[Infowarrior] - IP OpEd from EU Pirate Party member

[Richard Forno]

Copyright laws threaten our online freedom
By Christian Engström

Published: July 7 2009 18:10 | Last updated: July 7 2009 18:10

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87c523a4-6b18-11de-861d-00144feabdc0.html

(The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament)

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of  
text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But  
you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright  
restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not  
“ours” at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes  
for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices  
handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up  
possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture,  
not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current  
regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright  
laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate  
with each other in private, without being monitored.
File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another.  
The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all  
communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on  
Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade,  
the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the  
authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still  
send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private  
networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government  
the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever  
there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share  
copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must  
remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option.  
Society has to make a choice.

The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information  
technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will  
change. But the direction has not been decided.

The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond  
our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every  
detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed  
tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using  
typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same  
thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many  
politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that  
embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens  
are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture  
through one-way media, but are instead active participants  
collaborating on a journey into the future.

The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic  
things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer  
operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the  
participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the  
Pirate Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to  
anybody with an internet connection. But where technology opens up new  
possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to  
restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples  
by copyright.

The public increasingly recognises the need for reform. That was why  
Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote  
in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the  
European parliament for the first time.

Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the  
patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net,  
as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and  
transparent. This is our entire platform.

We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the  
fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent  
of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other  
political differences aside in order to ensure this.

Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set  
the course we take into the information society, and will affect the  
lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our  
fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have  
the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open  
society?

The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us  
to decide what future we want.


The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament