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Following Sweden and Germany’s lead, we have our own branch of the Pirate Party attempting to swashbuckle its way into power here in the UK; now it’s drawing a broadside on May’s local elections in both Scotland and Manchester. The Pirate Party UK aims to fight anti-piracy laws (and ACTA); reduce copyright to just 10 years, and allow non-commercial file sharing — hollywood, the BPI and their lawyers are really going love them.
The difference between the UK and the likes of Germany and our Swedish neighbours is that we don’t have proportional representation, so it would take quite a lot for the Pirate party UK to gain any seats in Parliament – not impossible if a massive ground swelling of the disenfranchised youth takes place, but pretty improbable.
According to Loz Kaye, the Pirates won’t stop at just copyright though – they have plans for the whole of the UK economy, health service and the future.
“We’re thinking about how to create jobs and an economy that is fit for the 21st century, and the growth area is in technology. How do you give the next generation skills and imagination, rather than just forming them into passive consumers?”
The last time the Pirate party made an attempt to infiltrate the UK it took just 1,340 votes in the 2010 general election. The party considers the local elections, including those in Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the next step. Would you vote for some pirates to run your local council? Realistically, how much worse could they be than your current lot? Actually, don’t answer that – there’s only so much “arrr”, grog and eye patches a man can take. [The Guardian]
Image credit: Pirates from Shutterstock
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These idiots talk about “creating jobs” whilst the main thrust of their agenda is to ruin the livelihoods of thousands of musicians and producers.
Whilst the visible minority of artists they have in their sights include the super-rich like Lady Gaga and Kanye West, the true vivtims of piracy are the thousands of lesser-known independent artists and producers who are barely able to make a living from dwindling royalties as it is.
In the age of entitlement, absolutely nothing is of value anymore.
Good points, and while I agree on the whole one point I have dwelt upon for some time is a reduced copyright period. A policy of 10 years copyright may help the lesser known artists, and stop the people getting super rich from a dated back catalogues – lots more money to be made in the short-term, but vast free public domain of material in the long term.
That way you can bring in stronger laws to protect a 10 year copyright to the hilt, giving it real value and encourage the industry to support a wider base of new material, where the money and profit would be, while everyone can knock themselves out with a deep achieve of public domain material.
It seems like a practical and sane solution to a complexed problem.
While some of their ideas are a little to extreme some would work fairly well if you think about it. Reducing copyright I think is a good idea perhaps not to ten but twenty years I think would work well. And fewer restrictions on file sharing isn’t a bad idea its a pretty impractical and expensive thing to police for little real benefit.
The system could definitely do with a change and a shift towards making sure content creators get paid not the distributors as it is now. I have always quite liked elements of the Russian system where royalties are paid directly to the artist.
We need a change in the media industry the old models don’t work anymore with the reduction of physical media and ease of distribution.
10 years is way too short. Trust me, as a recording artist myself, I’m trying to feed my children on royalties from releases that are already older than ten years.
Pro-piracy campaigners’ perception of the average copyright holder is complete fantasy. We are ordinary people just like you, with families to feed and bills to pay.