[pp.int.general] Purpose of copyright

[Ole Husgaard]

Richard M. Stallman skrev:
> I would therefore like to make a suggestion for Pirate Parties'
> program:
>
> To explicitly reject and denounce the term "intellectual property",
> and propose to undo recent government reorganizations motivated by
> that term that with the goal of grouping unrelated laws together
> under that term, with a view towards discouraging the public confusion
> that this grouping causes.
>   
I agree. This term only helps "owners" of various "intellectual
monopolies" to confuse things. What you suggest here should IMHO be part
of the Pirate Manifesto we are currently working on.

When the different kinds of "intellectual property" are confused, you
can use an argument against one kind of "intellectual property" to call
for harsher sanctions of other kinds of "intellectual property".

Let me give three recent examples:

1) The ACTA treaty currently under way is using this approach to enforce
countries to implement [don't really know what, as it is all kept
secret, but what has been leaked is really bad].

2) In the EU we have a proposed directive called IPRED2. The "IPR" of
this acronym is "intellectual property rights", and the rest of the
acronym is "enforcement directive 2". This directive is aimed to force
EU member states to implement harsher criminal penalties for violations
of "IPR" laws, and even calls for such penalties when no violated party
can be found. Up to four years of prison should be the minimum in local
criminal laws for these "crimes".

3) Our local government is going to propose new legislation this year
that would cause the penalties for any kind of "intellectual property
rights" (including violation of software patents, which are currently
illegal here) to go up to 6 years of prison time. The rationale is that
some of these violations (like "pirate copies" of important medicines
containing no active ingredient) could be extremely dangerous. This
confusion recently made our minister of culture talk about the health
problems with pirate copying in a parliament debate about illegal
copying on the internet!

In all three cases there is no exception for non-commercial sharing of
copyrighted works, though all the Pirate Parties support that this
should be completely legal. The enforcement of non-commercial sharing is
the same as the enforcement of the worst "intellectual monopoly"
violation you can think of.

The strategy in all three cases for those who want to enforce violations
of "intellectual monopolies" seem to be to confuse the different kinds
of "intellectual monopolies" and call for the worst kind of penalty
possible for enforcing any of these "intellectual monopolies". In some
cases like the "pirate copying" of important medicines without any
active ingredients I do agree with a harsh penalty, as people could die
(though it never happened, as far as I know), but if you are a
politician who doesn't really know the difference I can (almost)
understand why they vote for harsh penalties for violations when they do
not know the difference. (IMHO any such penaly should be for putting
people in danger, not for violating some kind of "IP")

Best Regards,

Ole Husgaard.