Rick Falkvinge, piratpartiet

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Why You Should Support Your Face is a Saxophone
2012-02-08 18:00:00
Activism – Zacqary Adam Green: The copyright industry is not going quietly. The legitimacy of its monopolist and consumerist practices are still upheld by policymakers and panicking creators who haven’t seen any real alternative in action. I humbly submit my silly cartoon about people with inanimate objects for heads as a first step in that direction. Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0. My friends and I formed a group called Plankhead to produce the series. At the begi...

Planned Post-ACTA Repression In European Union: The Documents
2012-02-08 00:22:00
Repression: Documents have leaked from the European Commission that gives a glimpse of the planned crackdown on online freedoms of speech post-ACTA. We’re seeing entirely new mechanisms and means of squelching dissent, mechanisms and means against pretty much anything online. A European Commissioner responsible for the governing of 500 million people who refers to his constituents as “consumers” and describes complying at legal gunpoint as “cooperation” is just a small taste of the newspeak in the documents we find here, documents that are intended for the post-ACTA timeframe. Oh, and he doesn’t rule out shutting down your income streams either. It is not hard to see where this particular mindset comes from – and no, it is certainly not Locke’s ideas of a constitutional government or anything similarly responsible. It’s filled to the brim with terms we would otherwise only see in reports from the copyright industry lobby. Th...
Mer om: Repression

Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee
2012-02-04 22:55:00
Infopolicy: I live in Stockholm, Sweden. A hundred years ago, one of the largest employers in the city was a company named Stockholm Ice. Their business was as straightforward as it was necessary: help keep perishable food edible for longer by distributing cold in a portable format. They would cut up large blocks of ice from the frozen lakes in the winter, store them on sawdust in huge barns, then cut the blocks into smaller chunks and sell them in the streets. People would buy the ice and keep it with food in special cupboards, so the food would be in cold storage. (This is why some senior citizens still refer to refrigerators as “ice boxes“.) COLUMN REPOST This column has previously been published on TorrentFreak. It has been updated here to reflect recent developments. When households in Stockholm were electrified in the first half of the last century, these distributors of cold were made obsolete. After all, what they distributed was the ability to keep food col...

Today, Sweden Rallies Against ACTA And For Freedom Of Speech. We Can Win Th
2012-02-04 06:36:00
Activism: Just look at this map. I’ve never seen anything like it in terms of people all across Europe demanding their freedom of speech and being angry against backroom corporativist deals that steals their most basic civil liberties. Today, Sweden rallies for freedom of speech, a free net, and firmly against ACTA. Late yesterday, it was announced that Poland is suspending its ratification of ACTA indefinitely. The Slovenian ambassador signing the document (which has no legal effect whatsoever) has publicly apologized and called people to rally in Ljubljana, Slovenia for their rights. This is not Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, as oldmedia likes to frame it. This is Hollywood versus The People. For decades, they have trained us to think in black and white, in good versus evil fighting for domination of the free world. And now, they’ve gone and put themselves in the role of evil villain. The copyright cartel thought they were battling Google. They’re not. The...

The Constitution is Just a Piece of Paper
2012-02-03 11:16:00
Freedom of Speech – Andrew Norton: The US as an ?idea? is dying. The country that used to pride itself on free speech, democracy, and being ?the last remaining superpower?, is now apparently drunk on its own power. With unchecked powers expanding at every turn, and terror laden missives booming out from government departments, the country seems to be taking a counterbalancing position from those who embraced freedom in the Arab Spring of last year, and is actively cracking down on freedoms previously embraced as a national advert. The US likes to be known as the land of freedom and integrity; indeed the first verse of the US National Anthem ? the Star Spangled Banner ? ends: O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? Over the last ten years, the answer has turned into a resounding NO! Over the last ten years there have been many laws passed ostensibly about ?fighting terrorism?, but which boil down to naked f...
Mer om: Repression

European Commission Slip Reveals Censorship In ACTA
2012-02-03 11:02:00
Repression: In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice. The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.” There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA: “Non-pirated”. Everybody will be free to share “non-pirated” material. All of a sudden, there is a qualifier  to what information we are able to share on the net; this qualifier has never been there before. We have always been able to send whatever we like, an...
Mer om: Repression

War on the Internet: The Pirate Bay Denied Their Day In Supreme Court
2012-02-01 11:38:00
Corruption: In what can only be described as an all-out declaration of war with the Internet, the Swedish Supreme Court has denied the final hearing in the trial of the original The Pirate Bay operators. This means that the Appeals Court verdict stands, unless appealed to the European Court of Justice. This case and trial was political from day one. The astounding arrogance displayed by the establishment showed that it was nothing but theater; there was never a shred of justice involved, only a hellbent desire from the entire establishment to show who’s boss once and for all. Let’s recap: In a country where police is constantly in short supply and cases with the derogatory label everyday violence are routinely dropped, fifty (!) police raided a server hall and took all (!) servers — over 150 of them. Many entrepreneurs went out of business. The copyright monopoly lobby gleefully commented in media with “you have to be aware who your neighbor in the serve...

Why ACTA Is So Mercilessly Pursued
2012-01-31 20:25:00
Repression – Thijs Markus: A recent article by Rick Falkvinge posed the question: If ACTA doesn?t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it? Well, the answer is rather hilarious: it does, actually. While this question is obviously a rhetorical device, its answer is none the less relevant to the discussion. And here, I would like to propose an answer to said question. You see, to understand the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, we need to go a little further back in time than the 00′s. We need to go back somewhere to the late 80′s, early 90′s. New contributor This is a guest article from Thijs Markus, who opens on Falkvinge &Co. on Infopolicy with this article. During this time, a new fashion came over the industries of the day: as pioneered by Nike, large corporations decided to put all their factories overseas, the company would be only its brand. Anything that could be done cheaper at the gunpoint of ...
Mer om: Repression

I Don?t Care About The Entertainment Industry?s Profits, And It Enrages Me
2012-01-31 14:24:00
Civil Liberties: Every time changes to the copyright monopoly are considered, the profits of major entertainment industry companies are at the center of the discussion. Even the people who fiercely defend the right to share information freely are going to extreme lengths to argue that this will not hurt the revenues of the copyright industry. But why are these profits even relevant? Why should we care about the profits of these companies? It is almost apologetic. Apologetic for defending the civil rights that our ancestors fought, bled and died to give us, their children and grandchildren. Thinking about what hurts and doesn’t hurt sales misses the point entirely. A corporation’s profits must never be at the center of policymaking, much less the center of determining what fundamental civil liberties we have as free citizens. COLUMN REPOST This is a repost of a column previously published on TorrentFreak, a repost made in the light of TechDirt’s excellent repor...

The Only Thing You Need To Know About ACTA
2012-01-28 13:04:00
Corruption: The ACTA awareness and debate has finally heated up. But in such a huge, convoluted and deliberately complex document, how can you determine for yourself whether it’s good or bad? It turns out that there’s a very straightforward way to tell. The easiest way to determine the nature of ACTA comes not from the document itself, but from the behavior of the people advocating it. Everybody involved in pushing and rushing through this agreement have insisted that it will mean no changes at all, won’t require any changes to law (or possibly minimal ones to trademark law, as in Sweden), and overall, insist that it’s no big deal. At the same time, these players are throwing all their weight behind its passage. The key question that results stands out like a sore thumb: If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it? And that contradiction, in itself, is enough to de-mask the entire ACTA and w...

The Copyright Industry: A Century Of Deceit
2012-01-27 07:22:00
Columns: It is said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. In the case of the copyright industry, they have learned that they can get new monopoly benefits and rent-seeker’s benefits every time there is a new technology, if they just complain loudly enough to the legislators. The past 100 years have seen a vast array of technical advances in broadcasting, multiplication and transmissions of culture, but equally much misguided legislators who sought to preserve the old at expense of the new, just because the old was complaining. First, let’s take a look at what the copyright industry tried to ban and outlaw, or at least receive taxpayer money in compensation for its existence: It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn’t make a living off of middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on ...

EU ACTA Chief Resigns In Disgust Over Disrespect At Citizens; Next Steps
2012-01-26 20:05:00
Europe: This just in: the European Parliament’s rapporteur of the ACTA agreement, an agreement which is about as bad as SOPA and creates seriously repressive legislation – that rapporteur has just quit in disgust over how the whole process has been designed to keep citizens and lawmakers in the dark. From the website of La Quadrature, which quotes and translates Numérama interviewing Kader Arif, former rapporteur for ACTA: ?I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.? ?As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calenda...
Mer om: Europe

Copyright Monopoly Goes Insane: Non-Copy Judged As Infringing
2012-01-26 06:02:00
Copyright Monopoly: In a shock ruling in the UK this Tuesday, a photo was found to be in violation of the copyright monopoly of another photographer. There’s only one hitch with this ruling: the infringing copy was not a copy at all, but another original with a similar composition. This verdict throws the entire copyright monopoly concept overboard; it has always been a monopoly on outright copying of a work. Here, for the first time, something that is not a copy is found to be in violation of the copying monopoly. The judge determined that the compositions were similar enough for the second photographer to be in violation of the copyright monopoly of the first one. Deem for yourself – here are the two images side by side (from the public court verdict): Yes, the images are arguably similar. But there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claim that one would be a copy of the other, thus violating the copyright monopoly. What the judge has done here is to set a ...
Mer om: United Kingdom

Copyright, Patent Monopolies Are Immoral Exploitation Of Third World
2012-01-24 17:53:00
Infopolicy – Anonymous: For the rich West and North, the copyright and patent monopolies are a moral nuisance and an impediment to progress, argues this anonymous guest contributor. For the third world, however, the practices are neocolonial and a matter of sovereignty and life and death. These reasons are often much stronger than the right to create. There are many reasons for those of us in the first world to oppose the current “intellectual propety” regime: Some of us see it as trying to legislate water to run uphill Some of us appreciate the remix culture Some of us see it as blocking specific projects Some of us believe it’s morally iffy to create an artificial scarcity. Some of us simply don’t appreciate the way the system was constructed, on broken promises and overstated figures. However, what you hear a lot, is the assumption – from others, mostly, that it’s all about not wanting to pay for a movie. Yes, go ahead and shake yo...

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2012-01-24 00:41:00
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How Filesonic Just Stabbed Us In The Back
2012-01-24 00:00:00
Activism – Travis McCrea: The US media industries along with their cronies in the United States Federal Government are no longer fighting with the weight of law against the process of sharing culture… they are using fear based tactics that have no legal grounds and are designed entirely to scare filesharers and other “Cyberlockers” into submitting to their will. This is NOT the time for us to give into the fear-based tactics of the United States. It just so happens the United States DOESN’T rule the rest of the world, and we do not have to stand by as our governments sell their souls to protect the interest of the school yard bully. Maybe it was because I was raised in the United States, and I don’t know what you are taught, but I was always taught to stand up for yourself to the bullies. We must not let them believe (wrongly) that their tactics have any impact on us. Fuck those guys. What’s worse, the websites like FileSonic and the ot...

Debunking The Argument That No Blockbusters Would Be Made Without The Copyr
2012-01-23 13:40:00
Copyright Monopoly: Whenever I argue that the copyright monopoly isn’t necessary to incentivize culture production, I hear the counterargument that multi-million-euro movie productions would never happen in case there wasn’t a guaranteed return on investment. The image for this article is a still image from Return of the King published in 2003, the third installment of The Lord of the Rings, which I’ll use as a concrete example. But first, let’s examine the counterargument above in more detail. I frequently hear that this-and-that would not happen if there wasn’t a guaranteed return on investment. While most people seem in agreement that music would be played, books would be written, and art would be made without the copyright monopoly, because that creativity happens for other reasons than pure money, the objections usually gravitate towards the subject of blockbuster movies, and how a guaranteed return on investment is necessary for those to be p...

Today, I turn 40
2012-01-21 00:00:00
Personal: Today, on the 21st of January, it is 40 years since I was born in 1972. Therefore, I am taking the liberty of taking a day off from activism and celebrating this event with my close and dear friends and colleagues. Of course, given the current escalation of insanities from authorities and the copyright monopoly lobby alike, it can feel a little frustrating to take a day off right now. It is at times like those that I remember the wise words of our first Member of European Parliament, Christian Engström: If you feel you need some time off from activism, that’s the right thing to do. There is no reason to fear that the world will run out of evil while you’re away. Some people have asked me what it feels like feeling 40, if I’m getting into some sort of expected crisis. On the contrary! Six years ago, on founding the Swedish Pirate Party, I discovered how much more fun it is to speak your exact mind and make a mess out of the status quo at the same time...
Mer om: Personal

EEA to Revoke US Citizenship Without Due Process
2012-01-19 18:00:00
Process of Law – Zacqary Adam Green: Oh boy, another police state bill enters the US Congress! The Enemy Expatriation Act will allow citizens to be stripped of their nationality for “supporting hostilities” against the US. Conviction, of course, wouldn’t be necessary. The Enemy Expatriation Act is a short amendment to USC 8 §1481, the law which spells out criteria for the revocation of US citizenship. Already listed are naturalization in or serving in the armed forces of another country, formally renouncing US citizenship, or being convicted of treason against the US. These are, arguably, perfectly understandable. But the EEA adds this new reason to revoke citizenship: [E]ngaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.?For purposes of this section, the term ?hostilities? means any conflict subject to the laws of war. One would think that would constitute treason, and thus such a section wouldn’t be nece...

Experiences From Blacking Out For A Day
2012-01-19 00:00:00
Infopolicy: Yesterday’s blackout was an interesting experience. But before I say anything else, let me yay Mike Masnick of Techdirt who has been the hero through this whole ordeal. Masnick blew the whistle early on these laws on Techdirt and spared no energy in diving down into details and what they meant. He has been absolutely key for safeguarding free speech this time around. Hat off and tons of respect. Ben Huh notes that where the rallying words of the 1960s were Peace and Love, those of today are Openness and Free Speech. I think that’s an acute observation – perhaps because I’ve made the exact same observation in my view of political cycles, that every 40 years, a new generation reconquers democracy (and is always abhorred by the old guard of its time). As I have had time to reflect on today’s events (seeing there’s no Reddit to absorb my attention of the day), I become more and more convinced that this is not really aimed at the end-u...

Today, This Blog Goes Dark Protesting Against Censorship
2012-01-18 00:00:00
Infopolicy: Today, Wednesday January 18, the world protests against proposed censorship laws in the United States. It is a protest of unprecedented scale, ranging from Google to Wikipedia to Reddit to image hosting sites to thousands and thousands of individual blogs. The Pirate Party was founded on the principles that politicians don’t understand technology and the net, and the only way to force them to care is to threaten their jobs over not caring. That has gone fairly well so far. In the meantime, the copyright monopoly lobby is racing ahead with slashing down civil liberties, using technically apathetic politicians as tools. For while the politicians do not care, understand, nor care to understand, the copyright monopoly lobby understands perfectly. I think Dan Gillmor is spot on when he says that the copyright industry understands exactly what is at stake, as I have argued for five years in my Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties keynote. The problem is the politici...

Damn Yanks Harass Another Of My Colleagues
2012-01-17 18:42:00
Repression: News reached me this morning that authorities in the United States has decided to harass yet another of my colleagues. Australian activist Asher Wolf’s communications have been subpoenaed by a ridiculously entitled local police force in Boston. In any normal part of the world, the police force in a city would swiftly conclude that their jurisdiction does not extend to another country on the other side of the planet. But no. Not United States authorities. Asher Wolf has become one of the key activists across the world in coordinating news and information relating to breaking the old information hegemony. Perhaps it is therefore she is being targeted. The Boston police force demands to see her communications history and is demanding it from a company on US soil, Twitter. This is the fourth valued colleague of mine that is being harassed extrajudicially and rightslessly. You’ve all heard of the previous three, I don’t have to name them. I’m so d...
Mer om: Repression

I Have Absolutely Brilliant Colleagues
2012-01-15 22:26:00
Pirate Parties: Stop whatever you’re doing right now and watch this eight-minute speech from Christopher Lauer, a Member of State Parliament in Berlin who was elected last fall. After you’ve seen the speech (after clicking Play, press the uparrow and then CC to turn on subtitles in English, as I did), try to tell me with a straight face that Pirate Parties worldwide isn’t exactly what is needed to reconquer democracy and make a government for the people, by the people. Now, you need to remember as you watch this, that this man is actually an elected representative. He is a Member of Parliament in Berlin, elected for the Piratenpartei, the German Pirate Party. Every day, I am amazed at the sheer brilliance, clearsight, and almost brutal candor of my colleagues. Christopher, I would be honored to buy you the first beer next time we meet. At the same time, I can’t help noticing the von oben attitude of the old-guard politicians filmed in the video, just th...

My Plans For 2012
2012-01-15 01:48:00
Swarm Management: In 2011, I managed to transition from leader of a local Pirate Party to an international voice on information policy and civil liberties matters. These are my plans for 2012. At the turn of the year, I precisely reached my last goal for 2011 — to attain one million readers in direct readership. These are my goals for 2012. 1. First, turn 40. One week from now, on January 21, I’m turning 40. There will be a bit of media around that and I’ll celebrate with friends in the evening. This isn’t really a delivery as such – even though failing to turn 40 years old would have a dramatic impact on my other deliveries of the year, I can’t honestly say that’s a risk I’m anticipating. This is what’s currently the most on my radar, naturally. 2. Then, release the book Swarmwise. I’ve been writing a book that summarizes my leadership experiences from the Swedish Pirate Party – what I did well, what I learned f...

Three Half-time Victories In EU Parliament
2012-01-12 16:03:00
Pirate Parties – Christian Engström: It’s been two and a half years since the European Elections in 2009, when I was elected a Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party. As Parliament re-opens after holiday recess, the second half of that term commences. So what has the Pirate Party achieved so far, during the first half of the term? I’d like to highlight three successes where it is clear that we’ve made a difference. 1. The Telecoms Package was the first large test of pirate policy, directly after my election as a Member of European Parliament (MEP). The entire telecoms package was almost complete, having been negotiated during the previous Parliament. All that remained was one single point, going by the name “amendment 138″ in public debate. It concerned whether a citizen could be disconnected from the Net (for sharing files illegally, for example), and what guarantees of due process the individual would have in such a ...

Why SOPA-Supporting News Networks Don?t Mention SOPA At All
2012-01-11 03:47:00
Corruption: A study by MediaMatters confirmed the gut feeling we all had: there is indeed a mainstream media blackout going on over the SOPA law that would censor the Internet in the United States . It’s not just a gut feeling, it’s happening. The good folks at MediaMatters just list the facts without going into causes: if a news station is owned by a SOPA-supporting company, it does not mention SOPA as a matter of fact. Techdirt points to how badly the SOPA discourse fits media logic. I think it’s easier than that. It’s about the age-old power of information advantage, and it is in their strategic business interest to keep this off the newsradar. To put this in context, we need to look at the concept of functional literacy and then compare to a recent situation in Italy. What’s “Functional Literacy”? There is this concept of functional literacy that goes a little bit above literacy, which is “the ability to read” in all simp...

Looking to Occupy Wall Street for Anonymous Democracy
2012-01-10 18:00:00
Privacy – Zacqary Adam Green: One of the the drawbacks to a perfectly private society is the impossibility of preventing voter fraud; without knowing who’s who, there’s no way to be sure that every eligible voter is only voting once. Perhaps the Occupy movement’s method of decision-making is well-suited to solving this problem. The question came up in a discussion I had with Rick last month when he was in New York. At the end of the night, as we walked uptown towards his hotel and in the direction of my train home, I mentioned that there’d been something I’d meant to ask him about and hadn’t remembered until now. Obviously, I’m paraphrasing this conversation:     ”I’ve been thinking,” I said to Rick. “You know how most of the things that we think and talk about are related to technology making it impossible to enforce laws?”     ”Making the cost to civil l...

US Citizens Should Try The Copyright Monopoly As Unconstitutional
2012-01-08 07:32:00
Copyright Monopoly: Legal scholar Stephen Kinsella argues a fascinating line of thought I haven’t seen before: the entire copyright monopoly in the United States may actually be unconstitutional. In the comments field of my recent column on Techdirt, Stephen Kinsella argues that the entire copyright monopoly is unconstitutional. What’s more, he appears to have a solid base for that reasoning. Not only is he a patent/copyright monopoly attorney since two decades, he is also active in the monopoly debate. His reasoning goes like this: The copyright monopoly is a limitation of freedom of speech. If I write a poem, you are legally prohibited from reciting that poem in public or to a stranger, because of my copyright monopoly on that poem. Therefore, it is clear that the copyright monopoly is a limitation on freedom of speech. The part of the US Constitution that allows the US Congress to enact copyright monopoly laws, thusly limiting freedom of speech, was in the origin...

Legal Ramifications Of File-Sharing Now Being Religious Worship
2012-01-05 04:21:00
Activism: With yesterday’s story of the Missionary Church of Kopimism being an approved religion in Sweden, one wonders what the practical effects are. It’s not like religion gives immunity from the law. Oh, wait, it is like that. But anyway. Before I go into the legal ramifications, I have realized that some people think this religion is a joke. Get that idea out of your head immediately. It makes perfect sense to observe that all life comes from copying and remixing of previous life, and to therefore hold copying and remixing as higher, sacred acts worthy of reverence. (In any case, it makes a lot more sense today than most millennia-old religions and their explanations of life, without going into graphic but inconsiderate detail.) People who have observed that copying and remixing is the basis for all our being deserve every bit of respect for considering those acts connected with life itself. First, to set our frame of reference for tolerated religious exception...

File Sharing Approved As An Official Religion In Sweden
2012-01-04 14:49:00
Activism: After a year of bureaucratic struggles, the Missionary Church of Kopimism is now an official religion in Sweden, enjoying the constitutional protection of Freedom of Religion. Information is holy to the church, and copying its sacrament. The Missionary Church of Kopimism is a religious institution founded by people with their roots in the youth wing Ung Pirat of the Swedish Pirate Party; people who believe that copying is not just right, but has a higher purpose in itself. Information is holy, and sharing and copying is a sacred act. The missionary kopimistsamfundet is a religious group centered in Sweden who believe that copying and the sharing of information is the best and most beautiful that is. The request for constitutional recognition as a religion was approved just before year’s end by the Kammarkollegiet authority in Sweden. The church has tried to get official recognition for more than a year. In a press release in Swedish and English today, the chief ...