Norway Liberal Party Wants Legal File Sharing 563
dot-magnon writes "The Liberal Party of Norway (Venstre) passed a unanimous resolution that advocates legal file sharing. The party wants to legalise sharing of any copyrighted material for non-commercial use. It also proposes a ban on DRM technology, free sampling of other artists' material, and shortening the life span of copyright. The Liberal Party is the first Norwegian political party, and the first European mainstream political party, to advocate file sharing. The Liberal Party's youth wing proposed the resolution."
Software? (Score:2, Interesting)
The article only mentions music - what about software? Would Apple and Microsoft have to provide DRM-free versions of their operating systems?
Near-exact copy of a Swedish Piratpartiet document (Score:5, Interesting)
The Swedish Pirate Party didn't explicitly permit this copying, except for declaring their pages to be "No Copyright". I guess Venstre practice what they preach, and the Swedish Pirate Party has also come out with a statement saying that they welcome this act of copying.
More information about this (in Swedish) from Piratpartiet can be found here [piratpartiet.se].
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
As Pirates (I am a member of the Swedish Pirate Party) we believe there is no inherent right in getting paid for copies. We do however believe in a right to charge for performing a work.
If artists who are out to make money stop producing due to copyright reform -- good riddance. There'll still be plenty of music and culture left, just as there has always been.
To take one example, in the Music Industry, even the big labels don't see recorded music as a product any more -- but rather as advertising for other events and products.
The fact is that technology for unlimited copying is here -- and the laws preventing private exploitation of this technology are outdated and counterproductive. With new technologies, people and products are made redundant. This happens all the time -- today nobody sees the sharp decline in sales and production of horse-whips after the widespread adoption of the automobile as a bad thing for example.
Wish we had medium size political parties (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:tyranny of the majority (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, the Swedish Pirate Party (of which I am a member) uses the pharmaceutical industry as an example of an area where patents are harmful.
The pharmaceutical industry today spends more money on advertising than on R&D, and also receives a very large bulk of its funding through government grants and other subsidies.
Getting rid of the patent system would be a big win for society at large. Maybe then we'd get more drugs for things like AIDS and not as many drugs for erectile disfunction.
Speaking of AIDS drugs, a lot of people in the third world can't afford AIDS treatment because of the artificially inflated drug prices due to patents. Are pharmaceutical patents really worth their cost in human lives?
No -- let the governments continue to fund pharmaceutical research -- maybe more than before, and get rid of patents. It's better for everybody in the long run, except for Big Pharma.
Not impossible, just different. (Score:5, Interesting)
In truth, there probably wouldn't be as many books written, but I'm not sure that's necessarily bad per se; I think our current system encourages the overproduction of many forms of "art" basically on speculation, far more than the market really demands and is willing to pay for, which is why there are so many out-of-work artists of various stripes, e.g. authors who have written books that nobody wants to buy. An approach that resulted in nothing being written without a market for it would result in less pages produced annually, but it would lead to only the stuff that people were actually willing to pay for getting written.
Re:Not impossible, just different. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've read my share of crappy published books, that much is true, but it's one of the markets where publishers are less inclined to take risk publishing a crap book, because profits are so low. With the possible exception of self-help and diet books, which, like that stupid cheese moving book, are inexplicably popular.
I just don't think eliminating copyright completely is the right path. That's not to say I think the current system is perfect; I'd be fine with a ten-year-from-publication limit. Or even five. Of course, at this point anything is better than "99 years after the author kicks it." And I think software patents are stifling. But for entertainment, I can see the need for copyright and a monopoly on distribution.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you propose we pay these aspiring big-name writers?
The fact of the matter -- the problem of the starving author is here, not beceause of copyright law, but despite it.
If you have a solution to solve it, great. Let's hear it, but it certainly doesn't have anything to do with copyright law.
Finally, let me point out that neither Venstre nor the Swedish Pirate Party is proposing a complete abolition of copyright -- we just want to make it clear that it should only cover *commercial* exploitation of a work.
Hardcopies of books will still sell, maybe even more if they're freely available on the net before purchase. I can count several books (of a technical nature) that I have purchased of hardcopies, even though the entire contents of the book was (legally even) available for free on the Internet. This is still not a solution to the starving author problem, but still...
Re:Software? (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? Apple sells a version of OS X that I can run under vmware? I guess the osx86 project [osx86project.org] can shut down now.
Not by a long shot. (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree fundamentally. There is no pro-"subsidization" at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The entire concept of intellectual "property" requires that a society enforce certain totally artificial rules in order to encourage people to do things that they would, presumably, otherwise not do. They are demanding that everyone pay money to the government, in the form of taxes, for enforcing restrictions on individuals' physical-property rights that only benefit a very small number of content monopolies.
You have no fundamental right to control what another person can do with information. There is an essential difference between someone breaking into your house and stealing a bunch of manuscripts on your desk, and between copying something that they bought legitimately from a publisher. The idea that I can publish and sell you a printed sheet with something written on it, but at the same time prohibit you from photocopying it (or, for that matter, making it into a collage or papering your catbox with it) is completely artificial. It represents an assault on one right -- that of being secure and having control over one's own possessions -- in exchange for a vaporous goal of engineering society in a way that a minority feel is beneficial. Sounds a lot like communism to me.
That some of the same political parties who support a re-evaluation of intellectual "property" laws also support other measures, some of which are redistributive or socialist, does not necessarily imply that anyone who is anti-IP is a communist. To say that is dishonest and discourages meaningful discourse; frankly it borders on McCarythism. There are many people, myself included, who are unconvinced of the merits of the current IP law framework and system, but who are sharply critical of redistributive ideologies.
Re:Technological neutrality (Score:3, Interesting)
What if I owned a PSP and wanted to play the New Super Mario Bros. on it? Would I be justified in warezing the rom and hacking my PSP's firmware to play it, so long as I sent my $30 check to Nintendo Norway? Could I request Microsoft release NT3.5 for my super nintendo so that it's cross platform?
Re:Technological neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this mean that software bought to run on a Windows PC should also run on a Mac, Linux PC, whatever?
No, it means it should not be artificially restricted from doing so.
This is a completely separate issue from _requiring_ software to be multiplatform.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
thats communism right?
I'm not trolling, or being negative, I repesct people who believe in communist principles, but often (in my experience) they don't realise what they are.
You expect people who can manufacture products (songs, software etc) to do so without any expectation of being compensated for the fruits of their labour (assuming those fruits are desired and consumed). That remind me of "to each according to their needs, from each according to their means".
Of course the flipside of it, is that everyone has to go out and work and abide by the same principle. If you are a farmer, and I'm a software developer, I can pop round your hosue and take some bread and eggs and meat when I am hungry, without paying you. That's how the system works.
Or do you belive just ins ome special new radical form of communism where people who make physical goods work as capitalists, and the schmucks who make copyable goods have to uphold the communist side?
Re:Ban on DRM is a terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
It can work sufficiently well that a large portion of the people with playstations, for example, are in practice unable to make a backup of their game and have that backup work.
This is a fact -- despite you being correct: there are ways to break it, and determined people can indeed manage to copy and play playstation-games.
I don't think banning DRM is needed. I would however advocate an either-or approach:
For a work to enjoy copyrigth, it should be published in an open unprotected form. If you have your own technological mechanisms for restricting what people can do with your work, then obviously you don't need copyrigth *aditionally*.
Besides, no current DRM-system has adequate (as in ANY!) mechanisms for ensuring the balances of copyrigth, such as the expiry of protection or fair use.
Re:Ban on DRM is a terrible idea (Score:3, Interesting)
We should welcome this as it is the first big step of defiance against the EUCD. If Norway banned DRM it would give the anti-EUCD lobby some much-needed ammunition.