Pirate leader Falkvinge: "Our enemy has no intellectual capital to bring to the battle" Rating Options

[TankGirl]

Pirate leader Falkvinge:
"Our enemy has no intellectual capital
to bring to the battle"

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In this special interview Rick Falkvinge, the founder and the leader of Swedish Pirate Party, gives his own views on the wildly heated political filesharing debate in Sweden, evaluates the political and technological prospects of P2P and talks about the dangers of citizen surveillance and Big Brother society.

Filesharing debate

Q: In last couple of months the copyright debate in Sweden seems to have got hotter than ever before, and especially the emergence of the reformist group within Moderate Party makes the situation look like the beginning of a 'final battle' before the legalization of filesharing. How do you read the situation? Is it possible that Reinfeldt government could actually end up assuming the reformist position and decriminalizing filesharing, or is it too otimistic to expect this to happen before your 2010 elections?

Rick Falkvinge: Gandhi once said something that has become a famous quote:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

I interpret the current situation as a definite shift to phase three. That mainstream existing MPs for the largest party in government pick up and fight for our ideas is a huge legitimizer. Our ideas are not out on the fringe, we were just a little bit ahead of time.

What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy - forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance - realized they were under a serious attack, and mounted every piece of defense they could muster. For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle.

And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is "thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief". And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.

So now we know what the enemy has, and that they have absolutely nothing in terms of intellectual capital to bring to the battle. They do, however, have their bedside connections with the current establishment. That's the major threat to us at this point.

However, I don't see the established parties picking up understanding at the necessary level just yet. Some parties advocate legalized downloading with uploading still being criminal, which is a clear sign they have not understood the current structural changes to society in the slightest, but just have a hunch that something needs to be done. Of course, that is good in itself, but not enough.

Karl Sigfrid's own party, the Moderates, are technophobically luddite to the brink of the Stone Age as the official party line. Even though MPs in this party were the first to understand the issue thoroughly, I don't see their party line changing before the next election.

What Karl Sigfrid et consortes have accomplished, though, is to make sure that this is going to be a major issue in the 2010 parliamentary elections, possibly even the 2009 European elections. That's exactly what we want. We want as many as possible to reflect over the issue, discuss it, and try to understand what is happening, and realize it's important - more important than petty squabbles over, say, day care benefits. The more that do, the more we win.

And the more we win - both in terms of the idea and support for the Pirate Party - the more pressure on established politicians.

Global IPR revolution

Q: During your US speech tour last summer you came up with the idea of global IPR revolution starting in Sweden, then spreading to other European countries and from there to the whole world. Things seem to be so far on the track for your plan. How do you see the global situation yourself? Which countries and forces do you consider as biggest threats to this positive development you have envisioned? Any encouraging developments outside Sweden that you would like to mention?

Rick Falkvinge: What politicians at all levels have not understood is that the enemy is working internationally. If they get a victory in one country, their forces in every other country points there as a positive example and whine that they don't have the same advantages where they live.

For instance, France recently introduced a bill which would cut off Internet access for file sharers. This is one example of a draconian Orwellian measure that makes IFPI's and MPA's mouths water. The European Commission, frequently courted by the enemy, has not been given the time or opportunity to reflect on the situation as a whole - and so keep pushing for more draconian measures too, with European-wide DRM as the latest profound stupidity.

Sweden was a little bit ahead of its neighbors in terms of high-speed broadband penetration; I had 10/10 Mbit in 1998 and 100/100 today, neither of which is remarkable. When you give technology to the people, they discover what it can be used for. Whether this is the cause of Sweden's being ahead or not can be discussed, but I honestly see Sweden as leading the fight for free file sharing. When I speak to reporters abroad, I always get the question "with your proposal, how will the artists get paid?". I almost never get that at home anymore.

So in my experience, positive developments originate in Sweden and radiate outward, mostly underground at first. There is some significant intellecta in Silicon Valley about the situation, but they are not able to pressure politicians under the US' political system like we are.

I'll also quite selfishly take the opportunity to ask people to help us out financially. We have a program where you can donate a small amount every month through PayPal; every penny of steady income helps us spread the ideas, educate more politicians, and dropkick the existing establishment. See our donation page.

Remember, all of us do this in our spare time.

Privacy, integrity and P2P technology

Q: Lately you have started increasingly to pay attention to the issues of privacy and personal integrity. In the filesharing debate it seems that the personal integrity issue alone is a strong enough argument to justify the legalization of filesharing. If we assume that mainstream anonymizing p2p is just a few years away, nothing apart from a totalitarian control state and intrusive surveillance of home computers would make it possible to enforce copyrights in online communications. Do you share this view?

Rick Falkvinge: I do. The people who have been led to believe that file sharing can be stopped with minimal intrusion are basically smoking crack.

Early on in the debate, we dropped the economic arguments altogether and focused entirely on civil liberties and the right to privacy. This has proven to be a winning strategy, with my keynote "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties" being praised as groundbreaking.

The economic arguments are strong, but debatable. There are as many reports as there are interests in copyright, and every report arrives at a new conclusion. If you just shout and throw reports over the volleyball net at the other team, it becomes a matter of credibility of the reports. When you switch to arguing civil liberties, you dropkick that entire discussion.

Anyway, anonymous encrypted P2P is just a few years off (and encrypted BitTorrent is already becoming ubiquitous). More interestingly, our cellphones are increasing in capacity dramatically. When P2P debuted with Napster in 2000, the average hard drive was the same size as my cell phone memory is today. Using technology already available, BlueTooth 2, I can share content from my cellphone anonymously - say, in a café or so. This will probably just accelerate, with cellphones being more and more capable, holding more and more data, and opening up to customized applications. I'm betting that a P2P app operating on Bluetooth is not far off for the iPhone, for example. Imagine the anonymous sharing that will happen in the background just on the average subway train! The possibilities are very, very encouraging.

File sharing will find new ways - any measure to stop it will be ineffective the instant it is in place.

In short, you cannot stop file sharing with any less than undoing digital communications and/or monitoring all of it. The Internet was created as the world's largest copying machine, as the makers of Steal This Film II put it so succinctly. File sharing happens simply because it is possible, as sharing knowledge and culture has always been, although with different media.

What really upsets me, though, is how politicians are humming along with the copyright industry's every demand. The industry lobby is just doing their job, basically: demanding better conditions for their industry, at the expense of other parts of society. It is the politicians which have failed abysmally at understanding the big picture of their demands.

Big Brother society

Q: Apart from filesharing, there seems to be a strong worldwide political pressure to implement various surveillance state infrastructures pushed forward with the antiterrorism arguments. The Swedish parliament seems to be no exception to this. Why do you think the politicians around Europe are accepting this dangerous development so easily, despite the historically recent experiences from East Germany's Stasi etc.? What makes them so blind to the risks of Big Brother state? Is Europe still suffering from terrorism hysteria or is there something else going on here? For example in Sweden, Piratpartiet seems to be the lone political force even worried about the hasty establishment of an Orwellian society. What could be done to counteract this development?

Rick Falkvinge: This is true, and it has me seriously worried. Not only are politicians implementing a big brother state, they are also confusing and joining the government interests with those of large corporations.

Now, remember the lexical definition of fascism: fascism n. a merging of corporate and government interests, typically adjoined with a drastic curtailment of civil liberties.

We know exactly where this road leads, for we have seen many walk it before us. And while each step can seem convincing, we know what the endpoint is.

Each step is usually justified by "efficient law enforcement". This is deceptive - for who would stand against a bill and demand INEFFICIENT law enforcement? In reality, it is a shift of power from citizens and civil liberties to law enforcement. There have been plenty of governments, historical and contemporary, where efficient law enforcement has been a priority: East Germany, Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Pinochet's Chile, etc. The question that needs to be asked is if it's worth having that efficient a law enforcement, or if something else is lost on the way?

When the Iron Curtain fell, all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around.

What we can do is talk to one another about what is happening. The Swedish administration has been purposely deceptive and secretive about all new orwellian measures. There even exists a law proposal for the Police to take over people's home computers, allowing them to monitor nonsuspects using their own web cameras.

In the 1960's, there were dystopic movies about a big brother future where the government had installed cameras in every home. Now we're almost there. The only difference is that we bought the cameras ourselves.

A mass surveillance proposal for wiretapping every communication crossing the country's border was introduced in 2005, then retracted because - get this - it had received too much attention. It was reintroduced by the new administration and is pending a new vote this summer.

In summary, secrecy, fear and deception is the administration's friend in introducing the Big Brother state. What we can do about it is counteract that - which is as simple, and hard, as talking about it. Being vigilant about finding out new bills, new proposals, and talking about them with our friends, our colleagues, and in forums. Break the secrecy and tear down the veil. After all, politicians desire to get re-elected.

And nothing works better to get their attention than threatening that power base, as I discovered when I founded the Pirate Party.



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[vernarial]

Good interview.

[method77]

good job

[Vicious Panda]

Nicely done. I like the drop kicks, if only Chuck Norris was in politics.

I wonder though, all these arguments seem to hold the propensity to share as given, even as a force of nature.

Perhaps this is true, or at least structurally true of the Internet. But the propensity of government is to maintain control over the social dialog (with the FCC in the US, and similar regulatory institutions internationally) albeit in a passive state (Freedom of Speech, etc.)

Presented with new technologies, specifically ones that structurally bypass federal modes of authority, can we not expect Government to move steadily on a vector that reestablishes such a mandate?

[multi]

welcome to the forum!

Perhaps this is true, or at least structurally true of the Internet. But the propensity of government is to maintain control over the social dialog (with the FCC in the US, and similar regulatory institutions internationally) albeit in a passive state (Freedom of Speech, etc.)

There does seem to be a new push lately to regulate the internet by governments across the world, the freedom the internet represents to the establishment has been freaking them out for years. I see a combined effort to totally knobble the anarchistic nature of internet and in paticular its 'fuck you ' attitude towards sharing in general under the guise of hunting down terrorism and child porn, most internet users would like to see those things being monitored but not at the price of crippling and monitoring all forms of communication on it.

[TankGirl]

Presented with new technologies, specifically ones that structurally bypass federal modes of authority, can we not expect Government to move steadily on a vector that reestablishes such a mandate?

You are absolutely right. Governments and their representatives have already made a number of efforts and proposals to prevent the free flow of information between people and to regain old style centralized control on net communications. Examples from Europe:

Italian government planned a law requiring all Italian bloggers, however insignificant or private, to registrate into a national database, to pay a special tax for having a blog and to name a responsible editor from a commercial publication under whose authority they would be allowed to blog. Jail time was threatened to bloggers for a libel either by them or any of the commentators of their blogs. Harsh criticism from citizens and other worried parties forced the government to review the proposal.

EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini proposed in an interview that web like 'bomb', 'kill', 'genocide' or 'terrorism' should be blocked from web searches. The sheer idiocy of such a proposal should be obvious to everybody but apparently power and control hungry politicians make an exception.

Blocking websites with secret block lists is a popular strategy to control Internet even if the constitutions of most European countries clearly forbid advance censorship. The idea is to use some popular evil like kiddie porn as an excuse for the censorship to force the parliaments to accept an unconstitutional censorship mechanism, and then to expand the scope of the censorship to serve the interests of the government and/or the various vested interests. This kind of advance censorship mechanism is already in use in Sweden and Finland, and in Sweden there was already an attempt to block The Pirate Bay with a child porn block list. The vigilance of the Swedish copyfight activists and the consequent publicity prevented this from happening. It is not clear whether the attempt was orchestrated by the copyright industry or by the government itself, but already in 2006 a Danish copyright industry lawyer recommended his Swedish collegues to use the child porn card against pirates, as "politicians do not understand copyrights but they understand child porn".

[vernarial]

You make a good point that alot of politicians are not very computer literate, and if we let industry educate them, the politicians will have a skewed opinion of how the internet was meant to work and the benefits that such an open spread of culture over the internet could have. At least in the USA, politicians seem to be swayed more by money that popular opinion, but we can't let that stop us from making our voices heard with educated information, and with votes. Even though the media might not be covering the issue here in the USA as they do in Sweden. We must make our voice heard or we have no-one to blame but ourselves, and we deserve what we get.

[TankGirl]

Even though the media might not be covering the issue here in the USA as they do in Sweden. We must make our voice heard or we have no-one to blame but ourselves, and we deserve what we get.

When the final political breakthrough in Sweden happens and filesharing will be legalized, the US media will certainly take notice and report about it, because it will have such huge implications for the entire Internet. It will mean, among other things, that the Swedes can start free innovation on all the positive cultural possibilities of filesharing, like building all-inclusive digital libraries of movies, music etc. And even if filesharing will be free just for individuals, this will not prevent all sorts of new, innovative businesses from popping up and tapping into the phenomenon and benefiting from it. The negative strategy of the international copyright lobby can be victorious only as long as the fear factor is established all over the planet. If one advanced industrial country starts to embrace and apply the positive strategy, it will create a huge pressure for other countries to follow the suit, as the populations of these countries will anyway connect to the flourishing Swedish infrastructure and assume a virtual Swedish citizenship, so to speak.

[vernarial]

I sure hope so. I don't have very much confidence in my government following the good examples of other countries let alone listening to them. I also think the coverage of such a momentous occasion as the legalization of file sharing in Sweden will be minimal in the USA. Only because it's the same massive corporations that own the copyrights that also own the major media outlets.

[TankGirl]

The powerful position of the US copyright lobby will of course mean that the immediate media or political impact in US would not be that strong, but Europe is a different story. EU is not so uniform or united, and the political situations in different EU member countries vary greatly. Even one or two European countries joining Sweden in the copyright revolution would already spell serious problems for the European copyright lobby. We also have to remember that Russia and China are really not interested in the US copyright agenda but would probably prefer a much more liberal copyright environment. So if Europe starts to turn liberal on copyright issues, the Russians and Chinese might easily come to support Europe and leave the US copyright lobby alone. This is part of Falkvinge's manuscript for the global IPR revolution.

[vernarial]

Eventually I do believe the copyright laws in my country will be reformed. I believe it will be a long and tough battle between the the people and the 'copyright lobby'. Much more long and drawn out than the battle in Sweden seems to be shaping up to be. It seems like any meaningful or consequential change only happens after years and years of popular struggle. Of course there is always hope that our high courts will make some sort of momentous descision in the near future that will change the way media/culture is viewed by the copyright lobby. Sometimes they do get it right.

[jadedindece]

I discuss my feelings with someone.
http://www.google.com

[multi]

random?

[elisha]

Then after a year, what happens now?

Simulation pret immobilier

[philgorp]

or, after a year what has happened?

[verra99]

Thanks for sharing your idea here. I appreciate your idea, very excellent.


I SPAM!

[nightgirl]

this is an interesting discussion. thanks for sharing

rachat credit immobilier

[zain21]

Thanks for taking the time to help, I really apprciate it.




-------------------------------------------------------
Capital Talk

[vampirechronicle...]

Then after a year, what happens now?

Simulation pret immobilier

your an asshole

[vampirechronicle...]

Eventually I do believe the copyright laws in my country will be reformed. I believe it will be a long and tough battle between the the people and the 'copyright lobby'. Much more long and drawn out than the battle in Sweden seems to be shaping up to be. It seems like any meaningful or consequential change only happens after years and years of popular struggle. Of course there is always hope that our high courts will make some sort of momentous descision in the near future that will change the way media/culture is viewed by the copyright lobby. Sometimes they do get it right.

yeah seems like they did that via this 1 year later,
http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=18172