Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engstrom are respectively the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party and, the second, a Member of the European Parliament elected in the related list and sitting in “The Greens | European Free Alliance” parliamentary group. Despite the buccaneer flavoury name and the at times provocative attitude, the Pirate Party as proven to be capable of came out with many reasonable proposals and to be constructive in the approach, this is the case in “The Case For Copyrighting Reform”, a booklet with a self-explanatory title.
In “The Case For Copyrighting
Reform” Falkvinge and Engstrom offer to the European public a six-point agenda
of possible copyright legal framework reform also explaining why it is much needed. Following there is my opinion about the six proposals.
Moral rights should stay
unchanged; this is one of the main, if not the main, good reasons why copyrights
where introduced at the beginning, even Martin Luther found copies of his
thesis changed but still under his misattributed name. Everyone should have his/her creations properly attributed and we also as the community benefit from a system where sources
are properly referenced and trustworthy.
Free non-commercial sharing; here
the pirates ask something but still come with a decent compromise, while saving
the “bulk” of the copyright revenues in the for-profit sector, they still aim
to free the final user, we the consumers, from the burden of caring and paying
for the copyright legal framework.
20 years of commercial monopoly;
yes and no, this other compromise leaves me uncertain, I would differentiate more
the length of the monopoly by industry, this is probably the view of the authors
as well who maybe have left this to the lawmaker’s discussions.
Registration after 5 years; this
is a bit more of a technicality but sounds completely reasonable and needed,
after all, even the ownership of land gets lost if not claimed…
Free sampling; again, a
reasonable proposal but the evil stays in the details, the length and the extend
of a “reasonable” sampling is difficult to tell and verify, this may lead to an
increase in litigation and confusion. Maybe the benefits of this last point can
be obtained already with the “free non-commercial sharing” proposal leaving the
for-profit pay for what they use in their value chain.
A ban for DRM “Digital Rights
Management”; finally, with this proposal, the pirate spirit comes out advocating
for their freedom objective but at the same time not caring much about restricting
other actor’s freedom. If on one side I agree that should “always be legal to
circumvent DRM restrictions” on the other side I think that authors should be also free to shape
their works as better fit their marketing purposes, including discouraging “copying”
even if legal. People in Port Royal would agree with me.
Source:
The Case for Copyright Reform, by
Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engstrom
http://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/large/The%20Case%20For%20Copyright%20Reform%20(2012)%20Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf
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