de1bc66660b5d7a0[1] The Bookseller’s FuturEBook blog has an email interview with Andrew Robinson, the erstwhile leader of the Pirate Party UK. It’s interesting to note that the Pirate Party does not specifically endorse actual piracy—it inherited the name from the original Swedish party—though it is campaigning on a platform of pruning back what its members see as an increasingly out-of-control intellectual property regime. Robinson writes:

Yes, we seek a fairer balance in copyright law, that takes account of advances in technology. A law that was written to deal with businesses running expensive printing presses isn’t well suited to an age where duplication costs are zero, files are intangible, jurisdictional boundaries are regularly crossed, and everyone owns a computer that has cut and paste functions.

Robinson talks about what he sees as the potential future for the content industry should his party’s reforms come to pass—creators will do more of their selling direct to the consumer, and file sharing will be considered free advertising. “I find it amazing that in the US, record labels are still getting into legal trouble for paying radio stations to give away their product (payola), when bittorrent gives them a way of giving away music at zero cost.”

He also points out that there is evidence that the biggest file-sharing also tend to spend the most money on media, using it as a way to sample and preview before they buy so they can more easily find artists they want to support with their money. He says that there have always been and always will be people who won’t pay for content—they just listened to radio in the past instead of downloading music.

He also talks about consequences of his party’s proposed 10-year limit on copyright, and outlawing medical patents in favor of subsidizing pharmaceutical companies’ research, and how the Pirate Party relates copyright to free speech and privacy rights.

All in all, I found the interview an interesting look at a copyright reform political party. Their views are a bit more extreme than I am perhaps comfortable with, but on the other hand they’re definitely a minority party so their influence will be limited, at least for a while.

Tonight in my day job I talked to someone who wanted to put the “free” digital copy of Iron Man 2 that his DVD set included on both his iPod Nano and his non-Apple smartphone—but movie digital copies come with a single-use serial number that will only allow importing the freebie as either an iTunes file or a Windows Media Player file, not both. What kind of sense does that make? They’re giving out the free copy, why not make it so you can use it with both versions if you happen to have both?

That’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of when I wonder what’s going to happen as the older generations start to die off and the new digital generation comes of age.

Over the years to come, will people start to be frustrated enough with this kind of nonsensical DRM restriction, and the way copyright looks askance at activities they find commonplace like remixing or mashups, to start making some serious legal changes? Will the Pirate Party’s influence grow as this happens?

I hope I’m around long enough to find out

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