Pirate Party's North American Debut 178
adonoman writes "A 25-year-old Winnipeg businessman is the first Pirate Party of Canada candidate to run for federal election. At the same time, the US and UK pirate parties have put out an open letter to Anonymous requesting that they cease Operation Payback's DDOS attacks and focus on taking a legal route to fix intellectual property law."
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Legal means have been exhausted
Unless and until a dictatorship is in place, there is always a legal means: getting elected and changing the copyright laws.
A politician that listens. What a difference (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in America, we have politicians that tell us to grin and bear the gloved hand of tyranny up our metaphorical rectums. This past week has been a tumultuous time for our country with millions upon millions angry, demanding the end to the usurpation of our human rights. These calls have fallen on deaf ears.
Canada, the great untamed frontier, still seems to have politicians who put people over policy. What a topsy-turvy world we live in that we Americans finally look northward for leadership!
Maybe it's time we held our own Boxing Day.
Candidate's single sign... (Score:5, Interesting)
More than that (Score:3, Interesting)
I think what it means is that it makes you feel good.
There is that but there is also the fact that if it makes your oppressors even more oppressive then they are likely to irritate even more people. This will improve your support and give your arguments even more weight.
An important step has already been taken in that direction in Canada: Access Canada, the body which licenses Universities to use copyrighted material, has raised its fees by almost a factor of three and also added additional, more restrictive terms. The result is that all the major Canadian universities have opted not to renew the licence. I now foresee a huge backlash amongst faculty and students as access to material will now either become far more restricted or expensive. Give it enough years and enough students should have been affected that there will be some change.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)
The media has a deep invested interest in the preservation of copyright as most of their business models revolve around it, be it in print, TV, radio or online. It's not about left wing or right wing, they're pretty much all pro-copyright mouthpieces. I think trying to win sympathizers, that is non-participants that still sympathize will not get you anywhere. It's about recruiting participants and making them aware how many of the people around them do it too. Raise the "status" of being a file sharer to something you openly admit to the people around you. The potential is huge, in Sweden it's up to 20% of the population now and roughly 50% in males 16-25. 20% of 300 million Americans is 60 million.
To take one example - and I'm not comparing copyright to Gandhi's fight here - Gandhi broke the salt law simply by telling everyone to make salt. The British arrested over 60,000 people in one month. ONE month. Every jail they had ran full and yet they still kept doing it and trading it, there was no end and no victory in sight. That's how copyright will fall too, through the sheer mass of people, not a few demonstrators doing it as a provocation but many doing it for themselves. Granted they did get public sympathy, but that was not the force that led to victory. There's a whole different power in mass civil disobedience than in just civil disobedience.