Copyright laws threaten online freedom
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “This may be putting it too simply, but:
- Material property = You can`t take my CD without my permission.
- Intellectual property = You can`t copy my CD without my permission.
- Reproduction monopoly = You can`t copy your CD without my permission.
“The right is to property. The privilege is to monopoly.
“The right is natural. The privilege is unnatural, unethical, and now ineffective.
“End the privilege. Cease the monopoly. Abolish copyright.”
That’s frequent p2pnet poster and sometimes contributor Crosbie Fitch in a Reader’s Write to yesterday’s Who TF is MC Double Def DP?
Also on July 7, in an OpEd published in RevolutionRadio.org, Contract Central and other similar online publications, but originally in the Financial Times, “Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it,” writes the Pirate Party’s Christian Engström, 46, from Nacka in Stockholm, due take his seat in the EU parliament this autumn.
“This is reason enough for reform,” he says, going on »»»
But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.
File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.
The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.
The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.
The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.
The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate Bay, which makes the world`s culture easily available to anybody with an internet connection. But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright.
The public increasingly recognises the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet the Pirate party won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European parliament for the first time.
Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform.
We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.
Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?
“The information revolution is happening here and now,” says Engström, adding:
“It is up to us to decide what future we want.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Who TF is MC Double Def DP? – Who TF is MC Double Def DP?, July 7, 2009
RevolutionRadio.org – Copyright laws threaten our online freedom, July 7, 2009
Contract Central – Copyright laws threaten our online freedom, July 7, 2009
Financial Times – Copyright laws threaten our online freedom, July 7, 2009
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July 8th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Sure, we can let the government spy on us, private conversations and all, but under ONE condition, it is applied 360 degrees! NO more secrets! If CSIS wants to spy on my emails to my fiancee, then I want to spy on all their information, all of it, every little bit. If the NSA wants to monitor my MSN chats (yes, I still use MSN), then I want access to EVERYTHING they have! That goes for RIAA, MicroSoft, Apple, IBM, Coca Cola, Pepsi, KFC, etc…
You can’t have it both ways! It’s either all open or it’s well balanced with each person using their right to privacy, WITHOUT invasion!
July 10th, 2009 at 1:09 am
So,where is the “content” supposed to come from,if no-one needs to pay for its creation? I think that it’s fair to say that _most_ of the content being “shared” today was created by someone who was paid for their creativity and effort by “The System” of copyright ownership.
If the system that makes it possible to make a good living by creating new books,music, film, is broken, how do you intend to replace it?
What valuable content have _you_ , every reader, added to the world? What content has the Piratpartiet added to the world? How many people are busily P2P’ing Piratpartiet creations?
July 10th, 2009 at 5:49 am
There are a few ways:
1) Suspend people’s liberty to make copies of their own property so that everyone is forced to pay for copies from authorised sources (copyright).
2) When you can’t stop people copying, institute an Internet Tax and then divvy up the amount to copyright holders according to how prevalent copies and derivatives are.
3) If that doesn’t gain traction make a new law that prohibits unlicensed possession of copyrighted works, in conjunction with an auditing system to make it easy for people to automatically pay license fees for all copyrighted works they receive and all uses they might want to put them to.
4) Ultimately, it would be best to abolish copyright (and patent) to restore a free market in the exchange of art and knowledge. Audiences for movies or music can then pay for the production of these things directly. Moreover, people have their liberty restored to share and build upon their own culture (as used to be the case until the privileges of copyright and patent were enacted in the 18th century).
July 10th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
May I respond to:
“4) Ultimately, it would be best to abolish copyright (and patent) to restore a free market in the exchange of art and knowledge. Audiences for movies or music can then pay for the production of these things directly. ”
The issue seems to be that, with massive, “free” distribution, there isn’t any “market” at all… the P2P file-sharing system does not provide anything in exchange to the authors of works.
“Moreover, people have their liberty restored to share and build upon their own culture (as used to be the case until the privileges of copyright and patent were enacted in the 18th century).”
In the 18th century, and previously, there were no means to freely distribute intellectual property to millions, without apparent cost; books and works of art were physical objects, costly to produce and distribute, thus automatically limiting their audience and reproduction, and pretty much insuring that they were not “shared” for free with others.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I suspect you’re confusing the fact that file-sharing doesn’t provide anything in exchange to producers of copies, with the current lack of facility an audience has to exchange their money with the authors of the works they enjoy being published.
File-sharing is simply a facility to enable people to share their culture with each other. No natural right is being violated through the exchange of published art and knowledge. The most you could say is that a copyright holder’s monopoly was being infringed, but that is an anachronistic and unethical privilege, not a natural right.
So, no, file-sharing will provide no money to authors – directly. However, it does provide them with free promotion and distribution – something they’ve traditionally had to pay publishers a shed load of money for (hence such a tiny royalty). But then, because it provides them with free promotion and distribution it also helps increase the size of their audience. And their audience is where their revenue will come from in the future (the only people who actually want their work enough to pay good money for it).
You are right to observe that a lot has changed since the 18th century. It is now far easier for an author’s audience to communicate with them and commission them to produce more work (taking over the traditional publisher’s role).
A digital copy costs nothing to make and there is no longer any market for it. Printers are going to go out of business. Unfortunate for them, but inevitable.
A novel, single, movie costs a fair bit of time, effort, skill, money, creativity, to make and that’s what there remains a good market for. People don’t suddenly stop wanting such great works of art simply because they no longer get prosecuted for sharing copies of them with their friends. They stop needing to pay publishers for copies of course, but they still need to pay for the production of the movies.
So, the artist is still going to get paid, but the publisher isn’t. The problem is, the publishers are the ones who have traditionally kept the lions share of the profits and so are the wealthy lobbyists trying to get laws made to let them sue Jammie Thomas millions of dollars for daring to make her own copies and give them to her friends.
July 11th, 2009 at 9:47 am
“File-sharing is simply a facility to enable people to share their culture with each other.”
A problem with such a statement is, simply, that most file-sharing is not people sharing “their” culture, they are sharing the results of the creativity and work of other peoples’ culture.
“No natural right is being violated”
What do you consider a “natural right” ??
“free promotion and distribution” – this has been the selling point for so many previous schemes in the arts that it has become practically cliché; I would say that free promotion & distribution + â¬1.90 will by a cup of coffee.
It seems that we might disagree on the basic premise of who will pay for what … I believe that you have a utopian view that people will pay for what they can get for free, which does not at all match the current reality.
” a copyright holderâs monopoly was being infringed, but that is an anachronistic and unethical privilege, not a natural right.”
Here we disagree, on the basic premise of whether it is unethical for a person who produces something, be that a physical or intellectual product, to profit from the product of their labour, insight or creativity. Copyright also conveys upon the copyright holder the right to control not only the distribution, but the form of the copyrighted material, preventing the distortion, modification, or misuse of the material, as determined by the moral rights of the copyright holder.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:40 am
Just an additional note:
- Thanks for the civilised conversation.
- It is unfortunate that the issue of file-sharing has become mired in the issue of freedom from surveillance; I, too, despise the continuing inroads on freedom of communication and individual security, supposedly driven by “national security” and by this P2P explosion.