Christ. They have a country falling apart under the burdens of mass immigration. Ppl who even consider voting for those morons would have to be complete idiots.
Generally Swedes are political ignorants, which to some degree is caused by having a (socialist) oppressive media that denies debate about sensitive issues. Instead of discussing something real people turn to completely ridiculous (but safe) topics like gender equality, de-constructing the "idea" of sexes and now copy right laws.
So actually, I don't think I am exaggerating. Of course I don't know for sure, but my predication is that by 2025 calls for creation of an islamic state on swedish ground will be a reality. Armed conflict will follow in sweden and other parts of europe.
Copyright laws? Who gives a fuck. Buy your music and videos in iTunes store and focus on something real.
Maybe your missing the point and the youth are convinced of something you don't understand. There a plenty of cases of radical shifts in government and views because of what seems like simple actions and mistakes by a previous government. This should be interesting to see what happens but also serve as a warning to some of the other parts of the EU of what may come if they continue to act in a certain way.
Copyright and patent is an anachronism. It needs to go.
This is not the mere opinion of a generation. It is also the opinion of neoclassical economists like David Levine, free market anarchists, patent lawyers like Stephen Kinsella, etc. The intellectual framework is already laid down.
The Pirate Party is actually moderate in comparsion to those abolisionists but what they proposes will effectively negate the power of copyright forever. From there it is a matter of abolishment of an entire system.
According to Hernando de Soto (among others), copyright is the reason for pretty much everything good that happened to the western countries in the last couple of hundred years. And he makes a very convincing case about it, too.
The issue is a bit more complicated. The last part of the article was the most interesting. If they can put into law something against commercial lobbying (not a ban of course, but a damper) that could mean changes that are more profound and long term. And might be for the best, too.
I can't find the quote I was looking for, but it doesn't really matter. Hes argument is that "capitalism" is a thing which is harder to define then it seems at first glance, and it includes various property rights of higher order (i.e. I don't only own my house, I also own the right to sell/rent/mortgage/use as collateral). Copyright fits right in.
Anyways, my point was that it would be dangerous to mess with an important part of this "capitalism" without understanding how it works. It is true that extending copyright and patent inflation stifle, to a degree, original research. Is even more true that abolishing them would instantly kill all significant private original research.
The improtance of property in capitalism is that it allocate scarce resources such as land, computers, etc efficently.
I do not see how musics and source code fit in the overall scheme of property rights. Rather, copyright and patents actually violate property rights by forbidding people who actually own a copy from distributing new copies at will or building on the copy at will. (Remind me why it needs to last 20 years or 13 years, or whatever years? If it is property rights, than it should last infintely.)
In any case, your assertion that without copyright and patent, there would be no innovation is well contested by a book called Against Intellectual Monopoly.
My main problem is with taking an issue which is very complicated and offering a simple solution: just remove the copyright.
Most decisions in economy are taken in a very rational. A pharmaceutical company will decide how much to invest in researching and getting approved a certain drug based on the chance of success and the potential profits. The profits depend directly on the time it has exclusive rights on that product. If it's only until a competitor reverse engineers the product, then it could only be a few months. If it's 20 years, the profits are completely different. It will invest in both cases, just very different amounts. The length of the copyright should be computed to maximize overall benefits to society. A large enough investment, but not too long.
Another case is software patents. There is a very big difference between patenting ideas (usually considered a very bad idea) and patenting software (usually considered necessary). An interesting example: most people decide to use (and pay for) Windows, even when there are free alternatives. Why? Because it simply is better. All those money invested in developing it (based on the expectation of future profits) just make a difference.
Or collections of otherwise non-copyrighted data, like maps. Making a map is extremely expensive. Copying one on the other hand is extremely cheap. What incentive would a map maker have to do all this work?
All these are very different cases, and they have to be treated as such. Simply saying all IP laws are not necessary because RIAA is evil is not a solution.
My personal preference tends to be towards eliminating copyright for non-commercial purposes, with a broad definition of what is commercial. Listening to music at home would not be commercial, but in a restaurant (or any other public place) it would be. But I only consider this my _opinion_. I admit it's limited and with flaws, and I am aware that "the devil is in the details". And most of all, I firmly believe this is a complex problem, which does not have a simple solution.
I will take I look at the book you mentioned. I am curious how it treats some particular cases, like some of the above.
I did skim the book, or at least a few chapters. I'm sorry to say, but I find it full of logical falacies and anecdotal evidence. There is a long chapter about pharmaceutical companies, which points out very valid evils of the domain, including marketing of dubious ethics, but when it comes to offering an alternative incentives for developing new, expensive drugs, I couldn't find anything remotely convincing.
Other often used fallacy is: "If patents would be good, this would have happened when country X changed its patent laws". Correlation does not imply causation, and you will forgive me if I do not believe such obvious biased authors chose the most unbalanced cases. Maybe in the rest of the book there is an explanation as to why America (strong copyright) uses so few innovations developed in China (weak copyright). It seems to me it's the other way around.
The book is a very good critique of the evils of the copyright system. I fully agree with most of them. My conclusion is that we need a better system, less open to abuse and with shorter terms. But we still definitely need it.
- Finland's population vanishes entirely due to suicides and domestic knife violence
- Norwegian language extinct due to general sulkiness
- Iceland disappears into the Atlantic under the weight of Kaupthing Bank's debt
- Danes eat too much fatty foods, explode leaving a greasy stain on EU map