Ask the UK Pirate Party's Andrew Robinson About the Issues 391
VJ42 writes "With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital Economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate Party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader, Andrew Robinson, has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply."
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet you would find a rather large number of people who think that, for example, making a mix tape is entirely ethical and should be legal. Lots of people don't agree that artists should have ultimate control over their work. Also, who is being *forced*? not giving artists the privilege of ultimate control over the use of their published creations is not *forcing* them to do anything.
I hate that GPL argument. Sure it's technically correct, but the GPL was written with the intent of subverting copyright using it's own rules. The GPL would be unnecessary, and would most definitely not be common had the copyright system been much more lax during the last few decades.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, I disagree with everything you said. No, you shouldn't be able to retain permanent control over an idea. No, saving the GPL is not worth perpetuating our current broken copyright. And no, a world with drastically reduced creator control over their "intellectual property" would be on the whole far less controlling, instead of more.
Besides, how often does the GPL come up in non-commercial cases?
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Bring in a 3 strikes law (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we have a 3 strikes for politicians so that when they've been caught with red handed with their hand in the checkout 3 times they're jailed and banned from ever entering politics again so that the likes of Mandelson would never have got to a position where he could single-handedly manipulate the Digital Economy Bill in the first place?
Priorities for spending of funds (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does your treasurer and campaigns officer, apparently under heavy pressure from the likes of Eric Priezkalns, feel that spending almost all of the party funds on the upcoming general election is the right way to go, given that, realistically, the PPUK will not make much of an impact in these elections? Don't you think that the better approach is a long-term one, and blowing all the money available to the party right now on the upcoming elections would be resources badly spent, when they could be better used to garner long-term widespread support/publicity, and apply long-term pressure?
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:3, Insightful)
I think BSD license would be a lot closer in subverting copyrights using it's own rules. GPL clearly states that if you GPL'd code, along with the binaries you need to make your own source code available too. Having the source code available is something the author wanted and is using his right over his work. Without copyrights anyone could take anyones code and never release the modifications or even relicense it under non-compliant license like BSD license.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do artists get to control their creation after they sell it? Manufacturers don't. Crafts makers don't. If I sell you a car I can't tell you how fast to drive it, where to drive it, or what brand of oil you can use for oil changes. Just because something is "artistic" or "creative" (a property that is ill defined and could apply to anything) should not give you special rights. You made something, you sold it, they can now do whatever they want with it.
Since when is autorship transferrable? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people believe that I can give the fact that I wrote a story or a song away? Shouldn't the first issue in any copyright negotiations be that the author's right is non-transferable?
If author's rights are transferable, the "new author" (a publisher, for example) will not write the sequel to the original book, nor write the next song of the original author. In fact, the author is only discouraged to write anything if somebody else can steal his rights.
Re:Money (Score:2, Insightful)
Easy to answer. Content creators will be paid for the work they are actually doing at the time of content creation, not for the work they have done 20 years ago. The people that need the content---be it music, software, news or books---will pay the content creators. How this works in the detail depends on the domain. Most musicians, for example, already today live off teaching and giving concerts, so for them the changes will not be very huge. Journals and news items will probably become subscription-based and hand-tailored to the interests of the customers. How it affects the book market I personally cannot imagine, but since the vast majority of authors cannot make a living out of their books right now either, the changes will be much smaller than you might expect. I suppose the selling of physical items will become more important, so e.g. things like the quality of the print and typesetting of a book will matter more than now. Textbooks will be written by university staff and made available for free, which is already getting more and more common without changes in copyright law. All in all, the changes will be smaller than people might expect. However, there will be less crappy pop music, because wannabe musicians will no longer be able to compete against the professionals who have studied their instruments when their most important source of income is from live music and teaching.
Re:Money (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there is no a priori right to make money from an activity but what's the a priori right behind property laws (one man's property is another indigenous people's theft) or earning a wage for any job? Copyright has allowed us to move beyond the creative tyranny of patronage to an explosion of independent creation and allowing the investment of ridiculous sums of money into creative works.
Sure the setup we've got now is tilted incorrectly but the correct solution is reform not to burn the whole edifice to the ground.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless every piece of software is open source, which is the goal of the Gnu project. Then copyright would be meaningless.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:5, Insightful)
Should creators have rights over their work? Yes. For a limited time. The problem is that the time is no longer limited and it is not the creators who are asserting rights, but huge third parties who are small in number. Small numbers of players in a marketplace means the consumer is screwed.
Mickey Mouse should have been free LONG LONG ago but is not. Much very old music such as "happy birthday" is still being used as a weapon against people everywhere instead of being released to the public as it should have been long ago.
The problem isn't that authors are being forced to lose control of their work -- it's that they are not. Worse, the authors ARE being forced into losing control of their work in favor of large copyright publishers.
Your idealism in in some of the right places, but to see the problems, you have to first see reality as it is practiced.
Re:Money (Score:1, Insightful)
Because I like new games that require a team of 100 and millions of dollars to produce?
Copyright has allowed us to move beyond the creative tyranny of patronage to
the tyranny of corporate control of all works.
This is not an improvement. Corporations don't get old and start worrying about their legacy.
The Rest of Your Views & Stances (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:0, Insightful)
So if I use 3-4 years to learn an instrument, 1 year to write songs, 2 months and 10 000$ to rent a studio and record an album, I should only get paid 20$ for one CD which the buyer then can copy and sell as many times as he wants?
The difference between music/movies/books and almost all other merchandise, is how easily it can be copied and distributed in an unlimited amount. In the case of a Car, the only thing copyrighted/trademarked is the design, because that is the only thing that can be copied an unlimited number of times for a small price. If I had made a car and you bought one, copied it several times and sold the copies, you would still have to spend money on buying materials, pay people to assemble the car, run commercials and the like. You would therefore have to charge a prize that would allow you to cover your costs, and I would be able to compete on a relatively equal basis.
If on the other hand you bought my CD, ripped it and sold it online, you would be able to charge much less than me, because you would not have to pay for musicians, studio time, advertisement, etc. etc.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL is an anomaly caused by strong copyright. If it was easier to merely contribute to the public domain and copyright had realistic fair use then the GPL would be unnecessary.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree - politics basically works by middle ground. In many cases, it's an argument to moderation fallacy, and it's poor for many reasons (including the fact that it rewards people for taking extreme positions), but despite being a fallacy, it's how politics works.
If some people say "Copyright should be life plus 70 years, be extended whenever Mickey Mouse might become public domain, we should have laws criminalising telling people how to circumvent protections even if you legally bought the material, and anyone suspected of downloading should be banned from the Internet", and on the other hand you have an already compromising and reasonable stance, say, "Copyright should last 50 years, and maybe some of these other laws are too strict", what will happen? We won't get "Ah yes, the latter guy talks sense", instead at best will be a compromise between those two positions.
Also it's worth remembering that even the Pirate party's "extreme" position still believes in copyright for commercial use (IIRC, 10 years for the UK party?) The OP refers to the GPL, but most outrages of GPL violations seem to be about commercial use, in my experience.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition, they still have other terms we have to agree to like EULAs and terms of use.
The only plausible argument for EULs being a valid contract is based on copyright: namely, you need permission to even copy it from disk to memory, so you'll be committing copyright infringement if you don't accept the licence.
So if it was no longer copyrighted, you could simply use it without accepting the licence.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:3, Insightful)
which the buyer then can copy and sell as many times as he wants
No, that wouldn't come under non-commercial.
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Forcing authors to lose rights over work (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Since when is autorship transferrable? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is quite common in the financial world to sell an asset early for a smaller sum rather than wait for its full value to appreciate. There are several benefits to this. The first is that you get the money now. You may need the money to pay for things like rent and food. A million dollars ten years from now does me no good if I starve to death today. The second (and more important) is that you can offload risk to another person. Your song/book/software *might* be worth millions or it might be worth nothing. Sometimes it is better to opt for the security of a real paycheck rather than hope you will strike it rich sometime in the future.
As an author of software I have never regretted having the option to transfer my work to others in exchange for money. Although I made much more money for others than I made for myself, I don't think I was financially taken advantage of. The security of the paycheck was well worth it. These days I wouldn't transfer my copyright simply for money, but that's more an issue of control than anything else. I was never happy with *how* my work was used and how the customer was treated. By retaining the copyright I have more control. But I also don't make any money doing it ;-)
Re:Questions (Score:3, Insightful)
I see the point you're making - but most of those questions are only relevant for a party forming a Government.
There's no chance of that happening here - I don't mean that in a "they won't get that many votes" sense, but I mean in the sense that they don't have enough people even standing for election. So such a thing is impossible.
It's still important I think to have policies on a wide range of issues, because if you had one as your MP, you'd still want to write to him, and hope he has an opinion on more than a single issue, and such things would be voted on in the Commons.
But let's be fair - individual MPs are not expected to come up with solutions to the economy, or immigration problems. (As an aside, I'm not sure what uncontrolled problem you are referring to - although I appreciate that these might be questions asked by your typical Daily Mail reader, so it's useful to have responses to them.)
Re:The Rest of Your Views & Stances (Score:5, Insightful)
Your question appears to be based on a flawed premise.
Do not vote on who you want to be the Prime Minister. Vote on who you want to represent your interests in parliament.
Yes, it's useful if that representative doesn't present views with which you agree on broader issues (foreign policy, education, healthcare, taxation being the usual suspects) but in reality a PPUK vote isn't even voting in a candidate; it's voting for a given issue ahead of the others.
If you really care strongly about foreign policy then vote for a candidate that will represent your views. If you care about a range of issues, find a candidate that represents you the best across the range.
If you find that the three main parties are all corrupt and pushing broadly the same policies, the Greens have no sense of reality, the BNP are a bunch of racist fuckwits and none of the independent candidates have knocked on your door to tell you what they're standing for, then why not vote for a single issue party. If you hate Europe vote UKIP, if you want greater transparency and online rights then vote PPUK.
Re:The Rest of Your Views & Stances (Score:4, Insightful)
Voting (to me) shows more than support. It shows I am confident in that person or group as leader of my country.
And this is why we're in the mess we're in. Our politicians are meant to be our servants, not our masters; I don't vote for a leader, I vote for a representative that I can hold to account.
Forcing Artifical Scarcity into Digital Works (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Forcing Artifical Scarcity into Digital Works (Score:1, Insightful)