the perpetrators. I’d like to see malware legally controlled or banned. I’d also like to see Walmart’s practices regarding organized labour investigated a little more thoroughly. That doesn’t justify shoplifting or make me question laws against theft. Those issues are separate issues.

22

Because people don’t want their taxes going to supporting the Uwe Bolls of the world?

23

Very convienient for you, I’m sure. That allows you to just dismiss the other side as nothing but thieves.

No, they aren’t. If, say, Ford sold cars that self destructed if you let a friend drive them, or set your garage on fire, or extruded guns and machinegunned your wife’s Toyota we wouldn’t just dismiss it as a separate issue if people went instead to dealers that sold cars that didn’t do that. Even if they were all stolen cars, because the car thieves were the about the only people selling cars without those “features”. More likely though, we’d be screaming for the heads of the lunatics who built cars like that; but somehow we are supposed to put up with behavior in the name of copyright that would be criminal if, say, ordinary people did it.

It is NOT a separate issue, because by their behavior the pro-copyright forces long ago threw away the moral high ground. Vandals and worse accusing people of being thieves ( often falsely, at that ) doesn’t produce much sympathy.

24

So why do you keep bringing them up?

So far in this thread a few people have made good points about Copyright reform and have not justified any illegal activity.

Edit: Well… I’m not going to speak for Der Trihs.

25

Well, it seems that most people jumped to conclusions about the goal of the party before actually reading about their principles. I suppose I should have written a summary in the OP, but it was late and I was busy celebrating.

The main reason for the party’s existence is not merely to reform copyright law, in fact, most members seem to be of that opinion. While that goal is in their platform, most emphasis is put in protecting citizen’s rights and a healthy democracy. The party wants to ensure personal privacy and integrity from governmental surveillance, keep the government transparent, and to safeguard individual judicial security in our courts, etc.

The party’s success and their explosive increase in members is caused by three events.

The first one was the so called FRA law. FRA is our National Defense Radio Establishment which is an agency tasked with signals intelligence. Previously they had only been allowed to listen in on foreign radio transmissions, but this new law gave them authority to collect cable-bound information as well. This caused a big uproar as we are not OK with the government having such massive surveillance of the population, yet the parliament passed it despite the protests.

Secondly, a directive called IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) which gives private companies more power than the police to hunt for evidence against file sharers, such as in secrecy granting warrants to search peoples homes without notification or defense in court, where the police needs to have evidence against crime giving at least a prison sentence to do that. It also requires ISP’s to release personal information about IP numbers, etc.

Thirdly, the guilty verdict of The Pirate Bay, coupled with the exposed judicial corruption in the court proceedings, also caused a torrent of new members to the party.

There are also many proposed laws that continue to erode our personal integrity. For example a law that lets the government search through your computer, mp3-players, USB-sticks, etc when traveling in our out of the country. Another example, is a telecommunication data retention directive that will force ISP’s and phone providers to store information regarding every phone call, such as between which callers, from where (mobile phone), every SMS, every e-mail, for between 6 months and 2 years. All these things together are really taking us closer and closer to a real Big Brother society, just a bit later than Orwell thought. Now we are all suspects.

We have now clearly marked that this is not acceptable, in the only way you can make a politician understand, by taking their jobs.

26

I guess I don’t see it this way. I see Disney taking stories from the public domain, putting a fresh coat of paint on them, than changing the rules to claim perpetual ownership. It strikes me as unfair and I’m glad people are finally banding together under a banner of citizens rights. Pirate Party forever!

27

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Well said! :slight_smile:

28

Then you’ll allow us to be frank and say this is a completely ludicrous strawman. You don’t seem that interested in honestly debating anything here.

To give your point more time than it deserves, you don’t know what isn’t being produced because of our onerous copyright terms, because (duh) it isn’t being produced. We get the occasional example: you can’t get hold of Mighty Mouse’s Grey Album because it’s impossible to clear the samples he used; The Go! Team had to completely remake their debut album in order to sell it in the US because (guess?) they couldn’t clear the samples. That’s just two recent examples from a narrow spectrum of just one form of artistic endeavour. No doubt far more things simply never get made or distributed at all. In music, more than in film, work is transformative and derivative (in a non-pejorative sense) without being copying of, or damaging to, the original author’s work. As HFS7G points out, the purpose of copyright was intended to be to encourage creativity without simultaneously inhibiting it. Just because you’re annoyed by bittorrent users doesn’t exempt you from thinking critically about whether copyright still achieves this goal.

It’s heartening to see we’ve already got a ludicrous car analogy, though. I wonder what it is about the Ford Motor Company that requires their invocation in all of these threads? It can’t be their illuminatory rhetorical value.

29

I’m not justifying it, so much as explaining why it’s getting more and more sympathy, and why the law-and-order side is getting less. And no, I don’t pirate myself. But I understand why people would do it, and don’t think it’s just an unwillingness to pay. My unwillingness to either pirate or put up with DRM and such has meant that I’ve had to simply not get games that I’d like; I sympathise with someone who simply says “screw this” and gets a pirated, DRM free copy.

30

And for that that, ye shall walk the plank[sub]s of the party’s platform[/sub]

31

It was deliberately ludicrous, because what we let the music & software makers get away with is equally ludicrous. It’s just that copyright has been made into a Moral Issue and a holy war, so people acting in it’s name have been allowed to go to ridiculous lengths. They get away with selling games with DRM that damages your computer, for example; that’s pretty close to my example of a car that deliberately sets your garage on fire. The analogies are silly, because companies in other industries would never be allowed to behave that way. Even the infamous Pinto didn’t explode by design after all.

32

Not your judgment or decision to make, and not a reason to censor that artist.

If someone wants to make a “Disney’s Alice meets American McGee’s Alice, they freak out, fall in love, fight crime !” flick, they should have that right. I probably wouldn’t watch it, but that’s no reason to outright support its banning, is it ? Similar concept : if a writer is blown away by Tolkien’s work, and wants to write the extended story of a minor character, or even “how the LoTR should have been”, all set in Tolkien’s world and using only Tolkien characters, he should be allowed to sell that story without the Tolkien estate shitting bricks. As long as he’s not copy/pasting entire pages of Tolkien’s own writings, it’s all good IMO.

Consider the Cthulhu Mythos, the collective result of dozens of sci-fi writers gleefully running with Lovecraft’s works and concepts and even his writing style, during and after his lifetime. Had Lovecraft (or his friend and later editor, Derleth) been a litigious jerk, with the same legal machine as Disney (or the Tolkien estate) at his disposal, all these fantastic books, parodies and homages would have gotten the axe. I don’t want to live in that world, I’m sorry.

Compare with the White Wolf vs. Sony Pictures 2002 lawsuit, where WW sued Sony essentialy because the movie Underworld featured vampires fighting werewolves in a dark gothic modern world, and they (WW) own the rights to a dark gothic modern world where pretty much every legendary bogeyman (including, proeminently, vampires and werewolves) exists and fights against every other. Oh, and because they also owned the publishing rights to a shitty “Romeo & Juliet” short story in which a vampire and a werewolf fall in forbidden love, which is part of the film’s plot. Settled out of courts by what everyone assume is large bags of money on Sony’s part.
So, yeah, if such a flimsy premise for a lawsuit is not only actionable, but valid enough that Sony doesn’t want to risk losing it, I think IP’s gone a tiny teensy bit too far.

And finally, consider classical art history, and the countless painters and sculptors who did the same Biblical scenes over and over, 99% of the time incorporating elements from other painters’ and sculptors’ work into their own as a tribute, comment, or plain ol’ crib.
That’s art. All art is “theft”, to some extent. There’s nothing new under the Sun.

33

I see what you did there.

34

Yeah, well, it’s a good solution. I hate seeing this whole “thought ownership doesn’t make sense!” vs “thinkers need to be compensated!” tirade without anyone ever mentioning compensation schemes besides exercise of property rights. (There’s other solutions too, like mandatory licensing, as with song lyrics, but those don’t get discussed either. What’s with all the in-the-box thinking?!)

35

Information is not property. When you build a house, your children don’t have to give it to the public after you die. If you build a motorcycle, the government doesn’t make you give it away after 50 years.

In no way should the goal of copyright law be to protect “information property”, because it doesn’t exist. The goal of copyright should be to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit from their creations. When creativity stops being encouraged and starts being stifled, copyright has gone too far.

Frankly, I think copyright is a failed concept. We shouldn’t grant monopolies to everyone who comes up with a marketable idea. They should get a one time paycheck like the rest of us (or like painters). And then instead of resting on their laurels after one or two 3-minute songs, a 10-page short story, or a drawing of a mouse, they will be compelled to actually work for a living.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I come up with valuable ideas at work all the time. That’s what the paycheck is for. The company doesn’t owe me more money in perpetuity for every time they make use of that idea. Could you imagine what the world would be like if you had to pay royalties to some long-dead cave man every time you lit a fire? Or if an artist had to buy a license to use perspective? Copyright is blatantly absurd when there are long expiration periods. It is only slightly less absurd with short expirations.

For the moment, I tentatively support a drastic shortening of copyright terms. In the long term, I think we need to eliminate copyrights and come up with an entirely new way to encourage the arts.

For the record, I don’t want things for free. :rolleyes: I buy my music from Amazon, because it is cheap enough and I don’t have to worry about viruses or DRM. And I still watch movies the old fashioned way – with store bought DVDs.

36

Strangely, I have never had a book or a CD do any of these things to me. Perhaps you shop at the wrong stores. Software might come with malware, but most doesn’t, and the issue of copyright goes well beyond software.

But then, you yourself admit you refused to buy DRM-protected games. (If it was Spore, you didn’t miss much.) So you do have a choice when it comes to software. Isn’t it interesting, though, that EA backed down on the DRM issue and decided not to use it with Sims 3? Perhaps the good old fashioned market does have some power to prevent abuse of such things.

Why? How is that - to use your words - “your judgment or decision to make”?

Do you have any particular reason for saying Disney and Rogue Entertainment do not deserve protection for their original work except that you just don’t want them to?

Well, first of all, to be fair, it is a ridiculous falsehood to claim that White Wolf’s suit was based on the idea that they owned the concept of vampires and werewolves fighting. They alleged that “Underworld” copied a specific story they published. They did not claim to own the rights to the generic concept of monster-filled wars. That’s a monumental difference for you to gloss over. If I made a movie unambiguously based on James Clavell’s “Shogun” and his estate sued me, does that mean they’re claiming the right to all stories involving samurai?

But hey, like I said, I’m not going to deny that copyright legislation can and has gone too far and is applied with too broad a brush. It’s possible White Wolf’s suit was a nuisance; I haven’t read the story they claim was ripped off and I dozed off through most of “Underworld,” and I can’t find a full copy of their claim online. So maybe they’re full of shit. Granting that the concept of original work is never going to be a clear one - so there will always be arguments, forever and ever, amen, over who stole what - there’s perfectly good reason to limit the scope of copyright to reasonable limits. That isn’t what the Pirate Party wants and you know it; when people are saying you shouldn’t need more than a year or two to make money from your work, you know it’s not the creative folks behind the movement.

And yet, strangely, I can reprint fairy tales and books like “Snow White,” “Cinderella” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Little Mermaid” from now until the cows come home and Disney can’t stop me.

37

And how do you think the company profits from the ideas that you contractually agreed to provide them with, if not using the concept of intellectual property? I find it bizarre that you think this is an argument against the idea of copyright or patents.

Would your company be happy if you took your ideas to a competitor? Would you feel ethically justified in doing so? If the answer to either of these questions is “no,” how can you argue that the concept of intellectual ownership does not exist?

38

Or you’ve just been lucky. Or you just haven’t realized what damage has been done. And you haven’t had a book do something like that because it can’t. :rolleyes:

It’s the manufacturers not the stores who add such things as DRMs.

Yes, the choice to not buy much.

39

So if I wanted to write a story called “Harry Potter and his Conversion to Radiacal Islam”, J.K. Rowling shoudln’t care about it at all?

40

Considering that the reception for such a book would be . . . poor, no. Not if it didn’t use her name. If you are arguing that the Harry Potter series’ reputation can be tarnished by a third party like that, then all the Harry Potter themed porn online has done it already.

I’d actually expect such a silly book to benefit her indirectly; a form of free advertising both by the author and the media when they pick up on it.