You also need to read up on what the COSTS of copyright are. A right does not exist in a vacuum.

If you’re serious about understanding these matters, check a talk I did at Stanford. Google for Falkvinge Stanford Video.

Rick

I would go on to argue that copyright is a basic right. I struggle to make a buck developing software as an independent vendor over the web. I can spend many hundreds of man-hours developing a product that will just as likely bomb as be successful. Don’t I have the right to protect the fruit of my labor? Piracy of my software is the same as stiffing a worker of a fair day’s pay.

For instance, we also fight for people’s rights to manufacture medicine for their own use (patents are killing thousands of people every day), for their right to plant and cultivate seeds (again, patents), and for their right to privacy (basic democracy is at stake here).

The conflict is much larger than file sharing and being able to see the latest Hollywood piece of 90-minute trash without buying a ticket. It is about control over humankind’s knowledge and culture. Whomever controls knowledge and culture, controls the world.

“Food, shelter, war, famine, basic human rights, the environment, dignity, a livable wage, etc” — well, we don’t fight for the environment, or for a livable wage. Other people take that struggle. But yes, what happens to the other ones (food, shelter, war, famine, basic human rights…) will be direct consequences of the fight we have picked.

/ Rick Falkvinge (founder of pp)

enigmax // torrentfreak

I want more, this is what it is all about, and I appreciate your comments on a regular basis. You have helped make this blog much more than a lonely sounding board.

So thanks for keeping me honest.

Man, you’re making me work for a living and I love it

I don’t think pirating is necessarily useful as an end in and of itself, I think it is a reflection of the current models of distribution and copyright that are apparently broken. And while profit is necessary, I think that there has to be some kind of agreement that once a work has had the opportunity to amass a profit, or fail miserably as fate may have it, there would be some obligation on the artist, company, artisan, or what have you to make their work available to the public, the folks upon which their fortunes depend upon. I think the idea that once classics of film, literature, music etc., have made their imprint on our culture and those involved have reaped their reward, that these works should be allowed the freedom to be reproduced and used in a variety of ways. This is not to say they still won’t be sold for a profit by folks who do something extraordinary with them (I mean Shakespeare has been in the public domain for a long, long time but publishers are still making a fortune off his genius). I guess my point is that we have gotten to the point where the individuals who consume a culture (and arguably in many ways also define it through that consumption -for consumpiton is not necessarily as passive as it might seem) are simultaneously forced to think of themselves as criminals in relationship to this culture due to the construct of property grafted upon music, film, artwork, etc.

I actually agree with you that the current capitalist framework of culture will cannabalize itself. Increasingly, such laws and policies about property and profit margins have managed to choke out any signs of a once great tradition. I think Hollywood as a space of producing magic like it did in the 1920s 30s, 40s 50s, and even 70s is dead in the water predominantly because they have become so stuck in the logic of profit, international markets, and general global dominance. The same can be said for the current state of music as I see it.

The real problem is that these media giants own much more than the last ten years of popular culture. Under the current laws that change as quickly as the seconds hand on a clock, they own just about the last century of culture and that is a truly disheartening. Our own culture is being sold back to us again and again and again, an endless loop of profits that has, at the same time, criminalized us for trying to do something beyond our consumption, or even in relationship to our consumption of it–that, for me, is the real root of the problem in my mind. And will Pirate Parties end this, no, I don’t think so, but they are one of the few voices to frame it as a real concern that will shape our future and our sense of culture over the next century and beyond, and that I heartily agree with.

I am happy to support pirating as a valid subversive response to big capital, but to argue that somehow it should be legalized is untenable unless you go the whole hog and abolish property rights altogether. But somehow I don’t think that is the Pirate Party platform.

As Marx said, capitalism is adept at re-inventing itself, and I am sure the content producers’ distribution models will evolve by co-opting the technologies that will allow them to prosper. Look at the web. When I first logged-on in 1995, the potential for free expression was exciting. What de have now: little voices that struggle to be heard above the cacophony of big media portals and the lurid noises from all the porn sites, and the independent print media is dead or dying.

When I disparaged content, I was referring to the vast volume of Torrent “traffic” in stuff that is of questionable cultural worth, not to the full body of popular culture.

That’s actually a pretty fair critique, although I think the relationship between the market, culture, and the shit you refer to is deeply linked to the notion of ownership that these parties will challenge, but by no means conquer. For I tend to agree with you that one platform parties are myopic at best, but I am more interested in what the surfacing of these parties suggests about the issues that will shape certain “core values” of the Western world such as ownership and property.

In fact, your blog is one of the spaces I think could benefit immensely from re-imagining the length of copyright protection and the move of cultural works into the public domain. How many of those great Noirs (most of which are well over half-a-century old) that you write about so wonderfully on a regular basis are still under copyright, effectively preventing folks from freely accessing them? Or, as I think about often, prevent us from quoting them with the actual footage, rather than using the limits of textual description to describe the visual magic of these films. I don’t believe all of the works still under the protection of insane copyright laws are crap, in fact I think you write about so many of the amazing ones–and their are many more in a wide array of genres –and that’s just film! Didn’t you just write about Out of the Past and Double Indemnity–tell me these two don’t belong in the public domain by now!

Shouldn’t we, after a reasonable period of time, have free access to these works of cultural magnificence? Not everything being produced in Western culture is equivalent to a Britney Spears song, nor is all the purported deficient work unworthy of examination on some level. As to the politics of the Pirate parties, I am not so much a “member” as an “interested party,” for like most folks in the Western world I consume culture regularly and would like to have a way to preserve that right under some negotiable guidelines.