The Case for Copyright Reform

Today’s copyright legislation is out of balance, and out of tune with
the times. It has turned an entire generation of young people into criminals in
the eyes of the law, in a futile attempt at stopping technological development.
Yet file sharing has continued to grow exponentially. Neither propaganda, fear
tactics, nor ever harsher laws have been able to stop the development.

It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing
without infringing on fundamental human rights. As long as there are ways for
citizens to communicate in private, they will be used to share copyrighted
materials. The only way to even try to limit file sharing is to remove the
right to private communication. In the last decade, this is the direction that
copyright enforcement legislation has moved in, under pressure from big
business lobbyists who see their monopolies under threat. We need to reverse
this trend to safeguard fundamental rights.

At the same time, we want a society where culture flourishes, and where
artists and creative people have a chance to make a living as cultural workers.
Fortunately, there is no contradiction between file sharing and culture. This
is something we know from a decade’s experience of massive file sharing on the
Internet.

In the economic statistics, we can see that household spending on
culture and entertainment is slowly increasing year by year. If we spend less
money on buying CDs, we spend more on something else, such as going to live
concerts. This is great news for artists. An artist will typically get 5-7% of
the revenues from a CD, but 50% of the revenues from a concert. The record
companies lose out, but this is only because they are no longer adding any
value.

It may well be that it will become more difficult to make money within
some parts of the cultural sector, but if so, it will become easier in some
others – including new ones, that we have not even imagined so far. But
as long as the total household spending on culture continues to be on the same
level or rising, nobody can claim that artists in general will have anything to
lose from a reformed copyright.

Should this also have the side effect of loosening up some of the grip
that the big distributors have over cultural life, then so much the better for
both artists and consumers.

When public libraries were introduced in Europe 150 years ago, the book
publishers were very much opposed to this. The argument they used was the same
one that is being used today in the file sharing debate: If people could get
access to books for free, authors would not be able to make a living, and no
new books would be written.

We now know that the arguments against public libraries were wrong. It
quite obviously did not lead to a situation where no new books were written,
and it did not make it impossible for authors to earn money from writing. On
the contrary, free access to culture proved to be not only a boon to society at
large, but also turned out to be beneficial to authors.

The Internet is the most fantastic public library that has ever been
created. It means that everybody, including people with limited economic means,
has access to all the world’s culture just a mouse-click away. This is a
positive development that we should embrace and applaud.

The Pirate Party has a clear and positive agenda to end criminalization
of the young generation, and provide the foundation for a diverse and
sustainable cultural sector in the Internet age. We invite all political groups
to copy our ideas.

Sharing is caring.

The Pirate Party does not want to abolish copyright; we want to reform
it. We want to keep copyright for commercial purposes, but we want to set all
non-commercial copying and use free.

This reform is urgent, as the attempts to enforce today’s ban on non-commercial
sharing of culture between private citizens are threatening fundamental rights,
such as the right to private communication, freedom of information, and even
the right to due process.

File sharing is when two private individuals send ones and zeros to each
other. The only way to even try to limit file sharing, is to introduce
surveillance of everybody’s private communication. There is no way to separate
private messages from copyrighted material without opening the messages and
checking the contents. Gone is the postal secret, the right to communicate in
private with your lawyer or your web-cam flirt, or your whistle-blower
protection if you want to give a sensitive story to a journalist.

We are not prepared to give up our fundamental rights to enforce today’s
copyright. The right to privacy is more important than the right of big media
companies to continue to make money in the same way as before, because the
latter right does not even exist.

Today’s copyright also prevents or restricts many new and exciting
cultural expressions. Sampled music on MySpace, remixes on YouTube, or why not
a Wikipedia filled with lots of pictures and music in the articles? Copyright
legislation says no.

The copyright laws must either be reformed or abolished outright. The
Pirate Party advocates the reform alternative.

We want to set all non-commercial copying and use free, and we want to
shorten the commercial protection time. But we want to keep the commercial
exclusivity in a way that allows most business models that are viable today to
continue to work.

Our proposal can be summarized in six points:

• Moral Rights Unchanged

We propose no changes at all to the moral right of the author to be
recognized as the author.

Nobody should be allowed to claim that they are ABBA, or have written
all of Paul McCartney’s songs, unless they actually are or have. To the extent
that this is a real world problem, it should still be illegal to do so. ”Give
credit where credit is due” is a good maxim that everybody agrees with.

• Free Non-Commercial Sharing

Until twenty years ago, copyright hardly concerned ordinary people. The
rules about exclusivity of the production of copies were aimed at commercial
actors, who had the means to, for example, print books or press records.

Private citizens who wanted to copy a poem and send to their loved one,
or copy a record to cassette and give it to a friend, did not have to worry
about being in breach of copyright. In practice, anything you had the technical
means to do as a normal person, you could do without risk of any punishment.

But today, copyright has evolved to a position where it imposes serious
restrictions on what ordinary citizens can do in their every-day lives. As
technological progress has made it easier for ordinary people to enjoy and
share culture, copyright legislation has moved in the opposite direction.

We want to restore copyright to its origins, and make absolutely clear
that it only regulates copying for commercial purposes. To share copies, or
otherwise spread or make use of use somebody else’s copyrighted work, should
never be prohibited if it is done by private individuals without a profit
motive. Peer-to-peer file sharing is an example of such an activity that should
be legal.

• 20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly

Much of today’s entertainment industry is built on the commercial
exclusivity of copyrighted works. This, we want to preserve. But today’s
protection times – life plus 70 years – are absurd. No investor
would even look at a business case where the time to pay-back was that long.

We want to shorten the protection time to something that is reasonable
from both society’s and an investor’s point of view, and propose 20 years from
publication.

• Registration After 5 Years

Today, works that are still in copyright, but where it is impossible or
difficult to locate the rights owner, are a major problem. The majority of
these works have little or no commercial value, but since they are still
covered by copyright, they cannot be reused or distributed because there is
nobody to ask for permission.

Copyright protection should be given automatically like it is today to
newly published works, but rights owners who want to continue to exercise their
commercial exclusivity of a work beyond the first 5 years after publication
should be required to register the right, in such a way that it can be found by
a diligent search of public rights databases. This will solve the orphan works
problem.

• Free Sampling

Today’s ever more restrictive copyright legislation and practice is a
major obstacle to musicians, film makers, and other artists who want to create
new works by reusing parts of existing works. We want to change this by
introducing clear exceptions and limitations to allow remixes and parodies, as
well as quotation rights for sound and audiovisual material modeled after the
quotation rights that already exist for text.

• A Ban on DRM

DRM is an acronym for “Digital Rights Management”, or “Digital
Restrictions Management”. The term is used to denote a number of different technologies
that all aim to restrict consumers’ and citizens’ ability use and copy works,
even when they have a legal right to do so.