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

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

Five years ago, when I founded the Swedish and first Pirate Party, we set three pillars for our policy: shared culture, free knowledge, and fundamental privacy. These were themes that were heard as ideals in the respected activist circles. I had a gut feeling that they were connected somehow, but it would take another couple months for me to connect the dots between the right to fundamental liberty of privacy and the right to share culture.

The connection was so obvious once you had made it, it’s still one of our best points:



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

Information Taken From :: Do You Prefer Copyright or the Right to Talk in Private? | TorrentFreak

If governments were really there for the best interest of all people this wouldn't be a discussion, but, since what all governments do nowadays is to pass laws that restrict liberties and empower those who already have enslaved most of us, this is definitely the future. Hopefully we will find a way to surpass this, we always do, the question will be, at what price?

An interesting subject. It will be interesting to see how this turns out in the long run, there are too many possible outcomes at this point.

Interesting discussion. I love talking about the sharing culture. I wrote a paper for my computer ethics class 4 semesters ago - I should dig up that archive and post it. It's all about sharing and torrenting.

Also, do me a favor. Change the color and font. Reading a big red text block in that font really hurts the eyes.

Everything seems so cut and dried doesn't it. Either its this or its that. Either you share everything or share nothing. Yet humans truly cannot completely share everything. We crave holding something back. Something to show our ownership, no matter how small.

Even among the Scener and shares of torrents, the fanservices of animes, mangas and what not you will find evidence of this by the presense of watermarks, little easter eggs and so many other things. And these people really have little to contribute but even so they like to stamp their presence as it were.

When we are talking about a group of people who actively fight against others to gain power over a large number of people/money etc (and that would include any company, government or some such) then this sense of property only gets magnified. So unlike what the Swedish Pirate Party's president says with his sweeping comments, there is very little chance of sharing reaching worldwide social and legal acceptance like he hopes.

Originally Posted by diffuser

Everything seems so cut and dried doesn't it. Either its this or its that. Either you share everything or share nothing. Yet humans truly cannot completely share everything. We crave holding something back. Something to show our ownership, no matter how small.

This is really the driving force behind the capitalistic political philosophy, the idea of absolute ownership of everything. It's no surprise that copyright law is such a big deal in America, a land founded on capitalistic principles.

I'm a bit of a staunch libertarian-property rights-free-market-kind-of guy, and I believe it to be of absolute importance. The real issue comes when these original core principles contradict the principles that drive society today. It's definitely an area in which I, myself, am conflicted (along with the rest of the nation/world, it seems.) Which really gets back to the point trtpure (the OP) was making, I guess...

I recently watched a fantastic shortish (1 hr) documentary that focused on issues of copyright in music and whether one can "own" a sound or phrase. It was PBS Independent Lens: Copyright Criminals. I'll see if I can hunt up a link..but that stuff was extremely thought provoking, for both (all?) sides of the argument.