The Pirate Party

[sinisterpanda]

I don't think this is going to work. I think their objectives of protecting identity is a noble cause; however, getting rid of patents is just crazy talk.

A fledgling new political movement calling itself The Pirate Party of the United States has emerged from the dust of last month's police raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden.

Six days after the May 31 seizure of BitTorrent servers, the new organization's website, was up and running. Organizers claim the newly launched site drew over 100,000 hits in a little over a week.

The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party associated with The Pirate Bay, and says it wants to reform intellectual property and privacy laws. Piratpartiet was launched January 1, and by the end of that first day had gathered the 1,500 signatures it needed to participate in Sweden's upcoming parliamentary elections in September.

Wired News interviewed the founder of The Pirate Party of the United States, Brent Allison, 30, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, and his provisional co-chair David Segal, 20, a computer science major at the University of California Santa Barbara. They shared their thoughts on the stormy seas ahead.


I didn't include the interview. Hop on over to read it http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,71180-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1

Here's the pirate party website: http://pirate-party.us/

Thoughts?

[AliBabaIncorporated]

Copyrights are basically a form of subsidy from media consumers to media creators. They result in overproduction of media, and I don't see why they should exist in the first place, let alone why the government should use public money to enforce them. It's especially offensive in developing countries. China spends millions of dollars of its citizens money hiring police to go around finding pirated DVDs, LV bags, etc. on behalf of billion-dollar international corporations. I say fuck the international corporations, they want to protect their products, they can damn well do it themselves; China needs the money to hire teachers, workplace safety inspectors, police for investigating REAL crimes, etc.

Also, if getting a certain piece of content created is valuable enough to someone, they'd pay for that content to get created even if it meant it would immediately come into the public domain after getting created.
If you don't want a certain piece of content to go into the public domain, declare it a trade secret and don't distribute it.

(Though I think removing copyright would cause a big problem specifically for software, due to the dirty secret of open source software: a lot of it is written by people slacking off on company time, and those people wouldn't have jobs in the first place if it wasn't for copyrights giving the boost to their employer's bottom line).

[Atealtha]

The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party associated with The Pirate Bay.
I'm sure the Pirate party has no association with the Pirate Bay. Wired is getting lazy with the fact checking.

Seeing as how my job as a freelancer depends on me holding copyright, I'm conflicted over this issue now. But yeah hiring officers to catch bootleggers is a waste of money.

[sinisterpanda]

because, ideas are sort of like a public good once they get out. If no one gets paid for it, then the creator of ideas won't want it to share it. And it's not like roads where the gov't can just provide it. I like copyrights, and the laws behind them. But i like pirating too. Am I a walking hypocrisy?

[AliBabaIncorporated]

because, ideas are sort of like a public good once they get out. If no one gets paid for it, then the creator of ideas won't want it to share it.
Well, so what? Maybe we overproduce certain kinds of ideas. Look at all the shit coming out of Hollywood every year. 90% of actors and popstars deserve to be replaced by a bunch of unpaid hobbyists creating content in their spare time, a la YouTube. Hopefully technology will advance far enough to enable that on a large scale.

Also, I think your conception is wrong that the creator of ideas won't want to share. To give a basic example, let's say some company creates some computer program in order to improve their productivity internally. Now, they've already spent the money, and they're already getting the benefit. It's a sunk cost. So theoretically, there is some amount of money you could pay them to convince them to release that program into the public domain. And that amount of money shouldn't be so high (especially if it's an older version of the program, and wouldn't give the competition the same productivity increase that the original company itself is getting).

[VV o n g B a]

i hate the current implementation of copyright but i also think ur alternative is excessive. there's certainly a lot of shit that comes out of hollywood, but occasionally there's something like star wars, the matrix or shawshank redemption that just amazes u. movie art, like most big art, is subsidized by the general population. for all the flops there's an occasional gem that wouldn't be there otherwise.

i'm not sure that unpaid hobbyists would be able to create the gems. if their primary occupation isn't devoted to crafting their art of moviemaking, would they be as good at it as a dedicated professional? maybe something approaching patent law would be better. is it reasonable if all copyrighted works would fall into public domain after 5-10 years?

[sinisterpanda]

Alibaba, i think you're being a little idealistic. Economically speaking, commercial companies will not create something unless they can profit from it, and ensure that they are the only ones that can profit from it. If i'm trying to write a book, i want to make sure that someone who can market the book better than i am (e.g. someone rich) isn't going to just steal it off the shelf, re-publish it, and sell it again. Besides, most copyrights have limits. I'm not talking about what I think or I believe, i'm talking about not only the legislation behind copyrights, but also the economics behind it.

Maybe it's because i'm a business/econ major, but copyrights just make sense.