Copyright ReformBalanced Copyrights
Copyright was created to benefit society by encouraging the creation, development and dissemination of culture. To achieve these goals requires a balance between the society's demands for access and dissemination, and society's desire that there should be incentives for innovation and further development of culture.
We believe that today's copyright is out of balance. A society where culture and knowledge is free and accessible to all on equal terms benefit the whole society. We argue that a widespread and systematic abuse of today's copyright actively discourage these purposes by limiting both the range of culture and access to culture.
We want to restore the balance in copyright law by making the following changes:
Free file sharing
Technological developments have made it possible to spread culture throughout the world at almost no cost at all. It is a fantastic new opportunity. We want to bolster this possibility.
All non-commercial acquisition, exploitation, processing and dissemination of culture must be explicitly encouraged. Legislation should be amended so that it quite clearly only commercial uses of works is regulated. The sharing copies of or disseminating another's work should never be forbidden as long as it takes place without profit.
Free sampling
We want to make it easier to process and reuse parts of old works.
Shorter commercial exclusivity
Large parts of the entertainment industry, as it stands today, are based on the exclusive right to exploit works commercially. We want to maintain this exclusive right in the case of commercial use.
But the current term - life of the creator plus 70 years - is absurd. Investors never make calculations with such a long repayment term. No one can claim that an almost infinite protection period is necessary to attract capital to the entertainment industry. By contrast, it does lead to serious restrictions for those who want to preserve or build on classic works. Therefore, we want to shorten the term of protection to a reasonable level from both society's and the investor's point of view.
Prohibition of DRM
So-called DRM technology, or Digital Restrictions Management, continues limiting the already myriad constraints on our rights to copy and use culture. The trend is that media companies impose more and more technical barriers against the free use of their products. Then it does not matter what the legislature says should be allowed. As long as DRM is unfettered, the real power remains among a small circle of big media.
Hence the need for a ban on DRM technologies.
Removing tape levy
Cassette fees are the fees on all blank storage media such as CD and DVD discs and MP3 players sold. The fee is intended to compensate for the loss of income for the copyright holder, which occurs when a private individual for his own use a legitimate copy of, for example, a CD, for example to have in the car or in the summer cottage. We in Piratpartiet believe that the compensation is unreasonable for a number of reasons.
-Originally appeared in Swedish on piratpartiet.se
Translated by Brent Blazek
