The Party quickly gained the interest of the mainstream media and at the Swedish general elections in the same year it became the third largest party outside parliament. Inspired by this success, Pirate parties were founded in dozens of other countries.

Earlier this year, Falkvinge stepped down as party leader to focus more on promoting the Pirate position internationally. Aside from sharing his thoughts on conferences and his blog, he also spreads his ideas on copyright in bi-weekly columns on TorrentFreak.

No longer bound by political shackles, resignation allowed Falkvinge to spread the word on a global podium. And not without result.

Today Falkvinge was honored by the high-level politics magazine Foreign Policy by earning a spot in their prestigious list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Alongside familiar names such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Clay Shirky, Ron Paul and Hilary Clinton, the Pirate Party founder was recognized for inspiring millions of people worldwide.

“Indeed, 2011 may be remembered as the year Falkvinge’s big idea broke through into the public consciousness,” Foreign Policy writes. “His Pirates still aren’t exactly mainstream, but the issues they focus on — government transparency, Internet privacy, and copyright law — are very much in the zeitgeist, and their ranks are growing.”

“The Swedish and Swiss Pirate parties have aided WikiLeaks, offering the controversial site server space and web hosting; a self-described Pirate Party activist was named secretary of youth and sports in Tunisia’s revolutionary cabinet; and in September, the Pirates won a shocking 8.9 percent of the vote in Berlin’s state elections,” it adds.

Needless to say, Falkvinge is honored with his spot in Foreign Policy’s prestigious list, something he certainly didn’t expect when he founded the first Pirate Party in 2006.

“I never thought the ideas would gain ground this quickly,” Falkvinge tells TorrentFreak in a comment.

“I had expected a Pirate Party success in Sweden to be necessary just for the second Pirate Party to form in another country. Instead, we are seeing them grow like wildfire, and now, be recognized at the highest levels,” he adds.

Indeed, Pirate Parties all over the world are gaining momentum. In the European Parliament Amelia Andersdotter is about to become the second Pirate MEP, and in Germany the party is riding the wave of success after it earned 15 seats in the Berlin State Parliament elections.

Quite an accomplishment for such a young movement that was built by a group of volunteers who shared the same ideals, and it might be just the beginning.

Source: Pirate Party Founder In Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers

A concrete example is that the companies who sell quit-smoking aids don’t have any incentive for tobacco use to stop altogether. If it did, they wouldn’t sell any more quit-smoking aids. There are many more subtle examples of this happening as we speak.

The Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Lobaczewski talked of macropathy, the sickness of being too large:

“…governing such a country creates its own unavoidable problems; giants suffer from what could be called permanent macropathy (giant sickness), since the principal authorities are far away from any individual or local matters. … The main symptom is the proliferation of regulations required for administration; they may appear proper in the capital but are often meaningless in outlying districts or when applied to individual matters. Officials are forced to follow regulations blindly; the scope of using their human reason and differentiating real problems becomes very narrow indeed.”

This strikes a chord in every activist’s heart. We have seen rules being applied blindly in everything from forced sterilization to torture and segregation; for a bureaucrat, the question is is it the law?, but for an activist, the question is is it the right thing to do? Is it good?

I write a lot more on this specific topic in my article Lawful Good, Lawful Evil where I elaborate on the fact that the book of laws and the act of good do not coincide, and that it is crucial to understand that there is a difference between Law and Good.

But it is bigger than that, still, that which is going on right now. We are looking at a complete questioning of the very concept of top-down authority. What I see right now is that people are finally, after centuries, starting to re-examine the legacy of the old monarchies, the assumption that governments have a right to rule over the citizens as were they monarchial subjects.

I challenge this notion. And so do hundreds of thousands of activists in this very moment.

We, the People, employ politicians as our civil servants to govern the chores of administering the details of society. In this, it is no different from hiring a housekeeper to take care of things you don’t want to do yourself. But the employed do not have a right to set the conditions of their bosses — and in particular, they do not have the right to keep secrets from their employers that relates to how they do their work.

United States President Obama is an employee of the United States citizens. So is European Commission President Barroso of the European people.

You note that this is a complete turning of tables on the view — yes, the perspective — on who gets to decide what. And it is the final shedding of the legacy of the feudality and monarchies. Monarchs could keep secrets from their subjects and rule them at their whim; you could say that we have been in a birth-century of democracy where we elected our monarchs. But this is changing. We are starting to think in terms of employing administrators who are our employees, not our monarchs.

Now, the ramifications of this shift in perspective are enormous. But the shift is already underway, well underway.

We see this in how the swarms are overtaking the old, centralized, rule bound structures. People cooperate in the tens of thousands, volunteering, helping, making and taking a stand on changing the world. Every piece of activism, every piece of action right now is a statement that the decentralized, resilient movements are winning over the old centralized, stale bureaucracies.

In the Middle East and North Africa, people have been swarming to do good, rather than accept the lawful evil on account of being “the law”. This has spread to the West, and will continue to grow in waves.

For the first time since 1968, I see that people feel empowered. And we are. Nobody is asking permission anymore to help their fellow human being, to speak their mind, or to express their art. And, truly, why should anyone?

What could be observed as a movement of bits using BitTorrent, being a decentralized, resilient reaction against a corporate stranglehold on culture, has grown to become a movement of people in all of society, rejecting the notion that centralized structures have any power to stop people who decide to do good. The insight that there are no limits but those within you is causing mental handcuffs to drop in slow motion all over the West.

And new swarms are forming daily, all while the old politicians try to create new rules to quench people’s realization that they are free to reject the imposed limits. The politicians haven’t understood that the very notion that they can make those rules, monarching the people, is being questioned.

Thanks to Bengt Jonsson for inspiration to this article.

Source: Macropathy vs. The Swarm

A “high court” for nobility, where people would be sentenced to pay a fine, issue a formal apology, or to lead armies into would-be colonies for ten years and return as rich as dragons. And a “low court” for the common folk, where people would be sentenced to branding, have their hands cut off, or sometimes just thrown in jail if it was a petty offense; like killing another commoner, which was a lesser offense than stealing from merchants.

When I grew up, school taught me that democracies in the West are proud of how everybody is equal before the law. It was not until I became a full-time politician that I realized what a joke this is.

In reality, the high courts and low courts have been reintroduced in silence. When Sony BMG broke into millions of computers worldwide in 2005, rootkitting them to disable their ability to run instructions that would violate Sony’s own interpretation of its copyright monopoly, Sony was sentenced to send out marketing material for its own products and no individual executives were charged. When LulzSec members were arrested for breaking into systems in the singular, they get the low court treatment.

When a commoner is accused of violating the copyright monopoly, in some draconian countries like France, they can be sent into social exile without even getting a trial in the low court. In contrast, the noble Voddler (a video-on-demand service) violated the GPL egregiously by using free software to build its service — but without resharing the code, thus violating the copyright monopoly that GPL builds on, and for thoroughly commercial purposes. They were never prosecuted. In contrast, they are now speaking at hearings in parliaments on how successful they are.

As a politician, I have learned that the rights of the commoners are never enforced against the noble, but that the monopolies of the noble are always enforced against commoners. This is not being equal before the law. When did this division of people happen? How did some become more equal than others?

And don’t get me started on how the copyright nobility sat at the tables of the ACTA drafting, but where the rest of us creators — who only hold just as strong monopolies in theory — were mere commoners who should not interfere with the regulations of the monopoly on truth and culture.

There are many more examples. In Sweden and several other countries, commoners have to pay a fee to the copyright nobility just to play their own music — as in their singlehandedly composed and performed music — in their own hair styling salon.

This is just a symptom. The high and low courts go well beyond the scope of the copyright monopoly.

Isn’t it about time we reconquered democracy and abolished the high and low courts? Again?

Source: Return Of The High Court And Low Court

Thinking about what hurts and doesn’t hurt sales misses the point entirely. A corporation’s profits must never be at the center of policymaking, much less the center of determining what fundamental civil liberties we have as free citizens.

You remember Blackwater Security? The wet-jobs security firm that the US military hires for jobs abroad, jobs that violate the military’s own regulations to the moon and back?

When Blackwater Security was playing Grand Theft Auto among civilians in Iraq in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, with which Iraq had nothing to do, how would you react if they had issued the following statement?

– “Our profits are being hampered by the civilians’ rights. It is not fair. In all fairness, we demand that torture should be allowed preemptively to find suspects or people that we find interesting, or because it can boost our profit. Also, we demand the right to detain civilians at will and indefinitely, because we could charge Uncle Sam for that too, boosting our profits even further.”

How would you react to that?

Let’s take another scenario from Blackwater in Iraq:

– “Our profits are being hampered by the rights of the people. It is not fair. Our profits are falling. In all fairness, we demand the introduction of wanton censorship, allowing us to discover and prevent people from talking about subjects we don’t like. Also, we demand to hold messengers responsible to some amount of punishment we determine if they carry sealed letters containing something we don’t like. That way, our profits could perhaps be restored to their former glory. After all, it’s only fair.”

Would this demand from Blackwater Security in Iraq perhaps seem reasonable? They’re asking for the dismantlement of rights on the same level as the right to not be tortured, not to be detained without due cause, and similar rights.

Well, this is exactly what the copyright industry is demanding. Exactly this.

The rational emotional reaction to this is an immediate desire to personally kick the living shit out of these pretentious bastards. After proper impulse control has been applied to this desire, the proper official poker-faced response — if any — is that the world owes them nothing, preferably coupled with sharp reductions in existing monopoly privileges.

If somebody had written a dystopic novel in the 1980s illustrating how some subjects had been forbidden, and if you would speak about them on the phone, a voice would pop in and say, “You have mentioned a forbidden subject. This has been noted. Please refrain from discussing forbidden subjects” — if somebody had written this, people would have dismissed it out of hand as being too dystopic, too unrealistic. This could never possibly happen, people would have said, shaking their heads.

Try posting a link to a torrent on The Pirate Bay on your wall on Facebook and see what happens. People in the 1980s would have been horrified, people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. All in the name of protecting profits for a cartelized industry with monopoly benefits.

The job of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties, even if they can’t make money otherwise. That goes for Blackwater Security as well as the copyright industry as well as every other entrepreneur on the planet.

When our parents sent a letter in the mail, nobody was allowed to open it to check if it contained a copied poem, which would infringe on the copyright monopoly. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, they and they alone determined if they identified themselves as sender on the outside of the envelope, inside the envelope, or not at all. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, the mailman was never held responsible for the contents of that letter, regardless of if the contents infringed a particular copyright monopoly or were even downright illegal.

It is entirely reasonable to demand sternly that our children have the same rights as our parents and grandparents had. A particular corporation’s profitability does not factor into it.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: I Don’t Care About Your Profits, And It Enrages Me That You Think I Should

(This is why some senior citizens still refer to refrigerators as “ice boxes“.)

When households in Stockholm were electrified in the first half of the last century, these distributors of cold were made obsolete. After all, what they distributed was the ability to keep food cold, and everybody could suddenly do that themselves.

This was a fairly rapid process in the cities. With the availability of the refrigerator from circa 1920, most households had their own refrigerator by the end of the 1930s. One of the city’s largest employers — distributors of cold — had been made totally obsolete by technical development.

There were many personal tragedies in this era as the icemen lost their breadwinning capacity and needed to retrain to get new jobs in a completely new field. The iceman profession had often been tough to begin with, and seeing your industry disintegrate in real-time didn’t make it any easier.

But here are a few things that didn’t happen as the ice distribution industry became obsolete:

No refrigerator owner was sued for making their own cold and ignoring the existing corporate cold distribution chains.

No laws were proposed that would make electricity companies liable in court if the electricity they provided was used in a way that destroyed icemen’s jobs.

Nobody demanded a monthly refrigerator fee from refrigerator owners that would go to the Icemen’s Union.

No lavishly expensive expert panels were held in total consensus about how necessary icemen were for the entire economy.

Rather, the distribution monopoly became obsolete, was ignored, and the economy as a whole benefited by the resulting decentralization.

We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry — the copyright industry — has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important — to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.

The copyright industry tells us, again and again and again, that if they can’t have their obsolete distribution monopoly enshrined into law with ever-increasing penalties for ignoring it, that no culture will be produced at all. As we have seen, equally time and again, this is hogwash.

What might be true is that the copyright industry can’t produce music to the tune of one million US dollars per track. But you can’t motivate monopoly legislation based on your costs, when others are doing the same thing for much less — practically zero. There has never been as much music available as now, just because all of us love to create. It’s not something we do because of money, it’s because of who we are. We have always created.

What about movies, then? Hundred-million productions? There are examples of garage-produced movies (and one even has beat Casablanca to become the most-seen movie of all time in its native country). But it may be true that the argument is somewhat stronger with the blockbuster-type cinema productions.

I’m going go out on a limb here and say, that even if it is true that movies can’t be made the same way with the Internet and our civil liberties both in existence, then maybe it’s just the natural progression of culture.

I spend quite a bit of time with teenagers through my work with the Pirate Party. One thing that strikes me is that they don’t watch movies, at least nowhere near the quantity I did when I was a teenager. Just like I threw out my TV set 15 years ago, maybe this is just the natural progression of culture. Nobody would be surprised if we moved from monologue-style culture to dialogue- and conversation-type culture at this point in history.

After all, we have previously had operettes, ballets, and concerts as the high points of culture in the past. Even radio theaters (and famous ones). Nobody is particularly concerned that those expressions have had their peak and that society has moved on to new expressions of culture. There is no inherent value in writing today’s forms of culture into law and preventing the changes we’ve always had.

Everywhere I look, I see that the copyright monopolies need to be cut down to allow society to move on from today’s stranglehold on culture and knowledge. Teenagers today typically don’t even see the problem — they take sharing in the connected world so totally for granted, that they discard any signals to the contrary as “old-world nonsense”.

And they certainly don’t ask for a refrigerator fee.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee

You will notice here that I place taking personal responsibility at the opposite of blindly following laws, rules, or orders. That is quite intentional. Just following orders is never an excuse for not taking personal responsibility. Neither is just following the rules. Neither is just following the law.

Society at large will never take “I was just following rules and regulations” for an excuse in the large matters, when the nuclear disaster, fetal damage or war outbreak has happened. It won’t in the small matters, either — the missed sales order because of failing to bribe the right officials, or the bad grade because somebody was the only one who didn’t cheat on the exam.

A person who considers the orders, rules or laws to be wrong has a duty to defy them. Every single war criminal learned this before they were hanged. On the other hand, many resistance fighters learned the opposite before they were shot.

From this, we learn that it is unwise to follow the rules and laws created by others blindly, but just as commonly, it is equally unwise to flaunt defiance. Most things that we consider reasonable, that are banned by rules we consider silly, can be done with a little sense of discretion and proportion. In the larger scheme of things, it is everybody’s duty to do so. A society where people regard rules as general guidelines is a lot healthier for its neighbors and citizens alike than a society where laws and rules are enforced blindly and swiftly.

At the end of the day, you have only your own moral compass. You must decide whether to follow the law, and in considering this, you need to understand why the law was made in the first place.

Laws are not made because they are righteous. Laws are made because they advance somebody’s political career.

(It should be noted that these are words that don’t come from a rock-throwing masked guy, but from a professional politician in suit and tie.)

Usually, it makes sense to follow most laws, most of the time. But not all laws, all of the time. People who are standing waiting at a hung red stoplight at 2am with no human being nor car in sight are not just stupid, but downright dangerous.

The copyright monopoly is one example of such an unjust law. I can think of few things that are more plain evil than not sharing knowledge with your fellow human being, barring hurting somebody physically. Sharing culture and knowledge doesn’t even cost you anything, it just enriches other humans.

Does this mean I encourage breaking the law? No. Mostly it doesn’t mean that because doing so would be too flauntingly illegal. However, in the spirit of discretion, I encourage everybody to follow their own moral compass and to help their fellow human beings.

It is everybody’s duty to defy unjust laws.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: It Is Everyone’s Duty To Defy Unjust Laws

Let’s look at what rights I have when I communicate through analog channels with somebody — using paper, a pen, an envelope and a stamp. The same rights should apply when using a digital communications channel instead, at least theoretically, since the law doesn’t differentiate between methods of communication. Unfortunately for the copyright industry, the enforcement of these our rights online would mean that the copyright monopoly becomes utterly unenforceable, so the copyright industry is now attacking these fundamental rights on every level. But that doesn’t mean our rights aren’t there.

When I write a letter to somebody, I and I alone choose whether I identify myself in the letter inside the envelope, on the outside of the envelope, both, or neither. It is my prerogative completely whether I choose to communicate anonymously or not. This is a right we have in analog communications and in law; it is perfectly reasonable to demand that the law applies online as well.

When I write a letter to somebody, nobody has the right to intercept the letter in transit, break its seal and examine its contents unless I am under formal, individual and prior suspicion of a specific crime. In that case, law enforcement (and only them) may do this. Of course, I am never under any obligation to help anybody open and interpret my letters. It is perfectly reasonable to demand that this applies online as well.

When I write a letter to somebody, no third party has the right to alter the contents of the letter in transit or deny its delivery entirely. Shouldn’t it be perfectly reasonable to demand that this applies online as well?

When I write a letter to somebody, nobody has the right to stand at the mailbox and demand that they be able to log all my communications: who I am communicating with, when, and for how long. Again, to demand that this applies online as well would only be logical.

When I write a letter to somebody, the mailman carrying that letter to its recipient is never responsible for what I choose to write about (the messenger immunity). And yes, it is perfectly reasonable to demand that this applies online as well.

All of these are under systematic attack by the copyright industry. They are suing ISPs and demanding that they install wiretapping and censoring equipment in the middle of their switching racks; they are constantly gnawing at the messenger immunity (mere conduit and common carrier principle), they are demanding the authority to identify people who communicate, they want the authority to deny us our right to exercise fundamental rights at all, and they have the balls to suggest censorship to safeguard the distribution monopoly.

All of the above stems from the fact that any digital communications channel that can be used for private correspondence, can also always be used to transfer digitizations of copyrighted works — and you can’t tell which is which without giving the copyright industry the right to break the seal of private correspondence, which is a right I’m never prepared to surrender.

These are civil liberties that our forefathers fought, bled, and died to give us. It is beyond obscene that an obsolete middleman industry is demanding that we give them up to preserve an entertainment monopoly, all while demanding more powers than we are even giving the police to catch real criminals. Then again, this is nothing new.

When photocopiers arrived in the 1960s, book publishers tried to have them banned on the grounds that they could be used to copy books which would then be sent in the mail. Everybody told the publishers tough luck: while the copyright monopoly still is valid, that gives them no right to break the seal on communications just to look for copyright infringements, so they can’t do anything about it. That still applies offline. It is perfectly reasonable to demand that it applies online as well.

The copyright industry sometimes complains that the Internet is a lawless land and that the same laws and rights that apply offline should apply online as well. In this, I could not agree more.

– — –

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other weekend. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Why Is It Rocket Science That Laws Should Apply Online Too?

This is only rhetoric from the copyright lobby in an attempt to justify the monopoly as righteous: to associate “the copyright monopoly” with a positive word such as “property”. However, when we look at the monopoly in reality, it is a limitation of property rights.

Let’s compare two pieces of property: a chair and a DVD.

When I buy a chair, I hand over money for which I get the chair and a receipt. This chair has been mass-produced from a master copy at some sort of plant. After the money has changed hands, this particular chair is mine. There are many more like it, but this one is mine. I have bought one of many identical copies and the receipt proves it.

As this copy of the chair is mine, exclusively mine, there are a number of things I can do with it. I can take it apart and use the pieces for new hobby projects, which I may choose to sell, give away, put out as exhibits or throw away. I can put it out on the porch and charge neighbors for using it. I can examine its construction, produce new chars from my deductions with some raw material that is also my property, and do whatever I like with the new chairs, particularly including selling them.

All of this is normal for property. It is mine; I may do what I like with it. Build copies, sell, display, whatever.

As a sidetrack, this assumes that there are no patents on the chair. However, assuming that the invention of the chair is older than 20 years, any filed patents on this particular invention have expired. Therefore, patents are not relevant for this discussion.

Now, let’s jump to what happens when I buy a movie.

When I buy a movie, I hand over money and I get the DVD and a receipt. This movie has been mass-produced from a master copy at some sort of plant. After the money has changed hands, this particular movie is mine. There are many more like it, but this one is mine. I have bought one of many identical copies and the receipt proves it.

Despite the fact that this copy of the movie is mine, exclusively mine, there are a number of things that I may not do with it, prohibited from doing so by the copyright monopoly held by somebody else. I may not use pieces of the movie for new hobby projects that I sell, give away, or put out as exhibits. I may not charge the neighbors for using it on the porch. I may not examine its construction and produce new copies. All of these rights would be normal for property, but the copyright monopoly is a severe limitation on my property rights for items I have legitimately bought.

It is not possible to say that I own the the DVD when viewed in one way but not when viewed in another. There is a clear definition of property, and the receipt says I own the DVD in all its interpretations and aspects. Every part of the shape making up the DVD is mine. The copyright monopoly, however, limits how I can use my own property.

This doesn’t inherently mean that the copyright monopoly is bad. It does, however, mean that the monopoly cannot be defended from the standpoint that property rights are good. If you take your stand from there, you will come to the conclusion that the copyright monopoly is bad as it is a limitation of property rights.

Defending the copyright monopoly with the justification that property rights are sacred is quite like defending the death penalty for murder with the justification that life is sacred. There may be other, valid, justifications for defending the copyright monopoly and these limitations of property rights — but that particular chain of logic just doesn’t hold.

– — –

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: The Copyright Monopoly Is a Limitation of Property Rights

Obsoleting scribes was not a popular development with the Catholic Church, who tried to ban the printing press with increasingly harsh punishments, up to and including the death penalty for using a printing press to copy books.

“How will the monks get paid?”, they argued to justify this. Still, even the death penalty couldn’t stop the copying.

Of course, it wasn’t about payment of monks. The Catholic Church couldn’t have cared less, really. It was about control over knowledge and culture. Once most of the populace had learned to read, the Church lost its grip permanently.

England chose a different route. Seeing how even the death penalty hadn’t worked, Queen Mary I needed an ally within the printing industry. She awarded a printing monopoly to London’s printing guild, the London Company of Stationers, in return for being able to censor anything before publication.

The monopoly was awarded on May 4, 1557. It was called copyright.

This alliance between industry and government worked well to suppress dissent. Fast forward 138 years, and censorship wasn’t really all that modern anymore. The British Parliament let the copyright monopoly expire in 1695, and the Stationers lost a very lucrative monopoly. They begged to get it back for 15 years.

Eventually, Parliament was persuaded. The printers and distributors complained that nothing would get printed or distributed without a monopoly. (Note how this is very, very different from nothing being created without a monopoly.) But they suggested that this monopoly originate with the author and be classified as property, so it could be sold to a printer.

In doing this, the printers killed three birds with one stone. One, they met Parliament’s requirement that there would be no more central point which enabled censorship, so they would reconsider the monopoly. Two, the printers would still have a de facto monopoly as authors would be forced to sell the monopoly to printers. Three, classifying the monopoly artificially as “property” would write it into Common Law rather than case law, giving it much stronger legal status.

The copyright monopoly was re-enacted in this form in 1709, and took effect on April 10, 1710, in the so-called Statute of Anne.

The United States adopted a similar passage in its constitution later, but with much clearer justification — that the only legitimate beneficiary of the copyright monopoly is the public.

Fast forwarding to the advent of libraries, the monopolist publishers — now strong in their almost religious belief that they had a right to dictate how people could read — tried to ban the lending of books. You couldn’t allow people to read without paying for their own copy, they argued. When politicians considered public libraries, the monopolist publishers went stratospheric.

“You can’t let anybody read any book for free! Not a single book will be sold ever again! Nobody will be able to live off their writing! No author will write a single book ever again if you pass this law!”

Parliament in the 1800s was much wiser than today, however, and saw the copyright monopolists’ tantrum for what it was. They decided that the public’s access to knowledge and culture had a greater value to society than a monopolist being paid every time a book was opened, and so, the first public library in the UK opened in 1850. And as we all know, not a single book has indeed been written since. Oh, wait. There are more books being written than ever in history. I mean, the argument is as bogus when used today as it was then.

After the copyright monopoly internationalized in 1886, music became more and more interesting. The record industry was invited to Rome in 1933 by Confederazione Generale Fascista dell’Industria Italiana in order to try to corporatize the copyright monopoly a bit further. IFPI was formed in this Rome meeting. The ambition succeeded, with the advent of the Rome Convention in 1961, where the record industry was granted copyright-identical monopolies called “neighboring rights”.

One notes here that the record industry’s monopoly is as recent as 1961. Not the image they paint.

Currently, the United States is trying to bully every other country to respect the copyright monopoly’s stronger and stronger privileges. They issue a “Special 301 list” every year, which is supposed to be a blacklist of the world’s worst “offenders”. A majority of the world’s population is on the list. Spain and Canada made the list this year, too. A personal political goal for me is to put Sweden back on that list.

To summarize, the battle over who controls knowledge and culture has raged for well over 500 years. The same justifications have been used all through those 500 years. But learning from history, we can see how the choke hold of the Catholic Church was defeated. We should repeat that course of action against the copyright monopoly today. Teach everybody to share. Make everybody experience what it’s like to have all of humanity’s knowledge and culture at their fingertips. It can’t be unexperienced, just like people 500 years ago couldn’t unlearn to read.

– — –

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other Friday. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Nothing New Under The Copyright-Eclipsed Sun

Today’s level of copyright can’t coexist with the right to communicate in private.

If I’m sending an e-mail to you, that e-mail may contain a piece of music. If we are in a video chat, I may drop a copyrighted video clip there for both of us to watch. The only way to detect this, in order to enforce today’s level of copyright, is to eliminate the right to private correspondence. That is, to eavesdrop on all ones and zeros going to and from all computers.

There is no way to allow the right to private correspondence for some type of content, but not for other types: you must break the seal and analyze the contents to sort it into allowed and disallowed. At that point, the seal is broken. Either there is a seal on everything, or on nothing.

So we are down to a crossroads. We, as a society, can say that copyright is the most important thing we have, and give up the right to talk in private. Either that, or we say that the right to private correspondence has greater value, in which case such correspondence can be used to transfer copyrighted works. There is no middle ground.

Once you accept that copyright must be scaled back, a whole palette of advantages to that scenario become apparent. Two billion human beings would have 24/7 access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. That’s a much larger leap for civilization than when public libraries arrived in 1850. No public cost or new tax is involved. All the infrastructure is already in place. The technology has been developed, and the tools are deployed: all we have to do is lift the ban on using them.

What surprised me recently was the level of understanding of this within the copyright industry, and how they persistently try to eradicate the right to private correspondence in order to safeguard current disputed levels of copyright.

A cable leaked by WikiLeaks just before Christmas outlined a checklist given to the Swedish government with demands from the US copyright industry, IIPA. The U.S. Embassy was quite appreciative of how the Swedish justice department was “fully on board” and had made considerable progress on the demands against its own citizens, but in favor of the US copyright industry.

In those demands were pretty much every big-brother law enacted in the past several years. Data retention, IPRED, three strikes, police access to IP records for petty crimes, abolishment of the mere conduit messenger immunity, everything was in there.

It became clear that the copyright industry is actively driving a Big Brother society, as it understands that this path would be the only way to save copyright.

Myself, I think it’s more than time to throw that industry out of the legislative process.

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Starting today, Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other Friday. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net/ focuses on information policy.

Source: Do You Prefer Copyright or the Right to Talk in Private?

The Party gained interest from the mainstream media and at the Swedish general elections in the same year it became the third largest party outside parliament. Inspired by the small successes the Party booked in the first year, Pirate Parties were founded in dozens of other countries as well.

Fast forward three years and the Swedish Pirate Party peaked at over 50,000 members just before the European elections of 2009. In these elections the Pirate Party got more than 7% of the total votes earning them two seats in the European Parliament, a major victory.

Today the Pirate Party looks back on its short history as it celebrates its fifth anniversary. However, this festive day also brings a surprise that nobody saw coming. Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party icon, founder and leader announced today that he is stepping down as leader. Effective immediately he will be replaced by his deputy, Anna Troberg.

According to Falkvinge, new leadership is what could take the Party to the next level.

“Anna has a cultural background which is precisely what the Pirate Party in Sweden needs at this point,” Falkvinge exclusively told TorrentFreak. “We are well established within the box of technical people, but need to break out of it. To do that, we need a leader who can explain why these issues are important in nontechnical terms. Anna is the perfect fit.”

However, the former Party leader isn’t hanging up his Pirate hat just yet. He stays on as the Party’s chairman while he broadens his scope. Freed from the political shackles, he will continue to fight for the same issues he’s championed for the last five years, but now more internationally oriented than before.

In the coming year Falkvinge intends to work as an ‘international evangelist’ for the Pirate movement and focus on Information Politics. Part of that will include a guest column here on TorrentFreak, as well as a new English-language blog at Falkvinge.net.

Looking back on the last five years it is impressive to see what the ‘Pirate’ movement started by Falkvinge has accomplished. There are now Pirate Parties in forty countries around the world, with city Councillors in Germany, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic and formerly a member in the German Parliament.

It will be interesting to see how the Parties fare in the coming half-decade, where privacy and technology issues are becoming more relevant than ever before. Meanwhile we congratulate Anna Troberg on her new position and wish her all the best. Rick Falkvinge – the man who made Pirates Political – is saluted for a half-decade of hard work as the Swedish Pirate Party leader.

Source: Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge Resigns on 5th Anniversary

Prosecutor Henrik Rasmussen, who is regularly involved in online infringement cases, said in an interview with Swedish media that in its ruling the Court of Appeal looked not only at the defendants cases, but at the issue of illegal file-sharing in general.

Noting that the Court referred to file-sharing as a “serious social problem”, he said that the decision to send the Pirate Bay’s operators to jail will affect how future file-sharing cases are viewed.

“If we have more cases of illegal file sharing we will discuss them in the same way, that it is a thoroughly devastating social problem,” said Rasmussen. “Therefore, jail sentences will be more widely considered.”

While the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were convicted for a significant amount of copyright infringements, it seems that Swedish prosecutors are now looking at cases where infringements are relatively minor.

One case in hand involves a 26 year-old man from Uppsala, who last summer made 44 tracks available via a Direct Connect hub. After the music industry provided evidence to the authorities which it says proves the man shared the files, he will now be prosecuted for the alleged offenses.

“He risks a fine or imprisonment up to two years,” said Rasmusson. “I have not decided what I’m going to insist on exactly, but it is more likely to be a fine.”

So which variables does the prosecutor consider when presented with a case? What makes one man face a fine and another a jail sentence? We hope to be able to provide more details on this in the near future but in the meantime we spoke to Pirate Party Rick Falkvinge for his take. Not surprisingly, he’s unimpressed.

“This prosecutor is an anachronism and should resign. File sharing is a strong net positive to the community, and should not be a crime at all. I believe the future’s verdict against these regressive people is going to be quite harsh,” he told TorrentFreak this morning.

“If the government should interfere at all, it should rather be to hand out medals and incentives to people who share the most.”

Source: File-Sharing is a ‘Devastating Social Problem, Jail Sentences More Likely’

In May 2006, a few months after the Pirate Party was founded, it saw a sharp increase in members after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s servers. As a result the Party gained interest from the mainstream media and at the general elections in the same year it became the third largest party outside parliament.

With three years more experience, the Pirate Party participated in the elections for the European Parliament in Sweden in 2009. These elections came a few weeks after four people associated with The Pirate Bay were sentenced to prison, something that was brought up repeatedly during the campaign. As a result, the Pirate Party got more than 7% of the total votes earning them two seats in the European Parliament.

For the upcoming election, The Pirate Bay will also be a central theme in the election campaign. In May the Pirate Party volunteered to provide bandwidth to The Pirate Bay after previous hosts got into legal trouble. Two months later, the Party surprised again by stating that it would use Parliamentary immunity to run the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.

In the upcoming elections this September the Party hopes to equal the success it achieved in the European elections last year. Today the Party released its manifesto, which has grown from 7 pages back in 2006 to 27 today. The manifesto is divided into three parts, which are the core elements the Party is focusing on – privacy, culture and knowledge.

As expected, the Pirate Party stays true to their well-known principles regarding copyright and file-sharing. The Party believes that non-commercial file-sharing should be legalized. On the other side of the coin, they are proposing charges for those attempting to sue individuals for non-commercial copying. Inhibiting the spread of culture and “copyright abuse” would potentially carry a jail sentence of up to 2 years.

Although they are often portrayed as a one issue party, file-sharing related paragraphs are actually in the minority. Securing offline privacy is also a major issue, such as the ability to travel freely within the country without having to submit to identity checks. The Party further believes that medical, biological and software patents should be abolished, even though they are no longer calling for the abolition of patents in general.

“We’re aiming for entry into Parliament,” Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “Just like in the European elections, anything above four point zero zero percent is a political achievement that will send shockwaves worldwide. At present, we’re polling between one and two percent, mostly because the election campaigns haven’t started yet.”

“We still need some kind of key symbol issue, but then again, we’re much better off today than we were equally long before the European elections last year. We were invisible in the polls until 38 days before that election. We know that we can sprint like no other, and that we have the activists to carry our weight. It’s going to be a tough race right until the vote counts are coming in on election night,” Falkvinge told us.

Based on the current standings in the polls a sprint is indeed needed, but the Party may once again get some help from outside to achieve this. Coincidentally, the elections are held just a few days before the appeal of the Pirate Bay four begins. Because of this, the issues so dear to the Pirate Bay and its supporters may play an important role in the political debates.

“TorrentFreak readers should vote for the Pirate Party because a Pirate entry into the Swedish Parliament is going to make a tremendously larger impact than keeping or switching prime ministers. It’s going to save the Internet from censorship, wiretapping and encroachment.”

An invasion of pirates into the political system is what Sweden really needs in order to save the Internet, according to Falkvinge. “It’s going to liberate our common culture. It’s going to change not just Sweden but the world. Be a part of that change and tell it to your grandchildren.”

Source: Pirate Party Ramps Up To Invade Swedish Politics

Calling a political party illegitimate and their members thieves is a pretty bold statement for an organization who’s feeding politicians thousands of dollars to support their cause. I doubt that Garfield even read their election manifesto, if he did, he would know that the party has nothing to do with stealing copyright.

“This can only be seen as MPAA calling democracy illegitimate. We are a registered political party finishing in the top ten in a parliamentary democracy,” says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party in a response to TorrentFreak. “That these people claim it would somehow be illegitimate to change laws through a parliamentary process shows just how corrupt to the core they are.”

Falkvinge continues: “On the other hand, I think the statement may be partly out of fear. There’s one thing that beats all their lawyers, war chests and monopolies. Just one. That one thing is votes in a democratic election, and that’s what we have and they don’t. These claims are so far out they don’t even reflect sunlight. Unfortunately, that seems to be true for most statements from the Music And Film Industry Associations of America, but we’re also seeing the oldskool politicians slowly starting to understand our counterpoints. It’s going to be an interesting couple of next years.”

It won’t be easy for the MPAA and other anti-piracy organizations to take on the Pirate Parties, especially not with such a clueless statement. Europe’s Pirate Parties are on course with their pan-European electoral assault for the 2009 European Elections. To quote Rick Falkvinge: “There is a far better than average chance that this is becoming the next global political movement, and I’m going to claim it already is the next big political movement.”

Sail on.

Source: MPAA: Pirate Party Politicians Are Illegitimate Thieves