Oct 09
11
An Interview With The President Of The Australian Pirate Party
As regular
visitors to this blog would know, we have a keen interest in how
networking tools and technologies are being used to aid communication.
One of the principal tools that we have watched and undertaken
extensive research in is how P2P is used in conjunction with content of
all kinds.
The positioning of the content industry and its peak industry
groups to attack consumers who have wittingly or unwittingly broken
copyright laws led, in Sweden, to the creation of The Pirate Party.
This spawned Pirate Parties in a number of countries, the most recent
being Australia. And before you think that this is either a single
issue party or a fly by night operation, I want to remind you that two
Pirate Party members were elected to the European Parliament at the
most recent elections. So this may be a party that will actually have
legs in this country. Time will tell.
The thing that clearly sets the Pirate Party apart from most of the
other fringe parties is that they are clearly extremely technically
savvy. (Certainly they monitor the blogosphere).
The following is a Q and A conducted via email in late October 2009 between Chris Gilbey and David Crafti.
Q: David, when was the Australian Pirate Party created and what are its ideals and objectives?
Party
Australia was started around a year ago, by Rodney Serkowski, who
is the current Party Agent (a position required by the AEC, mainly for
reasons related to funding and financial reporting). He began the
party, other than to support the general Pirate Party objectives, to
combat the rise in anti-Internet legislation, such as Senator Conroy's
Internet censorship plans, and the possibility of Australia adopting a
3 strikes policy, as several countries have considered.
The main objectives of the party are twofold:
1.
To reform intellectual property law to find a happy medium where
innovators and producers of content receive a good return on their
investments, and where society at large receives the addition to
culture that is the reason for protecting intellectual property in the
first place. We believe that there is an expectation on the innovators
and content producers to adopt business models that do not penalise
what
is currently considered to be non-commercial infringement of their
rights, and which do not lock content behind some impenetrable wall
with the effect
that by the time that the content should enter the public domain, the
content is lost forever.
We do not think that copyrights should
last
for terms such as 70 years past the death of the author, as copyright
protections were never intended to treat intellectual property the same
as real property. It was only meant to be an incentive to creative
people to keep working, rather than an incentive to the grandchildren
of creative people to never work. Copyright requires that society gives
up natural rights, but this is only done for the payback of increasing
the society's culture, not as an outright charity.
To protect civil liberties such
as freedom of speech and the right to privacy. We believe that without
these two freedoms, as a minimum, there cannot be a free society. The
protection of these rights has been trodden on a lot over the last
decade, at least partially in order to maintain the monopoly of certain
content producers. Freedom is far more important than protecting
outdated business models. The most immediate cause that the party will
be working on as part of this objective is to defeat the Internet
censorship plans of Senator Conroy.
A
free society cannot tolerate censorship, secret blacklists and
government-mandated communications monitoring. These all create a
chilling effect where people no longer feel that they can express the
ideas they want, for fear that the ideas may be overheard and misused.
A common argument by our opponents is “Well if you're not doing
anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide,” but my response
to that is to ask “what does the hen have to hide from the fox?” To
those who want everyone to “think of the children” I say that the
government already provided filtering software for parents to install
on computers if they thought it necessary.
There are sure to be many more issues
about which members of the party will feel passionately, however the
party is unlikely to include anything else in its core platform. Unlike
many other parties, however, we do not plan to restrict individual
members from stating their opinions about other issues, as long as it
is understood that it is their opinion and not party policy.
Q: How does the Pirate Party expect the public to take it seriously with a name like it's got?
members of the party are not ashamed of the name Pirate Party, as we
understand
the meaning and satire behind it, however we do need to treat the issue
with the respect it deserves. The word 'Pirate' grabs a lot of
attention, however the word 'Pirate' results in almost as much
dismissal. We are looking at possibly introducing a slogan for some
marketing purposes, such as “Silly name, serious policies,” which was
suggested by a member, though we are still considering options and may
turn it into a competition. We may also target different demographics
with different references, so that some may know us as Pirate Party
Australia, yet others may know us primarily as PPAU.
Do you think that the copyright owners in Australia are going to spend
money on fighting you or trying to discredit you, and what would you
intend to do about it?
stand for, well before we came along. We plan on running a grass-roots,
viral campaign, not specifically to garner votes, but to undo the
misinformation spread by organisations like A.F.A.C.T. such as the
term “Copyright theft,” which is in their name. According to the Crimes
Act (1958) s72(1),
A person steals if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging toanother with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.
there are many studies that support the notions that downloading of
content does not represent a lost sale for the creators and that
downloading can actually help content creators earn more.
Q: Tom Koltai and I have been blogging for some time about
alternative ways to monetise content creators including the models used
in Canada to put a levy on blank media, and using that to help fund
local creators of content. Do you have any thought on what we have
proposed, or do you have a proposal that will enable content owners to
earn money? And do you think that your efforts will bear fruit over
time?
many industries. The devil is in the details and the details here
revolve around paperwork and enforcement.
The other issue is that publishers of content are rarely the creators
of content. Content creators and society in general would be best
served by allowing for the non-commercial copying of content. Using
music as an example, the biggest problem that most bands have is
distribution and actually getting people to listen to their music.
Allowing their music to be copied freely solves this problem. Let's
call this the early Metallica approach. The next biggest problem is earning
enough money. This problem can be solved using some time-honoured
business activities: Tour, sell premium versions of albums, including
collectibles that can't be downloaded, and swag. Swag is the stuff that
the fans want to buy: t-shirts, hats, figurines and posters. With this
model, bands can expect that fans will buy the goods, but non-fans will
still download the music. They key point is that the non-fans were generally not
going to buy the album anyway. The main problem with this solution is
that the musicians themselves would make the money, which is not the
way the publishers want it. Most signed artists are kept over a barrel
for much of their music careers, so we see our position as trying to
break the publishers' monopoly so that artists can finally earn a
living doing what they love.
This approach is already being used by many artists, some of whom
release their music under the Creative Commons licence. The most
notable release which didn't require payment to download was
Radiohead's In Rainbows, which has been reported to have earned them
around $3 million, just from donations, with no publisher to take a cut.
Q: You are planning to field candidates in the next federal
election. Can you tell us what you are going to be doing to build
visibility for both your cause and to get a positive outcome? And how
much money are you planning to raise to enable you to mount a publicity
campaign?
to make any announcements relating to who might run for what. As I have
said, we plan on running a grass-roots, viral campaign. From what I
have been able to tell, many people don't use our preferential voting
system to use their votes to send messages to the government. We will
be encouraging people who don't think we can win, but like our
platform, to place us first, or at least ahead of both the major
parties. We will be looking at preference deals, however I think that
people should ideally take the time to fill in all boxes on the Federal
Senate ballot, rather than just the one number above the line. We
believe that no one party can entirely represent the views of any
person, so each person should specify their own preferences.
We are not ready to take donations yet, but you'll know when we are. In
the mean time, we encourage people to <a
href=”http://pirateparty.org.
at the Pirate Party Australia site</a> so they can receive
updates.
Q: Are there any other things that you can share with us at this time?
I have rambled on for long enough, there is still much more to say, so
I would just like to sum up by saying that grass-roots campaigns are
run by the people, for the people. I
encourage anyone who is interested to either sign up with us and stay
in
the loop, or join the Pirate Party Australia Facebook group, or just
send us an email at enquiries@pirateparty.org.au if looking for more
information.