pirate party social movement
The pirate party movement is very active here in Finland — the Pirate Party became an officially recognized party here today, garnering the needed 5000 signatures. I did not really know about the movement until now, predictably the wiki site on the Pirate Party is very instructive.
The movement started in Sweden just three years ago and has now spread across the globe. The party’s agenda centers exclusively on these three issues:
Reform of copyright law.
An abolished patent system.
Respect for the right to privacy.
Very interesting. Look like an interesting setting to study organizing and movements.
If you combine this with today’s post at Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/01/hey-kids-free-plato-book-and-you-can-help-me-make-it-better/), it feels like we’re standing on the edge of some kind of vast digital future. Actually, I’m SURE it will be digital but I doubt it will be free.
John
June 1, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Very interesting. I hope one day (way down the road) to find time to think about the epistemological implications of patents and copyrights. They are part of the incentive system that organizes scientific inquiry and it would be interesting to generate some hypotheses about what sort of knowledge would be produced if the Pirate Party had its way. Timothy Noah at Slate once proposed to abolish (or at least strongly limit) copyright for academic writers as a way of fighting plagiarism, some cases of which have been known to be “settled” in terms of copyright, not scholarship. That is, they have been concealled from the community of scholars.
http://www.slate.com/?id=2061281
Similar things can be said of patents, no doubt. If innovation, both in theory and technology, were driven by “pure curiosity”, i.e., if science were left to people who “just want to know”, what would happen? The question, I suppose, is whether such disinterested curiosity/creativity actually exists. Would the abolition of patent rights be tantamount to the abolition of intellectual and technological progress? Or would would it inaugurate an entirely new kind of intellectual environment, conditioned by entirely different stakes, and therefore composed of entirely different stakeholders?
Thomas Basbøll
June 2, 2009 at 6:59 am
I’m sort of interested in the social dynamics/organizing of it all: analytical issues related to parties (or any other collectives for that matter) with 2-3 issues versus broader-based approaches etc — very interesting matters arise related to aggregation, emergence, etc. Poli Sci obviously has some central work in this realm (Austen-Smith, Banks, etc) and naturally both the mechanism design and social choice literatures relate.
tf
June 2, 2009 at 11:05 am
Abolishing copyright for academic works would dry up a huge fount of corruption. No more 300pp books that cost $100. No yearly “upgrades” of $50 textbooks that involve replacing a 20pp module and leaving everything else exactly the same, and criminalizing the sale of used copies. No academic publishers offering free samples and kickbacks to faculty who assign their books, on the same model as the pharma reps who bribe doctors.
We need a Napster for scanned-in textbooks, so we can listen to the Copyright Nazis squeal like stuck pigs.
Kevin Carson
June 3, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Seems a little extreme. I don’t understand why there is all this “top-down” hubbub to try to tell people what to do with their content — come on. Some will make their content freely available to all and some won’t: why not let them choose and face the consequences either way. Sure, there are powerful gatekeepers in copyright, but — it seems that we’ve also got lots of bottom-up solutions emerging and essentially a range of experiments being tested with regard to the delivery of content (one could, for example, feasibly teach a class with articles that are all free, or use a textbook, or even wikipedia) — some will strictly enforce copyright, others freely distribute their content, etc and everything in between. So, for example, Napster was powerful, sure, but illegal — but now we’ve got all kinds of intermediate solutions taken/tested by artists, and consumers have choice not just in content but they effectively are voting for the appropriate delivery mechanisms as well. (It’s likely that I’m giving the ‘invisible hand’ far too much credit here.)
tf
June 3, 2009 at 7:08 pm
[...] was mentioned by Teppo Felin at orgtheory.net, pirate parties obviously are “an interesting setting to study and organizing and movements.” [...]
Copyright Related Social Movements: Pirate Parties and the European Parliamentary Elections «
June 8, 2009 at 8:33 am
Wow, the pirate party — again, a single-issue party — received 7.1% of the vote in Sweden yesterday (as the above comment link points out).
tf
June 8, 2009 at 2:07 pm
With luck, they’ll have an effect on the European Left beyond their numbers, as the Greens did 20 years ago.
Kevin Carson
June 8, 2009 at 6:24 pm
BTW, tf, I forgot to respond to your earlier comment.
It’s copyright itself that’s “top-down,” because it’s inherently illegitimate. The whole point is that it’s NOT “their content.” That’s like asking “What’s all the hubbub about slavery? You can choose to own slaves or not.” The form of property itself is illegitimate.
Any law that enforces “ownership” of content is inherently illegitimate, because it’s a top-down interference with what I do with MY hard drive or whatever. “Intellectual property” [sic] can only be enforced by interference with genuine (i.e. tangible) property rights. That’s why we have the tyranny of DRM, criminal sanctions on technical means of circumvention, and EULA agreements.
Kevin Carson
June 8, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Kevin: Not sure I follow, you’re equating slavery with someone’s ownership of a song or a software program one might write? (Not sure we’ve got symmetry there.) And, again — why not just allow the creator the freedom to choose whether to release something openly or not?
tf
June 8, 2009 at 8:16 pm
I’m equating copyright to slavery–in kind, if not degree–as a spurious property right that’s null and void on its face. No one CAN legitimately “own” a song or software program. And the creator has perfect freedom to release something or not; he just doesn’t have the right to prevent anyone else from copying it once it’s released. Someone else’s “copyright,” plain and simple, is a restriction on what I can do with my own real–tangible–property. As such, it is invasive of real property rights. Copyright is theft.
Kevin Carson
June 8, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I see the point, but disagree and/or perhaps just don’t ‘get’ (though I’m open) what a fully worked out version of your model would look like and its specific implications for production/creation and appropriation.
tf
June 8, 2009 at 10:00 pm
tf: FWIW, I wrote on the moral/theoretical side here, if you’re interested: http://c4ss.org/content/521
On the practical side, a common business model for open-source content creators is to give away the content free, but make money off of support, customization and/or accessories. A good example is Linux distros that offer customer support and customization, and Phish’s practice of encouraging file-sharing but making money off performances. Radiohead’s experiment of offering free downloads and collecting contributions via a glorified PayPal tip jar would probably work for a lot of indy artists, because the cost of home studio and editing equipment has imploded and, between that and web hosting costs, the total overhead would be minimal; even a buck or two average contribution would be a lot, because almost the entire revenue stream would be free and clear.
In book publishing, I think there’s a considerable rent involved in being the first to overcome the transaction costs of setting it up for print and establishing the Internet sales infrastructure, if you don’t get greedy and charge enough over cost to make it worth someone’s while to undercut you. OTOH an academic publishing house that charges $100 for a 200 pp. book is gonna be in deep doo-doo. I’ve got a couple of books published under the Woody Guthrie Public License (“anyone found reproducing this content without our permission will be considered mighty good friends of ours”), and manage to get $150-200/month royalties despite the fact that the content is free. Given the volume and the royalties, it’s not worth anyone else’s trouble to overcome the transaction costs of offering a rival version for a lower price.
Kevin Carson
June 8, 2009 at 10:31 pm
The Pirate Party will have its first seated member in the EU parliament – further evidence that that august body is the most ridiculous political institution on the planet.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090608/od_nm/us_election_pirates
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