Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the EU Parliament earlier this month. The Pirate Party is concerned with patent and intellectual property law on the internet.
Mats Lewan at Cnet
The Pirate Party is focused on three main goals: “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.”
The party was founded in 2006, and that year gained only 0.63 percent of the votes in Swedish parliamentary elections. But since then it has attracted members during the debate on several controversial laws that authorize monitoring of electronic communications and that make it easier to police file sharing on the Internet.
It is now Sweden’s third biggest party by membership. Its ranks swelled when four men were sentenced to prison in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in April. People use Web sites like The Pirate Bay to transfer movies and music, a practice that has drawn the ire–and the lawyers–of Hollywood studios and the recording industry.
The Pirate Party is not formally connected with The Pirate Bay, but has officially expressed support for the Web site.
While I won’t list the whole platform (it varies from country to country), the Pirate Party clearly supports a radical reduction in intellectual property rights. The U.S. version calls for the repeal of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the end of digital rights management, support for file sharing, and a return to a 14 year term for copyrights as provided in the 1790 Copyright Act.
Most of these goals are nonstarters, but there is one idea in their platform that may gain traction. The Party argues that “[p]atents which fail to be developed or have significant progress in any four-year term should be unenforceable.” At a patent law conference that I just attended, there was a lot of discussion about how the PTO and the courts should handle patents that are not commercialized. In recent years, these patents have (generally) been fully enforced. The problem with that, of course, is that these are often the patents that lead to nuisance litigation (patent trolls) and provide less value to society than ones that are actually developed or licensed in good faith.
Belatedly, the IP lobby is waking up. Robert Wexler, the Co-Chair of the US Congressional Intellectual Property Promotion and Piracy Prevention Caucus has issued a call to arms. Wexler makes the statement, usual in cases like this, that his lobby needs to a better job in communicating the message. But, also as usual in cases like this, the real problem is the message itself, exemplified by his reported view that ‘Government and private sector efforts to make IP theft taboo have fallen short’.
The problem here is that no one outside the IP lobby, not even those who strongly support copyright and patents, believes that these things are property that can be stolen. There is, I think, quite a bit of public sympathy for the view that the creative workers deserve a fair return for their efforts, and that social institutions should help to ensure that they receive it. There is essentially none for the inane suggestion that copying a video is similar to stealing a car.
I suspect that IP is doomed, given the steadily increasing ease of copying, the spread of free or open-source material and the reaction against the heavy-handed tactics used so far. But if the IP lobby wants to try to save something from the wreck, they would be well advised to put forward more moderate claims, supported by more credible arguments. Trying to massage the existing message won’t cut it.
Bloggingheads with Henry Farrell and Judah Grunstein
Bruce Byfield has an interview with the Pirate Party leader.
So – if the Pirate’s Party are going to get anything done, they are going to have to get institutionalized into the system, at least to some extent, facing the usual tradeoffs that wild-eyed radicals face when they actually win electedseats. Since my personal stance on these issues is somewhere in the wide spacebetween the Pirate Party’s stated position and the so-called mainstream, I think that a bit of institutionalization would be a very good thing (others, with different positions may vary). It would be nice to see some voices in elected politics expressing opinions that diverge from the copyright-maximalist ones – even when (as here) reformists are still seriously outgunned, they can still have significant consequences by showing up and shouting loudly when bad things seem to be afoot.
UPDATE: Christoper Caldwell in TWS
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June 25, 2009 at 9:39 pm
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