My opinion on "The Case For Copyright Reform" by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström

The book "The Case For Copyright Reform" was written to address the main points of the proposal of the copyright reform by the Pirate Party in Sweden. One of the authors, Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and has traveled around the world to talk and write about his ideas of a sensible information policy. The other author, Christian Engström is a member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party. Before getting involved with politics he was a computer programmer, who became involved with politics over the issue of software patents.

Chapter 2 - A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform:

The Pirate Party's objective is not to abolish copyrights, but to reform them. They only want to keep copyrights for commercial purposes, but make everything else freely available. The attempts to enforce non-commercial sharing of culture between private citizens is threatening basic human rights, such as private communication and freedom of information. To monitor people's communications for copyright infringements, all private communications would also have to surveilled. This would mean that your right to privately talk to your lawyer, your web-cam flirt or a journalist, who you want to share sensitive information with as a whistle-blower.

Moral Rights Unchanged:

The reform should not change the author's privilege to be recognized as the author. Nobody should be allowed to claim they are someone who they are actually not. This does not only apply to Copyrights but also in the real world, so the sentence "give credit where credit is due" is a good saying that applies everywhere.

Free Non-Commercial Sharing:

Until about 20 years ago Copyright did not concern the ordinary person. It was more aimed at companies and organizations that had the ability to print books and press records. In practice everything that you had the technical means to do was totally okay and did not breach any Copyright laws. Today though, Copyright seriously restricts what normal people can do in their every-day lives. The reform wants to defend the average person so that if Copyrighted content is shared without a motive for profit it should be totally legal.

20 Years of Commercial Monopoly:

Right now Copyright laws allow the author's created work to be exclusive to the author for their entire life + 70 years after their death. The reform finds this very unreasonable and wants to decrease the time from 70 years after the author's death to 20 years from publication. That would make it reasonable from society's and an investor's point of view.

Registration after 5 years:

There are works that are under Copyright, but the author is nowhere to be found. This poses a serious problem for distribution and reuse of the work, since there is no one to ask permission from. The reform suggests a law where every single published work should be automatically given 5 years of Copyrights Protection like most newly released works, but if the author wants to keep their rights after that they have to register.

Free Sampling:

Today's Copyrights are a major obstacle to musicians and other artists who want to reuse old works to create something of their own. The reform suggests having clear limitations and exceptions for how the Copyrighted works could be used.

A Ban on Digital Rights Management:

Digital Rights Management is a number of different technologies that all aim to restrict the consumer's and citizen's ability to use and copy works, even if they may have the right to do so. There is no point in having the Parliament introduce new laws if the large corporations can write their own laws and enforce them through technical means.

My opinion:

I certainly agree with the reform and do believe that the Copyright system needs to reformed and quickly. The regulations themselves have been around for over a couple of hundred of years and has seen little change since the conception. With the internet that has made the whole world into a tightly connected network, the true meaning of infringing on Copyright laws has changed drastically. Therefore we should also seek to change the Copyright regulations to better suit the world today, without compromising private information and surveilling regular citizens' private communications.

Source:

http://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/large/The%20Case%20For%20Copyright%20Reform%20(2012)%20Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf

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