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Pirating copyright reform

By Lynne Spender - posted Monday, 7 April 2008


“Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest pubic library ever created.”

So says the Swedish “Piratpartiet”, (the Pirate Party) a political party formed in 2006 to reform Swedish copyright law and the patent system and to alert people to the dangers of a “surveillance” society where practically everyone is watched.

Within two days of being set up in January 2006 by founder Rick Falkvinge, the Party’s website received three million hits and its first 1,000 members. It now has 6,000 Swedish members.

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Born digital and focused on the possibilities for an information society which is both open and diverse, the Pirate Party epitomises all of the characteristics of digital culture. It is Internet based with policies and principles developed collaboratively through discussion and debate on its website. Information can be uploaded, downloaded, edited and shared via the website; meetings take place online (there are no offices or “headquarters”) and its several well-attended public rallies have been arranged through the website, mobile phones and “social networking”.

The movement now has chapters either registered (Spain, Austria, Germany) or being formed in 27 countries, including fledgling but not yet active groups in Australia and New Zealand.

The Pirate Party aspires to gain enough seats in the Swedish parliament, Riksdagen, to hold the balance of power. In the 2006 Swedish elections, which were held just nine months after it was formed, the Party captured almost 35,000 votes. At 0.63 per cent of overall votes, this fell short of the 4 per cent required to qualify for a seat in the parliament but the Party did achieve the tenth highest vote overall and was placed as number four among youth voters.

The Party’s organisers note that in the parallel “mock” elections traditionally held in Swedish high schools, they easily gained 4.5 per cent of the vote - even without prepared Pirate Party ballot forms. No doubt Swedish youth were attracted by the Party’s policy that downloading non-commercial materials from the Internet should not be a criminal offence.

In much of Sweden, where broadband access and file-sharing were common well before the entertainment industry started to cry “Pirate” and to push for a tightening of intellectual property laws, digital natives were appalled when the laws were changed and they were suddenly portrayed as evil pirates rather than early adapters to digital technology.

A poll conducted by a Swedish newspaper in May 2006 found that those aged 18-20 were more likely to view file-sharing as a cultural phenomenon than a criminal activity. And it would not be surprising if they and other young people were also attracted by the Party’s policies on patents and privacy - both of which advocate reform for the benefit of citizens rather than the vested interests of big pharmaceutical companies and an increasingly invasive surveillance state.

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Rick Falkvinge (FalconWing) has been traveling and speaking to gather support for the 100,000 votes that will be needed for the Pirate Party to be represented in the European Parliament in the 2009 elections.

Speaking at a forum at Google last year, he claimed that garnering 100,000 votes in Europe was not unrealistic. He also noted that the issue of file-sharing has brought copyright and intellectual property policy to the fore. Not only are the media now interested in the copyfights between the big media companies and those who object to their near monopoly power, politicians are starting to understand that this is an issue that might have some votes in it, particularly among younger voters.

The Norwegian conservative party, for instance, recently adopted the Pirate Party’s policies on copyright reform. “They just translated it and adopted it” said Falkvinge in an interview. He added that it was somewhat ironic that such an action itself might technically constitute a breach of copyright.

Falkvinge argues that copyright law has now turned knowledge and information into private property that is no longer accessible and usable without permission or payment. The Party’s copyright reform policy states that non-commercial copying and use should be free and that file-sharing of cultural works should be encouraged rather than criminalised.

The period of protection for copyright work should be radically reduced to five years after publication - rather than 70 years after the death of the author as is now the case in the European Union, the US and Australia. This would allow a period for commercial exploitation of new works which would then move into the public domain and form the basis of “the greatest public library ever”, available to all citizens to access and use.

Falkvinge points out that the current 70-year copyright arrangement means that no current works will enter the public domain during his lifetime. “The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today’s world and no one needs to make money 70 years after they’re dead”, he says.

In response to the argument that creators need the longer period of copyright to compensate them for lack of employer superannuation, he points out that most of the benefits actually go to the corporations that either own or license the copyrights. And he adds, why should creators not put some of their earnings into super, as others are obliged to do?

The other focus of the Party’s copyright reform policy is the now ubiquitous digital rights management (DRM) technologies such as encryption and watermarking. Known by many who have tried to play a region-coded DVD on a player outside the designated region or by those who have tried to share encrypted music files, these are increasingly being applied to digital works.

DRM prevents users from accessing locked works even when their use might otherwise be lawful as “fair use” under US law or “fair dealing” in Australia. Some can also be used to track user behaviours, which the Party sees as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. The Party wants them banned.

Under international law, breaking or “circumventing” DRM locks is a criminal offence - even if it is done for educational or research purposes. Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian PhD student and employee of Elcomsoft found this out the hard way when he gave a paper that dealt with Adobe’s ebook security systems at a 2001 conference in the US.

As he was about to catch a plane home the FBI arrested him, charging him under US copyright law with distributing a product designed to break Adobe’s anti-piracy code. The charges against him were eventually dropped but not before digital activists started web and mailing-list protests in his defence and 100 protesters marched on Adobe’s headquarters demanding his release. And it was not before he was obliged to provide US$50,000 bail to secure his release from custody.

There are other tales, real and apocryphal, of the lengths to which the record, movie and publishing industries will go to preserve what the Pirate Party sees as abuse of their monopoly privileges under the law.

The passing of the US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (the “Mickey Mouse” Act) is an example. After intense lobbying by the entertainment industries, US Congress passed an Act that extended the period of copyright protection for corporate works just at the time that Disney’s Mickey Mouse was due to enter the public domain.

Another example is the legal action taken by the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) against more than 20,000 of its customers for file-sharing. Unfortunately for the RIAA and the individuals who have settled for an average of US$3,000 to avoid paying much more to a lawyer for representing them, the number of file-sharers has continued to grow.

There is an ideology and a sentiment within much of digital culture that new technologies offer the possibility of greater access to knowledge and information across both the developed and developing worlds. The Pirate Party is making a stand on the issue, using its name and its classic pirate logo as a banner to draw attention to a message that has serious and long term economic, social and cultural implications for Australia as well as Sweden.

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About the Author

Lynne Spender is a writer and editor who is currently completing a PhD on digital culture and copyright law at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney

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All articles by Lynne Spender

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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