The Case for Copyright Reform

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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.

It must always be legal to circumvent DRM restrictions, and we should consider introducing a ban in the consumer rights legislation on DRM technologies that restrict legal uses of a work. There is no point in having our parliaments introduce a balanced and reasonable copyright legislation, if at the same time we allow the big multinational corporations to write their own laws, and enforce them through technical means.

This is, in essence, what the Swedish Pirate Party proposes, and the position on copyright that the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament adopted in September 2011.

The proposal is completely in line with ideas that have been voiced in the international debate, such as Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture or Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. These ideas have been thoroughly discussed for at least a decade, both by academics and the Internet community.

“But how will the artists get paid, if file sharing is set free?” is the question that always comes up in the discussion.

Well, “how” is not really for us to say as politicians. To find a business model that works is up to the individual entrepreneur, in the cultural sector just as in any other industry. But we are certain that the cultural sector as a whole will continue to do well, as demonstrated by economic statistics from more than a decade of rampant file sharing. There is no conflict between file sharing and the production of new culture, quite the opposite. Our proposal is good for the artists, both from a creative and an economic point of view.

But the issue is bigger than that. This is about what kind of society we want.

The Internet is the greatest thing that has happened to mankind since the printing press, and quite possibly a lot greater. The Pirate Bay, Wikipedia, and the Arab Spring have made headlines as dedicated people have put the new technology to work to spread culture, knowledge, and democracy, respectively. And we have only seen the beginning.

But at this moment of fantastic opportunity, copyright is putting obstacles in the way of creativity, and copyright enforcement threatens fundamental rights, including the right to private communication, the right to receive and impart information without interference by public authority regardless of frontiers, the right to due process, and the principle of proportionality when punishments are handed out.

We need to change the direction that copyright legislation is going in, in order to protect our fundamental rights. No business model is worth more than the right to private communication and freedom of information.

Copyright needs to be reformed urgently.

Chapter 3 Copyright Enforcement Threatens Fundamental Rights

The Right To Talk In Private

Six years ago, when I, Rick Falkvinge, 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 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 the 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 cannot coexist with the right to communicate in private.

If I send you an e-mail, 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 the 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 at 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, even though such correspondence can be used to transfer copyrighted works. There is no middle ground.

What has become clear recently is 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