Copyright Talk

Thanks to a little article in Information Week, I have discovered the Pirate Party. There’s no ale or wenches that I’m aware of, but they do apparently want to turn “pirates” into legitimate, productive citizens. Not by changing any behavior, but by moving the line in the sand that separates “pirates” from the rest of us.

The constituency of this Party is the “Internet Community,” with a platform supporting changes to copyright, patent, and other laws that the Party feels have shifted away from the encouragment of scienctific innovation and artistic creativity and have in fact begun to stifle it.

I read their position statement on copyright, and I see quite a bit of merit in their viewpoint. It’s worth a considered discussion, in particular the terms of protection for intellectual property. England very recently debated extending it’s term of copyright in musical compostions from 50 years to 95 - and chose not to extend it. This makes English music copyright protection considerably shorter than the US protection of life of the author plus 70 years (for works copyrighted since 2000). There is clearly room for minds to disagree on this issue.

But as I continued reading, I came to this passage: “We believe that a user has the right to distribute works given that he/she follow the author’s restrictions on allowed obfuscation of the essence and encumbrance of the format. The author’s only restrictions on this type of redistribution should be on how obfuscated the essence or how encumbered the format is. The author should not disallow clarified essence or freed up formats. We believe this would foster the progress of science and the useful arts.”

Huh? I have no idea what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s because it’s early in the morning and my mind is still asleep, but I’m lost here.

However, I do think their larger point, that the internet has changed the way people communicate and publish information, does deserve debate on how that impacts our laws, if only because so many people think that should change things.