[pp.int.general] Fwd: <nettime> Richard Stallman: How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software

[Philip Hunt]

2009/7/29 Eric Priezkalns <eric.priezkalns at pirateparty.org.uk>:
> On 29 Jul 2009, at 15:53, Philip Hunt wrote:
> >And make no mistake, Berne is a bad treaty that needs to be abolished.
> >A copyright term of life plus 50 years is far too long.
>
> Forgive the pedantry, but I think you mean that the convention needs to be
> reformed or superseded, not abolished.

Amounts to the same thing.

> The Berne convention was not all
> bad, and brought about some improvements over the pre-existing national
> laws.  For example, it oriented the rights to be more in favour of creators,
> and less focused on the interests of publishers.  One aspect of this was
> that creators had rights simply as a result of creating, without needing to
> register their work in order to secure those rights.  Abolition implies
> reverting to a hotchpotch of national laws and bilateral treaties, and that
> may have lots of undesirable consequences.  One challenge for this fledgling
> international movement is working out, amongst ourselves, what a Berne mk.2
> would look like.

I think it's quite likely that a "Berne Mark II" is the way it will go
-- a group of pirate-supporting countries will get together and
negotiate such a treaty. I don't think it will immediately supercede
Berne, because at the time that the pirate movement is strong enough
to get a Berne II, we won't (yet) be in control of all the world's
major economies. But we will be strong enough that we (i.e. the
countries where the PP philosophy holds power) will be able to
implement the changes and make them stick.

It would be tactically unwise for the Pirate movement to wait until
Piratism is victorious everywhere before we try to reform/abolish(*)
Berne, since that would mean delaying things when we could have done
them earlier.

* delete according to taste.

-- 
Philip Hunt, <cabalamat at googlemail.com>
Campaigns Officer / Press Officer, Pirate Party UK