[pp.int.general] Open letter to Anonymous (please distribute)

[Boris Turovskiy]

Ahoi,

> These people break the laws we are trying to change. We don't have to
> support them but we have to admit that they are our shadow, that we
> move together not because of an agreement but because we react to the
> same things. We don't obey them, they don't obey us. But we hit the
> same targets : where we protest, they are attacking.
There are different ways of "attacking" and breaking the laws.
Considering copyright for example, there are people who break DRM or
develop secure filesharing protocols, and there are those who hack
customer databases and spread private data of innocent users all over
the internet. I would like the Pirate parties to make this kind of
differentiation instead of making general statements like "hacking is
good / hacking is bad".

> That may look like a dramatization, but a lot of things in the 21st
> century will depend on the stance the world takes toward this
> "intellectual property" mess. It is more than just about culture : it
> encompasses science and technology through patents and copyrights on
> designs, agriculture through property rights on crops species, and
> medicine on the generic drugs issues.
I'm most surely no fan of bashing everyone who mentions "intellectual
property" but in this case you've run into the trap posed by this
terminology. There is no unified "intellectual property" problem, but
rather a number of very different legal fields (both regarding their
aims and the design of the laws) and it's not at all helpful to confuse
things such as copyright, patents and designs.

Best regards,
Boris