August 13, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
Pro-piracy politician proffers his worldview
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Dressed in a gray suit and red satin shirt, his look suggests hip, young, European politician. But the founder of Sweden's Pirate Party could represent a very serious threat to the music and movie industries.
Falkvinge is a budding politician, a Microsoft-trained technologist and bitter foe of U.S. copyright law. Last year, he founded the party that surprised many when it amassed enough votes to become one of the country's top 10 political groups. (There are nearly 40 in Sweden.)
The organization failed to win enough support, however, to gain membership in the country's parliament and is now raising money for elections in 2009 and 2010. The party's platform is a promise to thwart U.S. attempts to enforce copyright law on Swedish soil.
There are some signs the Pirate Party's message could appeal to audiences beyond Sweden's borders. On Thursday, a group calling itself the Pirate Party of the United States announced that it was seeking support as it prepares to register as a political party in the state of Utah. The group said in a press release that it needs 2,000 signatures by February to qualify.
"The aim of the Pirate Party is to change intellectual property laws globally...Sweden, Europe and the rest of the world in that order," said Falkvinge, 35. "Fledgling pirate parties are now in many countries...When we reach our first major political victory, such as taking seats in parliament, pirates across the world will see we can do something."
Falkvinge's party has yet to win anything even in its home country. But the group arguably represents the largest effort to date to organize the unknown number of people who illegally download content, and wage a copyright fight at the ballot box. Their goal is to take their argument--that sharing movies, music and other information should not be a crime--directly to voters.
Founded by Falkvinge in January 2006, the Pirate Party received wide media coverage in Sweden. That was nothing compared with the attention the group received after police in the country raided the headquarters of The Pirate Bay, a highly popular online tracker of BitTorrent files.
Hollywood has accused The Pirate Bay, which is not affiliated with the Pirate Party, of being an essential pirate tool for file sharers. U.S. trade officials have lobbied the Swedish government to shut it down, according to Swedish media reports. In May 2006, police seized The Pirate Bay's servers, shutting down the site for several days.
/CNET News.com
Many Swedes believed their government had bowed to the will of a foreign power. The Pirate Party held two demonstrations attended by hundreds in Stockholm and Gothenberg. Attention began to swell: Sweden's justice ombudsman reviewed the police's handling of the case, but nothing came of it.
"Swedish youths are proud of the stubbornness and defiance of The Pirate Bay and see their activities as 'sharing,' not 'stealing,'" said Oscar Swartz a Swedish blogger. "Bloggers and activists stand up for The Pirate Bay and defend them against threats to their existence."
All of this occurred as the country headed toward parliamentary elections last September. Membership of the Pirate Party swelled to nearly 10,000 soon after and Pirate Party leaders were confident they could obtain 225,000 votes, or the required 4 percent, to earn a parliamentary seat.
Come election day, however, the party received 35,000 votes, or 0.6 percent. The party with the most votes, Sweden's Social Democrats, which lost in the election to an alliance between the country's liberal and conservative groups, earned the most votes for any single party with 1.9 million.
"To me, it is not an eligible party, but a protest group," said Mats Johansson a member of the Moderaterna party, currently Sweden's leading party in Parliament. "I hope they don't get any votes in the next election."
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Or do you believe those who generate the content you wish to pirate don't deserve to be paid for their efforts? Who will determine what you get to pirate for free? Right now, the market place is in the process of opening up, the indie bands, the indie presses, even the indie film makers are slipping out from under the thumbs of those companies who want to control what you read, think, watch, and enjoy. Do you really wish to end all that by dismissing copyright protections, by cutting off their incomes? What will you be left with? Your thinking is so very short-sighted as to render you blind to the dull and lifeless future you would create.
M.L. Bushman
It's time to vote against the traitors!
The solution is for publishers to provide a better product than those downloaded. I do not P2P files, because I do not like having my network infected by viruses, I don't think you can get the same quality by downloading that you can get from a blue-ray disk, and I want the people who create works to get paid.
Restrictive DRM only degrades the value of products, thus making people more likely to pirate. Good will is the best preventative against bad behavior.
I challenge this politian and anyone who agrees with him to go into work and tell their boses that they are willing to work but not get paid for it. See how long they actually keep working...
Richard Stallman, we all love you
Oh, and btw, I'm a musician, and trust me, no money is made from record sales unless you're one of the 0.005% of musicians who go multi-platinum, and you STILL don't make much money in relation to music sales.
Because of advances in wireless technology, transmission capacty in UHF and beyond becomes unlimited. Granting exclusive rights to a single entity is as wasteful as using bottled water to irrigate a Las Vegas Lawn.
Because modern radios can beam several packets simultaneously, each time a router is added to the network the bandwidth increases.
Instead of 100 ugly (or disguised as a pine tree)million-dollar cell towers, the network can be built of a million $149.95 radios.
Sure the treasury (whoever that is) misses out on 15 billion in auction money (thats the estimate) but thats peanuts compared to the OPEN PUBLIC ACCESS model which saves every town and county millions in public safety communications buildout costs.
The new Gigabit Network will not be free; it will be user owned. It will also be self healing and self forming. Routing will be simply pointing packets at the GPS address of the recipient, or away from the GPS address of the broadcaster. From a homeland security standpoint, the first responder network has no backbone to attack.
GOOGLE seems to get this. Although their request for 30 MHz of this spectrum to be set aside for open access was trimmed to 10, if these bands do NOT become public, let us all hope that google will bid and win the entire spectrum.
Lets not sell the town resirvoir to a bottled water company. Nobody loses with public access.
He then gets certified using stolen information and pirated operating systems. he then makes more money to save up to come to USA and gets a job while an honest low wage earner buys the stuff though ligit channels and will take years to study for his Microsoft certifications.
So your USA citizen lost and pirates win.
- Copyright Out Of Whack
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by zanzzz
August 15, 2007 3:04 PM PDT
- Originally copyright was for a period of 14 years in this country. Thanks to Disney (and a handful of others in the content cartel) they have effectively bribed Congress to extend it to the life of the author plus 90 years! The Supreme Court ruled it stunk but was marginally Constitutional because copyright was still "limited". I think the founding fathers had it about right. The rampant rise of Corporatism has put thing out of balance between individual and public interests.
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See all 32 Comments >>One more thing that some may feel is splitting hairs but none the less is accurate- sharing music, movies, etc. is not "stealing"! It may be copyright infringement but nothing is stolen, the original owners still have their works.