Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
July 3, 2008
The founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge, explaining the European (and US) copyfight in terms of Copyright Vs. Civil Liberties. In short, for the media industry to prevent breach of copyright they must remove all previously held privacy laws and monitor everything you do online. To prevent this Falkvinge launched the Pirate Party to battle in the Swedish polls. For more on Rick try this video presentation.
Chances are you’ve never been welcomed in front of an audience with “Arrrr!” Chances are, however, that you are not the founder of the Pirates Political Party. It’s a rapidly growing group located in Sweden. The name was chosen to represent piracy, or “stealing” copyrighted products because the Party is firmly against corporate ownership.
The danger in copyrights and patents, says Falkvinge, is that they make it illegal to possess or purchase or download or provide copyrighted data and products. In order to enforce such a law in the Digital-Age, though, all communication and activity would need to be monitored. In other words, to make sure you weren’t stealing a company’s music, they would need to tap your Internet. It goes even beyond that with the possibility of laws that would not only impose actual jail time for copyright infringement, but hold the sites and internet-providers responsible for what others due on their pages.
That’s why the Pirate Party exists. They want to change the current situation of heavily protected corporate privacy and the increasing publicity of the private affairs of people. While they may be small in number now, the Pirates are growing fast and hope to become a “wedge” party. This means that, while it would be unlikely that they would ever personally win an election, each major side needs the support of the Pirate Party in order to achieve a majority. Captain Falkvinge is ingenious, is he not?
