Copyright laws threaten our online
freedom
FT.Com
By Christian Engström
Published: July 7 2009 18:10 | Last updated: July 7 2009 18:10
If
you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a
few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no
music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our
common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.
On
MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to
enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and
record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them
down.
This was never
the intent.
Copyright was
meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform.
But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold
copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate
with each other in private, without being monitored.
File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file
to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all
communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa
and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of
file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all
other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments
to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we
give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks?
Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share
copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove
the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to
make a choice.
The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new
information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been
decided.
The technology could be used to create a Big Brother
society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every
detail of our lives. In the former
The same technology could instead be used to create a
society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the
citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture
through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a
journey into the future.
The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see
fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer
operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the
participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate
Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to anybody with an
internet connection. But where technology opens up new possibilities, our
intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back
by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright.
The public increasingly recognises the need for reform.
That was why Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular
vote in
Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually
abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the
net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and
transparent. This is our entire platform.
We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting
the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of
Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political
differences aside in order to ensure this.
Political decisions taken over the next five years are
likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect
the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears
lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and
wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?
The information revolution is happening here and now. It
is up to us to decide what future we want.
The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European
parliament