Ahoy! Pirate Party gets berth in European Parliament
Sweden's Pirate Party has won entry to the European Parliament in Brussels in elections held Sunday.
The Pirate Party gained 7 percent of the Swedish votes and secured at least one of the 18 seats that Sweden holds in the parliament.
Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden's Pirate Party
(Credit: Carl Johan Rehbinder)"Citizens have understood that it's time to pull the fist out of the pocket and that you can make a difference," Rick Falkvinge, leader and founder of the party, told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, after the result of the elections were revealed. "We don't accept to be bugged by the government. People start to understand that the government is not always good."
The Pirate Party is focused on three main goals: "to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected."
The party was founded in 2006, and that year gained only 0.63 percent of the votes in Swedish parliamentary elections. But since then it has attracted members during the debate on several controversial laws that authorize monitoring of electronic communications and that make it easier to police file sharing on the Internet.
It is now Sweden's third biggest party by membership. Its ranks swelled when four men were sentenced to prison in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in April. People use Web sites like The Pirate Bay to transfer movies and music, a practice that has drawn the ire--and the lawyers--of Hollywood studios and the recording industry.
The Pirate Party is not formally connected with The Pirate Bay, but has officially expressed support for the Web site.
The party wants all noncommercial copying to be free and file sharing to be encouraged. The copyright system, it argues, is out of whack--rather than encouraging the spread of culture, the system now imposes severe restrictions.
The European elections attracted 43.8 percent of the Swedish voters, which is on par with the European average.
Apart from the Pirate Party, which became the fifth biggest party in the elections in Sweden, the Greens were the big winners gaining 10.9 percent resulting in a fourth position and two seats in the parliament.
Many people don't want to only think about how to protect the monopoly of content creators, but also want to balance that with thinking about how to update our ancient laws for the internet age, and allow the spread of culture.
Frankly, the only updates we've done so far, were written by out-of-touch people who don't even use the internet that much. They've enraged the people that do understand the issues, and whats at stake.
RIAA should probably realize that they are sealing their own doom, they can can sue everyone and their mothers, but the law will just be changed.
But why stop there? Why not allow the "non-commercial" stealing of personal belongings, cars, money, etc? Bernie Madoff could be our campaign poster boy.
The only real problem with these reforms is how to get intellectual-property producers to keep on producing when they know that they are forbidden from benefitting economically from their work. (These, presumably, are the "out-of-touch" people who don't understand the issues and who haven't yet updated their thinking about ancient stuff like needing to pay the rent.) But throw a few of them into forced-labor camps and I'll bet the rest of them would modernize their thinking very quickly!
They steal our rights to move the music and moves we buy from one device to another.
They steal our rights to make backups of our movies and would steal our rights to backup music if they could.
They steal our rights to take snippits from movies and use them for commentary and educational purposes.
It is time for the current music and movie industry to die. Those of us who have talent can and will be able to create better content if we are not forced to filter our work through a bunch of useless gate keepers who's only job is to remove any artistic merit, intellectual value and creativity from anything presented to the public.
PS. The MPAA/RIAA are all a bunch of cat sniffers (That's right, you guys all sniff cats!)
You are more right than you know. Corporate media gets in it's own way. Steals the IP of others (Web 2.0 media firms are a a prime example of how to jack IP for corporate profit) and so on.
When you step back from the myopic picture you are thinking of and realize that IP is all around and that the vast majority of it plays by the rules you are complaining about then, and only then, will you realize the truth of things.
the MPAA says making a backup of a DVD is piracy, ***
May I suggest you read up on the history of Hollywood?
The movie producers who came out here were an early form of pirates. They didn't want to pay royalties to the East Coast companies that owned the rights, so they set up shop in the "Wild West" where they could ignore the requests for royalties.
So, it only has come full circle.
Another example- there is something really troubling when a company can take a sample of your DNA, patent it, and then sue you if you do anything with you own DNA (There are several cases of this already). This is leading to a corporate dystopia and there certainly are limits to how much companies can steal from the public before individual rights and freedoms are trampled completely. I live in the home of the free. I only ask that my fellow American's be brave in resisting the intellectual property producers in locking down my freedoms and a free and open culture of my future.
- Develop a new strain of crops (either genetically engineer or using the conventional selection process);
- Patent the strain;
- Give the crop to a farmer for free;
- Cross pollination will spread the crop to near-by farms;
- Sue nearby farms, ordering them to a) stop the sale of the product, b) destroying all seeds that collect from the farm.
Patent should protect real infringement (e.g. the farmer "borrows" seeds from his neighbor an breeds then to create more seeds for his field). However, recent lawsuits established a precedent that it does not matter why a farmer has patented crops. If they have it, they are liable for patent infringement. So if a wind pollinated your field, you are out of luck... you belong to a corporation
Said farmers should countersue for damages caused by the harm being caused by the cross polination.
Oh and since genes arleady exist it's a great example of what should not be patented.
Here is a specific newsprint story. The individual cases might be a little less easy of a read...
CNN Story on Human Gene Patents- http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/13/genes.patent.myriad/index.html
The Grateful Dead always allowed the free sharing of concert tapes and for decades they made millions from their tours.
I work with no less than 4 performing musicians. When it comes to how they view media they are like everone else. Of course none of them are rock stars. Just ones who play local and enjoy performing.
We have however seen some pieces of legislation passed by supposedly liberal (as in liberal, not left wing) parties, that I find seriously violate my civil rights.
Since the left and right agree on that the government should read my electronic communication and that commercial interests may search my house (something not even the police may do, unless they suspect me of serious crime), I have only Piratpartiet and the communist party (sic!) to choose from. And since I am no communist, Piratpartiet is my choice.
We mustn't give government the right to take away our rights. And not let the RIAA et al. govern government.
Humbly, Ylan
Europe will be far more capable of dealing with a society without patents than the United States. The United States are far behind when it comes to politics than Europe and lets itself be controlled by companies e.g. entertainment business and Microsoft(no offence Microsoft).
It's a wonderful time to live in Europe!
Sorry for my poor English.
Doing so in the US with its two party situation might be a tad difficult... Maybe in the individual states it would be possible to make a difference somehow, I don't know enough to give an informed opinion. I would hope so seeing as how EU seem to be developing in to a very US-like entity and if it is practically impossible in the US it might be that it will soon be practically impossible in EU as well.
They should also realize that calling people criminals for holding information is pure fascism.
Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing?currentPage=4
Many say that PP is a "one trick pony", but it just so happens that that "one trick" is one that spans pretty much the entire spectrum of issues in one way or another.
The best solution I can think of would be to shorten the duration of patents to something like 3-6 years, depending on how long it takes to recoup R+D investment.
Perhaps a more radical redesign would be appropriate as well. However, if patent law were completely removed, then business would have a strong incentive to conceal their research, which would hinder it from entering the public domain, to the detriment of all.
As for removing copyright law, that would require all content creators (musicians, programmers, artists, authors, etc) to either develop alternative business models or go out of business. The very easy with which people can copy around electronic media makes the problem more difficult. Ultimately, online distribution only really works if there is some mechanism to limit the distribution to those who pay. If there's no copyright, then there's nothing to ensure that the content creators get paid.
US companies become ATM for EU?
Although don't expect many changes here in the US, as the Obama/Biden team seems to be already bought into Micro$oft and the MAFIAA organizations.
Sad, really.
- by slxzmv June 8, 2009 10:58 PM PDT
- @sanenazok
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- by sanenazok June 9, 2009 11:13 AM PDT
- The 15th Century Swedish diet was based on classes and remained so until the mid 1800's. Also, it was subservient to the monarch, who decided everything except taxation. In order to extract taxes European monarchs had no choice but to agree to various diets. If 15th century Sweden was a democracy then so was Austria-Hungary, Prussia, etc., all of which had these assemblies. Sure there may have been civil rights, as there are in China now (especially the right to own property), but that doesn't make a democracy.
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- by slxzmv June 9, 2009 12:15 PM PDT
- Yes, you are absolutley right that the swedsih king had most of the power for long times (1523-1718, 1772-1809), maybe I was a bit unclear but I never ment it was a democracy in the 15th century. However the class system was not as dominant as in many other countries. Except for the king, the same laws applied to everyone, everybody (male) could vote and be a member of Riksdagen or rise to any other office in the goverment.
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- by sanenazok June 10, 2009 5:31 AM PDT
- I agree with you, no government's perfect. Sweden certainly had the luxury of being neutral during WWII, as far as I'm concerned no major European government remained completely democratic during the depression years.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (45 Comments)Just to clarify: Sweden is monarchy but also a democracy. The roots of the modern Riksdag (parliament) is from 1435. But each "county" had other assemblies long before that where "all free men" could participate. The last king with a lot of political power was removed from office 1809.
Prominent old swedish freedom laws include:
Sweden's Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 is thought to be the oldest Freedom of information legislation
http://www.sverigeturism.se/smorgasbord/smorgasbord/natrecspo/nature/every.html
must of course be mentioned, although it just became part of the Swedish constitution in 1994. Have been a customary law since the "beginning of time"
So also Sweden has a long history of freedom
Also one clarification to your previuos post: No part of sweden at any time was occupeid by the nazis or anybody else during WWII, the democratically choosen goverment worked well during that whole sad time.
Anyway no matter when a country became a democracy, it is still important to learn from each other, to defend our freedom and democratic principles as being discussed here.