Pirate Party?
Can someone explain the Swedish Pirate Party to me? Today’s Marketplace piece about the party sounded utterly ridiculous to me. How is this not a case of a lot of people who love to pirate commercial material trying to ignore the fact that what they are doing is illegal?
The Pirate Party says music and movies should be freely shared on the Web. Copyright laws should be rewritten, and the current patent system scrapped.
I’m sympathetic to wanting to change copyright laws and the patent system, but the Marketplace piece ended up sounding like these were secondary issues to wanting to be able to download free media and continue to make use of The Pirate Bay. Is this just bad reporting? Is the Pirate Party actually a civil rights party (as claimed), with those interviewed just making it sound like a party devoted entirely to pirating legitimately copyrighted media?
Greg: There was a recent decent note about the Pirate Party in the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/11/pirate-party-sweden Also, it seems from the wikipedia page that there’s quite a lot of respectable popular sentiment in Sweden in favour of fielsharing.
I think that part of the context is that non-profit uploading is (or was) arguably not illegal under Swedish copyright law, and that the recent action against Pirate Bay was (perceived as being) driven by US commercial interests.
It certainly adds to the gaity of the nation….
Norman
Posted by: Norman Gray on June 11th, 2009 10:45 AM