What happens when a lot of people get upset about copyright laws? In Sweden, the Pirate Party gets a seat at the European Parliament. As the Guardian reports, “revulsion” over a controversial I.P. enforcement directive and the arrest of The Pirate Bay’s owners helped the Pirate Party secure 7 percent of the national vote. Another Pirate Party won nearly 1 percent of the vote in Germany, and similar parties exist in Austria, Spain, Denmark, Poland, and Finland. It may be a good thing that Dubner’s new term for internet piracy didn’t catch on. The Downlifting Party just doesn’t sound as appealing. [%comments]
Pirates in Government
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Good on these pirates for giving it a shot, but I can’t imagine actually voting for a party based on something like my right to download torrents. Surely there are grander things to worry about? Surely the power of the internet could be used to rally people together for better purposes?
It all sounds terribly petty and ridiculous to me.
@cpb
“a party based on something like my right to download torrents”
Pirate Party in Sweden is not based on that. Torrents themselves are not illegal either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party
Dave: She is a spokesperson. One of them. She is not 18, but 22 and a member of the European Parliament (and a voting member if the lisbon treaty passes). It’s pretty evident that you have no clue what the pirate party wants, but you should not make stuff up like that when you simply do not know. You are on the internet, use tools like Google and knowledge shall be yours!
She’d also rape you hard in any discussion on copyright and patent law. She is awesome!
Economists cares about the money. Actually the money in their pockets. They are always in the place where money is.
The issue I take with movements regarding piracy is that, as far as I’ve seen it articulated, the opponents of anti-piracy law seem to basically be saying, “We don’t like these laws.” I have seen few arguments from advocates of filesharing that philosophically or ideologically justify filesharing without compensation to the original artists. Not liking a law is not a reason for it to be changed. Even if a majority of people don’t like a law, that is not necessarily reason to change it, if the law itself is right. I’m not saying specifically that anti-piracy laws are right; rather, I’ve yet to see a compelling argument for why filesharing is philosophically right and should be allowed.
BSK: dude, if a majority of people think a law should be changed, it should be changed. That’s sort of a fundamental part of democracy, laws are enacted based on popular opinion.
“[I]f a majority of people think a law should be changed, it should be changed.”
Except that most “democracies” are actually republics, and the majority opinion is (in theory) supposed to be tempered by giving power to fair-minded people who actually have experience making, enforcing, and interpreting laws.
That said, I agree that copyright laws are archaic and need to be drastically revised. Artist should be justly compensated, but the distribution channels of the past continue to demand unreasonable compensation for media that, by all rationality, should be public domain.
“Except that most ‘democracies’ are actually republics…”
Very true. However, in the ideal representative democracy (we like to model ideally here among economists, right?), if the fair-minded people act against popular opinion without managing to convince the majority of their unfair-mindedness, they will be replaced in the next election. The (ideal) process will end with the law being changed.
The philosophical argument of a higher moral, suggested by BSK, can be employed by fair-minded representatives to convince the public to change their mind, democratic systems are far from ideal and the majority is not always very politically astute, but in the long run, laws against public opinion are not viable.