We have the potential to do just this...if we so desire. (See below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1996840,00.asp
The Politics of Piracy Emerge in Sweden
We could feel the ripple effect here, too.
John Dvorak - PC Magazine
July 31 -
Overlooked by the major media is the weird situation in Sweden, where a
political party and lobbying organization has cropped up with the sole purpose
of overturning the current crop of copyright and patent laws and creating
something more modern and realistic: the Pirate Party and the Pro Piracy Lobby.
This movement, while unlikely to have any effect in the U.S., could change
things so dramatically in parliamentary democracies that we'd feel the
aftershock anyway.
This all began with the recent shutdown of The Pirate Bay, a famous quasi-legal
Web site run out of Sweden. The Pirate Bay has been playing various games with
the government over the past year, moving its server around. The site can best
be described as the Napster of BitTorrent sites, one of a few mega-sites where
kids manage their P2P file sharing. It's used mostly for music and movie
trading in violation of copyright, and everyone knows it. But under Swedish
law, it may not be doing this illegally. It's a middleman.
Apparently various record industry interests (and movie folks, too) put a bunch
of leverage on the Swedes to shut these folks down. But the Swedish system of
such law enforcement is arcane and apparently not effective against an
operation like this, since it is in a legal gray area. Enter Uncle Sam.
The U.S. government, after getting a bunch of complaints from Hollywood and the
record industry, allegedly threatened Sweden (though some diplomatic channel),
telling the country that it would be blacklisted in the World Trade
Organization if it didn't shut down the Pirate Bay once and for all. Of course,
there would have been a huge fuss in Europe if Sweden was indeed blacklisted,
and a trade war would have ensued, so I doubt the threat was serious. After
all, the WTO's main purpose is preventing trade wars. And we must have our
Volvos. Nonetheless, that's the way the story has been played in the news, and
the idle youth of Sweden?and now, perhaps, all of Europe?are politicizing
around the issue.?Continue reading...
Let me tell you something. You do not want youth politicizing. Not that the kids
shouldn't take part in politics. You just don't want to get them all jacked up
over an issue like this. There are lots of them. They often have a lot of spare
time. En masse they can ruin things for the "establishment." Luckily, they tend
to be lazy and cynical and seldom take to the streets or the ballot.
Well, it looks like the boneheads in Hollywood and the RIAA, along with onerous
new copyright laws such as the DMCA and other restrictions, are triggering
change. I'd be cautious. Today's youth internationally are not like anything
we've seen before. Their view of the world is skewed by the media and new
realities. When they see all these restrictions, they see them done on behalf
of fat guys who are flying around in private jets with a cabin full of
high-class hookers while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. They see
rappers in limos wearing diamonds and having their teeth removed and replaced
with gold for no apparent reason other than to spend the suckers' money. They
see mega-yachts and homes that are the size of a small college all bought and
sold on the backs of the kids buying music. Indeed, they are seeing a different
world than most of us did when we were growing up. It's nuts. It looks unfair
or, worse, exploitative.
Then they see old ladies arrested for copyright violations because a grandkid
downloaded a song. Dead people are indicted in hysterical sweeps. Kids are
threatened with ruination for song-swapping.
They're not going to put up with it for long, I can assure you. While I think
any outrage will fall short of storming the compounds of the rich and burning
their homes, once the next-generation youth finally figure out that they can
take over at the ballot box, all hell will break loose.
In a parliamentary system, a group like the Pirate Party, which will quickly
surpass Sweden's Green Party, doesn't have to win a majority of seats to have
an effect. In multiparty systems (unlike in the U.S.), you have to form
coalitions to rule, and all sorts of deals are made for anything to get done.
And I suspect that a lot of older politicos are tired of being pushed around by
U.S. intellectual-property monopolists and would love to side with the Pirate
Party on the excuse that they "had to."
Links to the current situation are on my blog here. To American ears, this all
seems and sounds silly. But the moniker for the Pirate Party in Swedish,
Piratpartiet, actually has a nice ring to it.
I'm not sure how far any of this will go, and perhaps this new up-and-coming
youth culture will get caught up in chat rooms or online games or green-tea
cultivation instead of fighting this fight. But this much I can tell you: If
they decide to make a fight of it, they'll win, and things will indeed change.
Stay tuned.
|
