The threat against private communications isn’t the only thing wrong with the copyright monopoly, of course. I have previously argued here on TorrentFreak that there’s really nothing defensible about the monopoly at all. But in order to break the spell of “publishers have always told me that the copyright monopoly is good and I have never had any reason to question their self-interest in the matter”, there are other tricks of honest, effective argumentation.

While it’s possible to attack the copyright monopoly construct from many angles – all of them, in fact – some fruit is more low-hanging than others. One easy angle is to point at the usual (horrible) motivation of the copyright monopoly; that it “enables creators to make money” (which is factually false, misleading, and dishonest). If you’re talking to a monopoly pundit, or just somebody who hasn’t had reason to question the monopoly, this point will come up sooner or later.

Once this point comes up, it’s an open goal. To make sure you understood the point correctly, reiterate back; “So your point is that they should be rewarded with a monopoly to make money, in order to give them an incentive to create more art?” Any monopoly pundit will nod enthusiastically.

Then, score the goal. “So why does the monopoly last 70 years after the author’s death? I don’t know of a single author who keeps writing books after they’re dead and buried. The copyright monopoly term is at least 70 years – a whole lifetime – too long. And if it is that obviously 70 years too long, then it’s absurd in the first place.”

Occasionally, you’ll see some fightback that their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren should inherit the privileges of the author, which you can easily refute by pointing out that the purpose was already agreed to be an incentive for the artist to create more art, not for their children to get privileged at the expense of others.

Once you have established that the copyright monopoly term is indefensively long – at least a lifetime too long – then the facade of pretend perfection is broken. If something as fundamental as that can be questioned, and it can, then everything else is also up in the air.

Have fun making the pennies drop and the facades crack.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It’s no secret that I’m the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, and that we’ve delivered during our term in the Europarl since 2009, as one important part of this liberty movement. We stopped three strikes in Europe – most people don’t even remember that it was a real danger that the copyright industry could do something as unthinkable as actually shut people off the Internet en masse by just pointing fingers. Our people on the inside were also critical in stopping ACTA. Our line with strong Net Neutrality, going against the European Commission, just won an important first reading on the European Parliament floor. We managed to get mainline support for a radical copyright monopoly reform proposal that would, as part of the package, fully legalize noncommercial file-sharing and ban DRM. This is not news, just background.

For the past five years, we’ve seen important battles being fought where we – we as a liberty movement and pretty much as a whole generation – have managed to keep dark forces at bay. The next five years will give us an opportunity to go on the offensive and actually start improving the legal state of things, rather than just preventing them from getting worse. I cannot overemphasize how great this opportunity is. However, this obviously requires that we have people in the European Parliament who can outvoice the corporate lobbyists.

Outvoicing lobbyists isn’t actually a very hard thing to do, if you’re a Member of Parliament yourself. Lobbyists have a strong voice when, and only when, MPs and MEPs don’t have a good view of the subject on their own. When people on the inside of Parliament are able to call out the lobbyist bullshit as just that, those lobbyists lose an enormous amount of influence. That’s why it’s absolutely critical to have people – individuals – in office who understand the issues and are able to do so.

The issues for the coming five years will be an opportunity to go on the offensive for liberty. We’ve already had a first reading of strong Net Neutrality in Europe, locking down the fundamental principle of the net that everybody’s an equal, and denying the telcos the right to seek rent for running a business. This is absolutely critical – it’s a matter of whether we want free enterprise in Europe or not. We’ve won in a so-called first reading, but this issue will bounce a bit between the EU institutions until determined, so it will spill over past the election and be finalized by the next European Parliament.

Net Neutrality will be finalized in the next five years.

On an even stronger note, the entire copyright monopoly will be rewritten in the European Union in the next five years. Literally everything is up in the air, and many lobbyists will be fighting for the corporate clampdown on liberty and freedom of speech. But we’ve learned how to outvoice and outcompete those activists now. There is a very real possibility that we can finally settle that freedom of speech, messenger immunity, and the civil liberties we exercise through the net (mostly all of them) totally, unequivocally, and unambiguously supersede the copyright monopoly – a distribution monopoly for a powerful but basically unnecessary entertainment industry.

Legalized file-sharing and a ban on DRM can be a reality in the next five years.

The future of the net is being determined in the next six weeks. And what happens in Europe, will necessarily spill over to the rest of the world – if file-sharing is legal in Europe, no country is able to effectively outlaw it, as it only takes one country to undo today’s ridiculous monopoly. Once file-sharing is completely legal, and I really want to underscore that this is within reach now, any lobbyism from the copyright industry for harsher penalties will be for absolutely nothing, as you can’t penalize a legal action to begin with.

Obviously, I’m not going to use a TorrentFreak column to tell people to vote Pirate. That would be abuse of column privileges, and besides, most everybody know I’m the founder of the Pirate party movement, so people would read it like that anyway. But the reason I founded this movement is because I think there was and still is a critical shortage of politicians who take these issues with the gravity they deserve – no, let’s say there’s a shortage of net liberty activists in office who understand the importance of the net.

So what I am going to do, if you live in Europe, is to ask you to vote in the European Elections, and to do so for a candidate who does take these issues seriously.

It doesn’t much matter what party they’re running for – all the good forces cooperate on an individual level in the European Parliament, regardless of party affiliation, and we need individuals in parliament who understand net neutrality, basic liberty, and the problems with Industrial Protectionism (IP) at a deep level. After all, if you’re reading TorrentFreak, odds are overwhelmingly in favor of you understanding the crucial importance of these issues to every aspect of our common future.

In May, that future is in your hands. What I ask is that you participate.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In order to prevent copyright monopoly violations from happening in such channels, the only means possible is to wiretap all private digital communications to discover when copyrighted works are being communicated. As a side effect, you would eliminate private communications as a concept. There is no way to sort communications into legal and illegal without breaching the postal secret – the activity of sorting requires observation.

Therefore, as a society, we are at a crossroads where we can make a choice between privacy and the ability to communicate in private, with all the other things that depend on that ability (like whistleblower protections and freedom of the press), or a distribution monopoly for a particular entertainment industry. These two have become mutually exclusive and cannot coexist, which is also why you see the copyright industry lobbying so hard for more surveillance, wiretapping, tracking, and data retention (they understand this perfectly).

Also, the means of discussing knowledge and culture has changed quite a bit with new enabling technology. Before the internet, you’d discuss a song or movie by listening or seeing it on your own and then discussing it together; today, the culture and knowledge itself is part of the discussion – we share a file with something and then discuss it, all in the same conversation. Therefore, the initial statement that a private communications channel can be used for either private, privileged correspondence or violations of the copyright monopoly isn’t really true; the way we talk and work today, it’s used for both at the same time.

When I was a young kid, the Internet did not exist. My father and mother would tell me stories at bedtime; stories that I would normally have told to my kids in turn. For some reason, this is now illegal. (Not that the law is being respected – but still.) This is a very similar example of how private communications is also used for cultural exchange, although before the net and “modern” law on the area.

In one of my first presentations on this subject in 2006, at the net-entrepreneur SIME conference in Stockholm, Sweden, I gave a piece of advice to wannabe entrepreneurs that relates to this observation.

I said; “The companies that will be struggling in ten years will be those with business models that depend on preventing people from sharing with each other. The companies that survive will be those who are indifferent to sharing. But those who thrive and dominate, they will be the ones that wholly depend on people sharing with each other.”

Eight years later, this seems rather obvious, but it wasn’t in 2006. At the time, it was rather provocative that somebody would have a business model that depended on sharing.

So what’s that magic sentence, then, after all this background? It’s this (somewhat paraphrased):

“The very concept of a business around the copyright monopoly revolves around the ability to prevent people from telling each other interesting things.” — Scary Devil Monastery (as part of a larger comment to this article)

And that, in a nutshell, is why the copyright industry is dead as a doornail. It’s just zombieing around for a bit first.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When computers allowed us to manufacture our own copies of culture and knowledge from what we observed firsthand online, the copyright industry – which held a monopoly on such duplication, keeping culture and knowledge scarce – went obsolete, and in the face of the new abundance of culture and knowledge everywhere, new scarcities appeared. For example, when you have more or less all the world’s music on your hard drive, it becomes tiresome and laborious to sort it into listening to what you want.

When the music service Pandora was launched, it did exactly this: it solved the new scarcity, the ability to sort out the abundance. I am paying subscriber number 110 out of today’s 20 million or so (and I’ve also been paying for ways to circumvent the silly attempt to lock the service to the United States). This is easy to verify.

This is notable because pirates aren’t unwilling to pay for culture and knowledge services. However, pirates (and by “pirates” I mean the younger 150 million Americans, 250 million Europeans, and roughly the younger half of the rest of the world’s population) are unwilling to pay for obsolete services, such as duplication. Pirates are early adopters.

Let’s take that again, because it is key to stopping parroting this ignorance of “don’t want to pay” about the situation with people happily sharing culture and knowledge online:

Pirates are early adopters. If you put something new and shiny in their hands, they will throw money at you. Conversely, they will be among the first to identify a stale market and abandon it. Further, they will not – ever – accept laws that lock them in to a service they haven’t asked for, especially not when they can do the same thing themselves at practically no effort, such as manufacturing copies of movies, music, games, or software from their own raw material and labor.

Obviously, this means you can’t morally oblige pirates to pay for manufacturing their own copies using their own labor and materials, even if the law says you have the right to tax and fine them for doing so. That comes across as extremely heavy-handed and repressive.

This has happened many times before, and these situations tend to resolve in about the same way. One of the more famous occasions resulted in a huge tea party on the docks of Boston. This is despite the fact that those people didn’t seem to have a problem as such paying the tea taxes; it simply wasn’t about the money, as it never is.

You can dismiss pirates as just being greedy and surely able to pay if they wanted, just as you could dismiss the colonist tea drinkers as greedy bastards who surely could afford to pay the tax on their English tea. And in doing so, you’d be missing the point entirely, choosing to grotesquely mischaracterize a situation in order to stay comfortable but ignorant.

“But the Boston Tea Party was about taxation without representation!”, some would say. “The copyright monopoly issue is different!”

Is it, really?

Really?

Let’s review the facts at hand. The copyright monopoly laws were constructed to benefit the public, and the public only. In the U.S. Constitution, we can read clearly that the purpose of the copyright monopoly is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is important to note this, as the purpose of the monopoly (“exclusive right”) is not and was never to allow somebody to make money on a particular activity. In particular, its purpose was never to allow somebody to keep making money the same way they always had, even when technology had changed the landscape and their offering didn’t add any value anymore.

The copyright monopoly is a balance, but it is a balance between two competing interests of the public: the public’s interest in promoting new science and arts, and the same public’s interest in having access to that science and arts. The copyright industry is not a legitimate interest in this legislation.

This is where the problem begins. For when we look at how the copyright monopoly legislation has been written and re-written in the past decades, it has been entirely tailored to the wishes of the obsolete middleman industry, increasingly upping the penalties for circumventing their monopoly deadlock. The interest of the public – the only legitimate stakeholder – is not, and has not been, considered at all. Simply put, the public isn’t represented.

So if a law that forces people to pay something unnecessarily and involuntarily isn’t taxation, then what is it?

And if their interests aren’t being represented in that legislation… well…?

This argument may come across as esoteric and outlandish to those who defend the copyright monopoly, but I guarantee those people two things: First, that the “you only want things for free!” parroting comes across as just as outlandish and reality-defiant to those envelope-pushing entrepreneurs who understand technology and society, and second, that the “taxation without representation” call after the Boston Tea Party would come across as exactly as outlandish to those who were the self-declared nobility of that time.

I don’t want to hear the “you just don’t want to pay” ever again. We are manufacturing our own copies from what we observe firsthand with our own labor and materials, and we have every moral, philosophical, ethical, economical, and natural right to do so. We reject an obsolete industry’s legal right to enact private taxation on us for our own work. If you want to be part of the future, at least try to understand the bigger picture.

Here’s to hoping the debate in 2014 will be just slightly better than in all the previous years since I got involved in this debate, which was in about 1987. It’s up to all of us to force the debate to go there.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“Swarmwise is a summary of what I learned on building a cost-efficient community that is capable of delivering to world-changing levels,” Rick told TorrentFreak.

“We put people in the European Parliament on less than one percent of the competition’s budget, and we beat them. There is a lot of new stuff here on leadership, swarming, and community-building that I haven’t seen anywhere else.”

Rick says that the techniques he describes in his book work equally well whether they are applied in social, business or political environments.

“The only consistent factor is that the person wanting to change the world needs to be short on cash and time,” he notes.

Swarmwise is due for a release soon but this morning (perhaps somewhat fittingly considering Rick’s unswerving support for file-sharing) the book leaked on The Pirate Bay. Well, that seems to have been the intention at least.

The torrent, uploaded by an anonymous account, carried with it a somewhat taunting message.

“From the author that you love to hate, or hate to love. That delivers lulz and facepalms in equal doses,” the release begins. “Just remember, dear Ricky, where ‘your’ ideas come from. They are as unique as any musicians music, or any writers concepts.”

However, despite the leak and the mocking tone, the leaker’s plan fell off the rails. Rick himself had quickly jumped on the torrent and he didn’t like what he was confronted with.

“Oh come ON, what kind of release is this? It’s not even properly packed,” he wrote. “Come on, you don’t need a multi-part ZIP inside a RAR archive when you’re already inside a torrent folder.”

Rick informs TorrentFreak that he had anticipated the possibility of a leak and only had a problem when it was badly presented.

“I was concerned that the people who went for the torrent may get disappointed in the quality of it, and that may reflect badly on the leadership book I’ve been working on for four years,” he explained.

Trying to put things right, Rick took matters into his own hands.

“If you really want this book in pre-release quality, don’t use this torrent, it appears to be broken,” he wrote, adding a link to a PDF on his own site instead for good measure.

“So, much better to make sure that the people who search for Swarmwise and find the torrent actually can get the pre-release version advertised,” Rick told us. “It’s still not proper, with draft image quality and stuff, but at least it’s the advertised pre-release.”

Of course, considering Rick’s anti-copyright stance he’s hardly likely to complain about the leak, but now he’s on the receiving end, how does that feel?

“A leak is an interest in your work. As such, it is a golden business opportunity to connect with your potential customers and/or people you want to get to know, for a myriad of reasons,” Rick explains.

“Of bloody course you want to make yourself known and say hi if there’s a torrent of your book somewhere? How else are you going to build a community? Which, by the way, is what the book is about: building a community and delivering. A bit of meta-levels there.”

Fans of Rick’s work will be able to buy a paper version of the book on Amazon next week but if they can wait and don’t want Rick’s ‘workprint’ style version, a finished electronic version will be out soon, free of charge (and free to share) of course.

“Actually, it’s more than free to share; the copyright monopoly page (which is usually filled with grim FBI warnings etc) says outright that people are _encouraged_ to share it with friends if they like it. I think that’s only proper,” Rick says.

Finally, we asked Rick if there was one single lesson that he’d like a reader to take from his book, what would that be?

“Whether you think you can or cannot change the world, you’re most likely correct,” he concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It didn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way. Changing society for the better takes time. It’s easy to laugh at it in retrospect, but I’m taking the opportunity to share my experience and underscore the importance of understanding it. We were elected to the European Parliament in 2009, which was still record time.

What strikes me is that after seven years, I still find myself explaining the most basic concepts of why there is a conflict between the copyright monopoly and private communications as a concept, and every time I explain it patiently, the penny drops for a few more people. That’s how you change society for the better. You explain, explain, and explain again, until you are blue in the face. You need to increase society’s understanding one person at a time, one article at a time.

In marketing, they say that a message hasn’t started to take hold until you personally are absolutely fed up to your limits of sanity with hearing yourself saying it. That’s how it works. That’s how it works when teaching the world what we understand – in particular, the key insight that the copyright monopoly cannot coexist with fundamental civil liberties.

I’ll be returning to that insight and how you – yes, you – can share it. But first, let’s establish that all of us are in different social contexts, and have different experiences and skills in expressing ourselves. When an old insight is communicated in a new context or in a new form of expression, it can reach new people – sometimes, a lot of new people.

We’re used to changing the world in a weekend of coding. We come from the Internet, after all. We’re used to a very long project being on a timescale of weeks. Changing the world and defending civil liberties is a project on a timescale of years, possibly decades – and it’s up to us to do something small every day to make it happen, for the simple reason that nobody else is going to do it for us, as they haven’t understood the importance and connected the dots as we have. It’s up to us to explain it with the skills, words, and expressions that we have at our disposal.

Let’s take one such new expression as an example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person. For all of us readers here at TorrentFreak and similar newsflows, it was old news, and we mostly saw the movie as a valuable expression of our own experiences at the time.

But others were knocked over backwards by the film’s message and its frank, factual documentation. Even people who are quite close to me, people to whom I had been describing all these events in real time with as they played out (and with all the anger that the thorough corruption of the Swedish justice system deserved) called me after having seen the movie – and they were downright devastated. They had no idea of the bigger picture that the movie managed to portray.

Most of us are geeks. We can take it as a personal insult when somebody tells us a fact twice, even if years pass between the two occasions: did they think we weren’t paying attention to what they were saying, or did they think we wouldn’t remember? However, reality outside of our sphere – where the battle of civil liberties, ours and others, are won or lost – is different. And it’s up to us to explain what we know, because people who don’t understand these key concepts are unable to share the the knowledge until we have shared it with them.

It’s a bit like a key message in the movie “Terminator: Salvation”, where people are listening to radio broadcasts from the Resistance, and wondering aloud who the resistance are – and then, the broadcast ends with these words: “If you are hearing this message, you are the resistance”. That’s exactly it.

If you are reading this column, you understand these crucial issues better than most, and therefore have a responsibility toward the civil liberties of yourself and everybody else to explain what you understand about the importance of free speech, the messenger immunity, and a free internet to people around you, in ways that you are personally comfortable with.

If you want a couple of key articles as a primer in explaining why the copyright monopoly cannot coexist with freedom of speech and communications as a concept, and why surveillance is bad, I’d recommend these two which contains reasoning and logic I’ve used successfully for the past seven years:

The Analog Letter explains why the copyright monopoly at today’s level cannot coexist with the concept of a private letter, and how it’s absolutely reasonable that our children have the same civil liberties that our parents had, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the copyright monopoly must be scaled back, and copyright industry profits are irrelevant to the discussion.

Debunking the dangerous “Nothing to fear, nothing to hide” debunks just that dangerous and blatantly false saying of “if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide”, which is wrong on so many levels. (A short retort to that one is “I lock the door when I go to the bathroom, despite nothing unusual going on in there – I just think I have a right to keep it to myself”, which will make some of people think.)

Read them both, and start talking about them, wherever you are, in ways that you are comfortable with. Not just once, but for at least the next decade. Happy changing the world – one conversation, one person at a time. You are the resistance.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Following an earlier court ruling ordering two of the country’s largest ISPs to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, the Court ordered a further five ISPs to block TPB IP addresses and 20 domain names Thursday. The Court then went on to make a decision that was perhaps even more controversial than the first.

The Dutch Pirate Party had been running a proxy service to facilitate access to the now-blocked Pirate Bay, but following pressure from anti-piracy group BREIN their activities were outlawed this week by the Court. The Pirate Party was ordered to shutdown its reverse proxy indefinitely and block Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses from its generic proxy.

However, in a decision that raised eyebrows, Judge Chris Hensen also banned the Party from using their own website to list the locations of other websites that allow the public to circumvent the blockade.

This decision by Henson – which some observers believe amounts to a curtailment of freedom of speech – is not the first the Judge has made of this nature. In 2010, movie studio Eyeworks won its lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In that verdict, Judge Hensen ruled that by allowing users to talk about a copyrighted movie’s location on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.

After the ruling it transpired that Judge Henson and Dirk Visser, the lawyer for the movie studio, had a closer relationship than had been expected. Visser, who also represented BREIN in their victory over Mininova, had been running courses for copyright specialists where Judge Hensen was once one of the teachers.

Of course, now Judge Hensen has delivered a similar ruling, his connections with Visser are being re-examined, not least by Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge who is absolutely scathing.

“This is truly mind-boggling: not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case,” Falkvinge writes.

“Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. From the plaintiff. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt,” Falkvinge adds.

Claims of bias have hounded many big copyright-related cases in recent years, but for whatever reason have never gained any traction. In 2009 following the conviction of the founders of The Pirate Bay, it was revealed that two of the four judges set to hear their appeal were members of pro-copyright groups. The Supreme Court eventually decided that this would not affect their judgment.

The year before it was revealed that police officer Jim Keyzer, the leader and key witness in the initial Pirate Bay investigation, had been recently employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the case. The controversy deepened when it was discovered that his employment with the studio was only temporary – he later returned to the police to head up an IT Crime unit.

This so-called revolving door phenomenon has raised its head time and again in the past couple of years. In March 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell – a former RIAA lobbyist and anti-piracy company boss – delivered a helpful ruling for potential copyright trolls.

Then later that month it was revealed that a former music industry lobbyist had been appointed head of a unit dealing with copyright and enforcement issues at the European Commission.

During early May commenting on the case against Megaupload, law Professor Eric Goldman bemoaned “the revolving door between government and the content industry.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All of a sudden, the Pirate parties are making it possible to vote for the defense and enrichment of the connected lifestyle, which is relevant to the core for the net generation. Thus, because you can vote for it, by definition, it becomes politics – which it wasn’t before.

I guess that’s why it took a long time for me to reconciliate with the fact that i’m a politician. I grew up knowing that politicians are boring, pretentious and infighting. It is only with the expanded use of the word that it makes sense that fighting for civil liberties is, in fact, policymaking. And those of us who fight for net liberty have become politicians, as people can vote for us to… fix things.

Politicians have been de-pedestalized. And that’s good every part of the way.

I’ve understood that a lot of US readers misread me when I say that 9% in an election is a sensation. That’s because the United States and Europe have completely different election systems: in the United States, if you take 9% of the votes, you are crushed, down and out. In (most of) Europe, when you take 9% of the votes, you get 9% of the seats.

That’s why it is fantastic that the German Piratenpartei is polling at 13% and that several more are on the verge of breaking through.

I was struck at the meeting by how many new Pirate parties are on the rapid rise: Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia, the list goes on.

When I was at last year’s PPI meeting, I confided in some people that I thought we could approach 15% long-term. If somebody had told me we’d be there in 12 months, I would not have believed them. Would Not. Things are progressing much faster than I have anticipated.

As I held the closing keynote, I noted that two countries are currently polling at parliamentary levels – Germany and Austria – and made a bold prediction: one year from today, between two and five more countries’ Pirates will be polling at parliamentary levels, meaning they’d enter their parliaments if elections were held.

Czech media was everywhere during the international meeting. The Greek Pirates are polling at one percent, just three months after founding. PP Luxembourg is showing clear signs of making the next election.

And as I flipped open my Android netbook to write the summary of the meeting, I learned that the Austrian Pirate Party had just taken its first parliamentary seat, in the local election of Innsbruck.

This journey is great to be part of.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Rick Falkvinge is known as the founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden back in 2006.

The success of this party didn’t go unnoticed and soon after Pirate parties were founded in dozens of other countries.

Last year Falkvinge stepped down as party leader to focus more on promoting the Pirate position internationally. In the real world, but also on his own blog and through his bi-weekly column on TorrentFreak.

Needless to say, he is honored by TIME’s pick.

“The most important thing here is that I’m not primarily on the list as an individual, but as a carrier of new and important ideas – as a symbol for a large movement demanding civil liberties for the next generation,” Falkvinge comments on his blog.

If you want to help Rick to make it into the final list you can let the people of TIME know here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This word was used by the copyright industry, to try to get citizens to do their bidding. Honest. Could you believe that today? This industry dared take that word in their mouths?

For some time, it may actually have worked. Not for us who worked with technology and knew sharing as natural and human, and who set the standards of tomorrow, of course, but I got the perception that “following the law” was associated with “being honest” in parts of the population.

That quickly waned.

People realized that “being honest” had absolutely nothing to do with “accepting serfdom in a rigged system” and “doing the wishes of a thoroughly corrupt industry”, quite regardless of the wording of mail-order legislation that had been created at the copyright industry’s persistent tantrums. Following the law and obeying the monopoly became the opposite of being honest.

So the concept of honesty in the debate was replaced by one of humanity and friendship – that good people share, regardless of larger ramifications to society.

As that went on for a few years, more and more people realized that the sky wasn’t falling as had been claimed. Moreover, culture and small bands actually benefited greatly from circumventing the previous gatekeepers. The ramifications weren’t negative. They were overwhelmingly positive.

This view was reinforced by the copyright industry’s attacks on all alternate distribution channels that allowed creative artistry to bypass the middlemen’s skimming of the 90-95% of the pie that they had previously grabbed for themselves.

Something else happened, too: old digital formats went out of fashion. The industry-issued copies became unplayable, especially with silly playback protection methods that never work anyway. All of a sudden, us who had shared culture had done something more; we had also preserved culture. If it weren’t for the so-called pirates, our cultural diversity would have been lost on technology’s scrapheap.

So sharing became a matter of being responsible as a citizen. Sharing culture was not only a good deed in humankind, it was also taking civil responsibility for preservation of our common heritage, a responsibility that neither the industry nor governments took on themselves to fulfill.

But the copyright industry’s war on the people continued.

A very astute observation by Ithiel de Sola Pool in a book from 1984 noted that the copyright monopoly can’t survive in the digital age as it creeps into our everyday activities without heavily regulating conversation itself. This is exactly what the copyright industries have tried to do, and therefore, this monopoly and its industry have become an enemy of our very freedom of speech.

By 2010, about half the population was directly or indirectly involved in this preservation or sharing of culture: many in a household gain from one person taking such civic responsibility. In Europe, that means 250 million people. Put another way, it means 250 million votes.

250 million European votes trump 250 million Euros in lobbying money, every single time.

And so, with the copyright industry’s outright war on the people, on our culture, and our civil liberties, we have arrived at a point where responsible citizens not only share and preserve culture, but also act in defense of society to destroy the copyright industry.

Every act towards that goal helps, and is now an act of everybody’s civic responsibility. 250 million Europeans doing something small every day to destroy this corrupt industry that stands between us and our future makes a lot of difference at the end of the day.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.