Interview With Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge 515
mmuch writes "In the wake of the recent copyright debate in Swedish mainstream media, the P2P Consortium has published an interview with Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. He comments on the mainstream politicians starting to understand the issues, the interplay between strict copyright enforcement and mass surveillance, and the chances for global copyright reform." Some choice Falkvinge quotes: "What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy — forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance — realized they were under a serious attack... for the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle. And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is 'thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief'... Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding... When the Iron Curtain fell, all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around."
Re:Fuck you America (Score:3, Informative)
Konrad Zuse [wikipedia.org]?
>motor car (well, us and the Brits)
Gottlieb Daimler [wikipedia.org]?
>and the telephone
Philip Reis [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Don't get political. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fuck you America (Score:3, Informative)
Hmmm, and I thought cars were invented by zee Germans [wikipedia.org].
Digital computers were achieved by Germans and Americans [wikipedia.org] sorta simultaneously in the heat of WWII, but the American ones obviously lived longer (which makes me wonder: did the Soviets invent their own computers during the cold war?).
The earliest incandescent light bulbs were done by brits [wikipedia.org], but weren't so efficient or practical. Edison took the fame for having the most refined solution and for good marketing, but Swan (British) had already commercialized some of his models.
Telephone invention is widely disputed [wikipedia.org]
Another thing Americans love to boast as being their own invention is the airplane. This is, guess what, disputed! [wikipedia.org] (personally, I side for Alberto Santo Dummont's).
Please understand I don't claim the US hasn't contributed to the current technology. They did, a lot, in refining details and improving production techniques. The initial "breaktrough", however, is not reserved to Americans in all instances as some people seem to think.
Re:Fuck you America (Score:3, Informative)
>Konrad Zuse?
John Vincent Atanasoff?
>>and the telephone
>Philip Reis?
From your own cited article:
"Said Judge Lowell, in rendering his famous decision: 'A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by mere improvement of construction. It was left for Bell to discover that the failure was due not to workmanship but to the principle which was adopted as the basis of what had to be done. "
(Bell, of course, was not an American in any case, having been born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada, so it's not clear why you want to knock him down)
Re:Fuck you America (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it didn't happen that way in the first election, seeing as how Bush won that first election without getting the popular vote. You see, we're not exactly a true democracy. We have an Electoral College system which grants every state a number of votes in proportion to their population, making it possible to win by having a distribution of voters [wikipedia.org], but not a majority of voters.
Also taking into account the low voter turnout that the States have, it could be that only a minority of Americans supported him, but it's their own damn fault for not voting.
Re:Fuck you America (Score:1, Informative)
Not even close. The ABC was a non-Turing calculator, not a full computer, and the Zuse Z3 pre-dated it anyway.
Konrad Zuse built the first Turing complete digital solid state computer. I say this as an Englishman, and you know how much we like to claim it as ours.
Re:Fuck you America (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not if you don't want to (Score:5, Informative)
There are plenty of ways the police are bound with regards to entrapment, search and seizure, warrants, interrogation, holding suspects and so on that all limit their effectiveness. Push too far and the people will simply decide this comes at too high a price.
Imagine you wanted to prohibit gay sex (not that long ago we did), and someone said: "The enforcement of this is ineffective, we need the right to break into people's houses at night and lift the covers". At that point it would hardly matter if you agreed with the law, you'd tell them to stay the fuck out of your bedroom. That is where the RIAA is now, and they're being told to stay the fuck out of people's Internet connection.
Re:Don't get political. (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. Funnily enough, that's how I feel about people who dismiss those making complex arguments based on the history and purpose of copyright, the free market model, and the balance between law enforcement and personal liberties as simply being freeloaders and/or Marxists. In actuality, the Pirate Party's arguments are primarily liberal (and not in the watered-down American sense of "generally lefty"). Consider the following quote:
This comes not from Marx, but from Friedrich Hayek [wikipedia.org] in his book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
What are these profits to which you refer? The interview subject, Rick Falkvinge, and the Pirate Party do not profit from file sharing. You may be confusing the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay, which is entirely unrelated. Neither does it disregard the law; its purpose is to change the law, through legal means. This is in part to protect aspects of law (such as the right to private communication) and the respect for the rule of law, which relies on laws being supported by the people as a whole and at least somewhat practically enforceable.
If you have a problem with the last sentence, consider this: the exact same arguments were used to motivate the explicit exception in Swedish copyright law allowing copying of software for personal use, an exception which still stands.
Political Support (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Atanasoff and CERN (Score:1, Informative)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff [wikipedia.org]
The son of a Bulgarian immigrant.... John Atanasoff was born in Hamilton, New York to an electrical engineer and a school teacher.