The Pirate Chief speaks Options

[TankGirl]

"There is nothing new under the Sun."

 Rick_h150.jpg ( 4K ) Number of downloads: 0


My quickish translation of the remarkable speech given by Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, in the Pirate Bay support demonstration in Stockholm 3.6.2006. If you wish, you can Digg this story here.


Friends, citizens, pirates:

There is nothing new under the Sun.

My name is Rickard Falkvinge, and I am the leader of the Pirate Party.

During the past week we have seen a number of rights violations taking place. We have seen the police misusing their arresting rights. We have seen innocent parties being harmed. We have seen how the media industry operates. We have seen how the politicians up to the highest levels bend backwards to protect the media industry.

This is scandalous to no limit. This is the reason why we are here today.

The media industry wants us to believe that this is a question about payment models, about a particular professional group getting paid. They want us to believe that this is about their dropping sales figures, about some dry statistics. But that is only an excuse. This is really about something totally else.

To understand today’s situation in the light of the history, we must go back 400 years - to the time when the Church had the monopoly over both culture and knowledge. Whatever the Church said, was the truth. That was pyramid communication. You had one person at the top talking to the many under him in the pyramid. Culture and knowledge had a source, and that source was the Church.

And God have mercy on those who dared to challenge the culture and knowledge monopoly of the Church! They were subjected to the most horrible trials that man could envision at the time. Under no circumstances did the Church allow its citizens to spread information on their own. Whenever it happened, the Church applied its full judicial powers to obstruct, to punish, to harass the guilty ones.

There is nothing new under the Sun.

Today we know that the only right thing to happen for the society to evolve was to let the knowledge go free. We know now that Galileo Galilei was right. Even if he had to puncture a monopoly of knowledge.

We are speaking here about the time when the Church went out in its full force and ruled that it was unnecessary for its citizens to learn to read or to write, because the priest could tell them anyway everything they needed to know. The Church understood what it would mean for them to lose their control.

Then came the printing press.

Suddenly there was not only a source of knowledge to learn from, but a number of them. The citizens – who at this time had started to learn to read – could take their own part of the knowledge without being sanctioned. The Church went mad. The royal houses went mad. The British Royal Court went as far as to make a law that allowed the printing of books only to those print owners who had a special license from the Royal Court. Only they were allowed to multiply knowledge and culture to the citizens.

This law was called "copyright".

Then a couple of centuries passed, and we got the freedom of press. But everywhere the same old model of communication was still being used: one person talking to the many. And this fact was utilized by the State who introduced the system of “responsible publishers”.

The citizens could admittedly pick pieces of knowledge to themselves, but there always had to be somebody who could be made responsible if – what a horrible thought – somebody happened to pick up a piece of wrong knowledge.

And this very thing is undergoing a fundamental change today - because the Internet does not follow the old model anymore. We not only download culture and knowledge. We upload it to others at the same time. We share files. The knowledge and the culture have amazingly lost their central point of control.

And as this is the central point of my speech, let me lay it out in some detail.

Downloading is the old mass media model where there is a central point of control, a point with a ‘responsible publisher’ – somebody who can be brought to court, forced to pay and so on. A central point of control from where everybody can download knowledge and culture, a central point that can grant rights and take them away as needed and as wanted.

Culture and knowledge monopoly. Control.

Filesharing involves simultaneous uploading and downloading by every connected person. There is no central point of control at all; instead we have a situation where the culture and the information flow organically between millions of different people.

Something totally different, something totally new in the history of human communications. There is no more a person that can be made responsible if wrong knowledge happens to spread.

This is the reason why the media corporations talk so much about ‘legal downloading’. Legal. Downloading. It is because they want to make it the only legal way of things for people to pick up items from a central point that is under their control. Downloading, not filesharing.

And this is precisely why we will change those laws.

During the passed week we have seen how far an acting party is prepared to go to prevent the loss of his control. We saw the Constitution itself being violated. We saw what sort of methods of force and attacks on personal integrity the police is prepared to apply, not to fight crime, but in an obvious intention to harass those involved and those who have been close to them.

There is nothing new under the Sun, and the history always repeats itself. This is not about a group of professionals getting paid. This is about control over culture and knowledge. Because whoever controls them, controls the world.

The media industry has tried to make us feel shame, to say that what we are doing is illegal, that we are pirates. They try to roll a stone over us. Take a look around today – see how they have failed. Yes, we are pirates. But whoever believes that it is shameful to be a pirate, has got it wrong. It is something we are proud of.

That is because we have already seen what it means to be without central control. We have already tasted, felt and smelled the freedom of being without top-down controlled monopoly of culture and knowledge. We have already learned how to read and how to write.

And we do not intend to forget how to read and how to write, even if yesterday’s media interests do not find it acceptable.

MY NAME IS RICKARD, AND I AM A PIRATE!

[rastaX]

MY NAME IS THEO., AND I AM A PIRATE!

[Lion7718]

Well Said...

 Music_Pirate.JPG ( 4.96K ) Number of downloads: 0

[Project-Buckfast]

Nice speech

[multi]

slink away in shame..
DN

The Anti-Pirate Bureau closes its website.
The Anti-Pirate Bureau, which was behind the police action against file sharing site The Pirate Bay, closed their website on Saturday.

The Anti-Pirate Bureau was formed by the film, video and computer games industry and represents their interests in the area of copyright.

The oraganisation has many times notified the police and acted against pirate copying causing themselves to suffer the wrath of file sharers.

"It's a bit lively on the internet just now, so we thought it was a good idea", said Henrik Pontén, the Anti-Pirate Bureau's lawyer, to Expressens* internet edition.

*-Expressen is another Swedish newspaper who's internet edition Dagens Nyheter are quoting from.

digg

[Tiremonkey2000]

Pirates Rule!!!!!

[Dr. Avery]

Isn't that guy running for some kind of office?

It diminishes his credibility.

[«Kingly»]

thats a great speech, wish i was at the demonstration but i didnt hear about it till the day after and probly couldnt get a plane ticket in time

[multi]

This is a list of all civil rights violations that happened in relation to the raid on The Pirate Bay’s Servers 5 days ago. The list is, despite the title, only of currently known civil rights violations and wrongs, which means that if there are any unknown ones at this point, they aren’t covered in this article.

• 1. This was ordered by the MPAA through the White House through the Swedish Government. Prosecutors and police knew they couldn’t act against TPB, but were ordered to anyway. Double or triple fault.
  
  
• 2. Thomas Bodström, minister of justice, gives direct orders regarding specific cases. (This may be a bit odd for foreigners to understand, but ministers aren’t heads of their departments here; they represent the departments to the government, which writes general rules. It is absolutely forbidden for a minister to interfere in a specific case). He has later gone on record denying this.
  
  
• 3. In direct violation with Swedish judiciary custom, the raid takes place.
  
  
• 4. From an investigatory point of view, there is no reason at all to close down TPB. They are completely open and transparent with what they are doing, and the BitTorrent protocol description is public. From an investigation standpoint, there is nothing additional to be gained by shutting down TPB.
  
  
• 5. At the raid, not only TPB’s servers were seized; ALL servers were seized. The server room is emptied. This has caused 200-300 individuals and businesses to have their machines and servers seized for the indefinite future for the crime of being in the same room as an accused.
  
  
• 6. At the raid, the Pirate Bureau’s servers were seized, too. The Pirate Bureau is a forum for public debate and a think tank in copyright related issues. In this case, the media industry has used the Swedish police force to shut down an opponent in the public debate.
  
  
• 7. At the raid, Mikael Viborg is arrested. Mikael Viborg is TPB’s legal counsel, and has nothing to do with the operations of the site.
  
  
• 8. Mikael Viborg was forced to give a DNA sample during interrogation. While this is allowed when one is accused of a crime that can result in a prison term, the law says that every such privacy violation must always be weighed against the investigative need. In this case, a DNA sample is impossibly necessary to investigate a copyright infringement case. It must only have been used for pure harassment.
  
  
• 9. At the raid, one of the servers seized was the one hosting the Chechen site Kavkaz Center. This site is a registered news site, and as such, enjoys constitutional freedom-of-the-press protection. Seizing it was a direct violation of the Swedish Constitution. When confronted with this fact, police say that they will prioritize searching this server in order to return it quickly. This statement is later nullified as a court slaps the prosecutor forcibly on the wrist by voiding the seize effective immediately.
  
  
• 10. Henrik Pontén, spokesman of the Anti-Pirate Bureau, claims that the real target was the opinion building community the Pirate Bureau, that TPB was at the bottom of the barrel anyway. This has later been publicly denied as a misquote.
  
  
• 11. Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the operators of TPB, was denied a public defender, on the reason that he did not risk a jail term. However, to stage a raid like this, you need jail term on the scale or the police can’t do it. Additionally, compare Mikael Viborg’s DNA sample, which was motivated by the possible jail sentence.
  
  
• 12. HÃ¥kan Roswall, the public prosecutor, responded on national television about what will happen to all of the unrelated servers: “We will mirror all of them and start looking through the information. If there is no interesting information to us there, we will return them.”. The police has no right whatsoever to search servers unrelated to the raid for which they had a warrant. So, not only are innocent bystanders’ servers seized; the police also intend to search them thorougly.
  
  
• 13. Henrik Pontén from the Anti-Pirate Bureau was present at the raid. What gives him the right to be present at a police action?
  
  
• 14. During the raid, the police covered up the surveillance cameras, which can be seen on videos available online now. Fortunately, these videos were transferred to other locations beforethe police siezed them. Why did the police cover the cameras, if the raid was legal and constitutional?

The list was originally compiled by Anders Gardebring and translated and expanded by Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of The Swedish Pirate Party. Thanks to both of you.
http://www.xmule.ws/node/51

[kurosen]

MY NAME IS MOE, AND I AM A PIRATE!

[An Awesome Guy]

the Pirate Party should start their own church!

[multi]

MY NAME IS MOE, AND I AM A PIRATE!

this isn't Pirates Anonymous either..

[rastaX]

MY NAME IS THEO., AND I AM A PIRATE!

MY NAME IS MOE, AND I AM A PIRATE!

this isn't Pirates Anonymous either..

Huh?

[NitnayLion]

MY NAME IS MOE, AND I AM A PIRATE!

this isn't Pirates Anonymous either..

Why not ? We could call it "The Friends of Rasta" or "Theo's Angles" LoL

[Guest_Couk_*]

Why not ? We could call it "The Friends of Rasta" or "Theo's Angles" LoL

[Guest_Couk_*]

Why not ? We could call it "The Friends of Rasta" or "Theo's Angles" LoL
thanks

[Guest_Couk_*]

Yes ! We could call it "The Friends of Rasta" !!!
I'll just take off the sunglasses and obey.....

[rastaX]

Welcome to the Consortium, Couk.

[TankGirl]

The Pirate Chief is still in good spirits and in full action, btw. Besides doing the US West Coast speech tour last summer he has been coordinating the co-operation of the emerging European Pirate Parties (aiming at the 2009 EU parliament elections) and of course leading his own party in Sweden. The political pressure for a copyright reform has not vanished anywhere in Sweden even if the Pirates did not make it to the parliament last year. Pirate Bay is up and defiant as ever; the nation keeps sharing files as before (3 out of 4 teenagers are active filesharers according to studies); and politically the reformistic spirit is spreading to other parties too. Karl Sigfrid, a conservative MP from Prime Minister Reinfeldt's party is the leading figure there, and he's really got it - he demands the legalization of filesharing with arguments almost identical to those of political pirates. So if I would have to guess, I'd still put my bets on Sweden being the breakthrough country for the copyright reform and legalization of filesharing, and Rick Falkvinge making history in that respect.

[Guest_Couk_*]

Welcome to the Consortium, Couk.

Hi,
I am new here. Pirates of interest - the money