Pirate Party of Canada Forum

 Quite frankly, I feel that the Pirate Party should take a much more affirmitive stance on filesharing. In my opinion, I feel there is a bit of fear regarding potential damages to our image if we were to take a more affirmative stance. However, given that Canada is at the forefront of using filesharing I feel that there is a large enough base of support for us to take this position. We should assume a stance in favour of the outright legalization of filesharing for personal use.

 This is (in my opinion) an extremely important issue that we've been somewhat avoidant of, and it should be put to a vote.

It's certainly worthy of serious discussion.  Thanks for throwing this out in the open.

True but I think most Canadian politicians are too whipped by lobbyist obligations to get their campaign contributions to do anything like that...

Then there is the fact hey might be afraid of a war with the US... But remember what happened last time they started shit. We went down there and burned the White House down.

We need to liken it to a library folks!

 Make torrent hosts donate 5% of their ad profits to funding Canadian media projects.

Throw on an additional optional box to donate money from your tax return into this canadian media fund if you are a file sharer.

Which is more or less why the Pirate Party exists, amirite?

It is not illegal to file share in Canada.
If you own it and have the rights to distribute it, go ahead fill your torrents.
It's even ( thanks to the private copying exemption that includes a levy on blank media) legal to download all the music you want, just don't upload it, and make sure its only music, and make sure its put on a CD.

As for the 5% levy on ad revenue from Torrent sites.
That would be like Timmy Ho Ho's being made to give 5% of their profit to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, because if you eat doughnuts you MAY get clogged arteries.
Very similar to the media levy, i buy cd's  to put files on, not music and I still pay the levy, that's not fair. ( they think I might so they charge me)

IMHO
The issue centres around Balanced Copyright / IP rights and what it should look like.

I should be able to buy a DVD movie, and convert it to whatever format I want, as long as its for personal use. Then I can have that movie since I bought it.
But...what happens if I don't know how to rip it, and I just go onto a torrent site and download it already converted to whatever format I wanted.
Should I be able to do that? it's still for personal use, isn't it? ( of course under the new bill having tools to break locks would be illegal)
But how would I control the people who didn't have the movie in the first place and only wanted it for free?
And what if instead of loaning the movie to a friend by handing him the DVD, i tell him to download it, since it would be faster..is that still OK?
That is the real debate.
It's not about file sharing and getting things for free, its about where our rights as citizens begin.

Even if we ignore the changes that C-32 is going to make to file sharing in Canada, the legal status of file sharing is still very limited. Sure I can torrent my files if I have the right to distribute, but how often do we have that on the things we download? Music downloading is legal but technologies used to do so often including uploading the information while you are downloading it. Bit-torrent is built on the notion that we are going to be seeding as much as we leech.


I am not sure what you are trying to say here. Our rights as Citizens include issues far outside the scope of the pirate party's platform. You seem to be suggesting that our ability to rip a DVD or share a DVD somehow is more closely tied with our rights as citizens then filesharing or "getting things for free".  That is an unfair assessment.

Getting things for free(in the context of information) is exactly the issue the pirate party needs to take a stance on. Free information is information freedom.

Why liken it to a library?

Why not just lobby for libraries of media?  In essence, it would protect an awful lot of culture(anyone else notice how bare B&M stores are when it comes to rarer music, TV shows, and movies?), while also giving the public reasonable access to culture.

If the public is unwilling or unable to fund it, I don't see why it couldn't be a private venture.  But lobbying to reform copyright to the point that I can login to my library and stream anything I like(that is a of a reasonable age, say 5-7 years or older).

It's entirely do-able...just a matter of getting a whole whack of very entrenched folks to consider another path.

That's politics, though, no?

I am all about this! Lobbying for literal digital libraries is an excellent compromise, I've said it before!

file sharing should be unregulated because restricting its use is impossible. you don't have to support it but allowing it is necessary.
no one will starve, i promise.

Oh sure except for the middle men in the music industry who get the stars their high quality blow... Wont you please think of the poor super rich record company execs? How will they ever afford a second leer jet if we allow filresharing</sarcasm>

I agree with your sentiments on file sharing, but that is the worst justification for its legalization that I've heard yet. If we want it to be unregulated, we want it to be unregulated for a deliberate reason. Using the difficulty in catching file sharers as the primary justification is like arguing that murder should be legalized because not all murder cases are solved.

At best it's a secondary or tertiary reason... :) why should we waste police resources on this when they have murders and stuff to deal with?

I agree, especially given that the head of copyright theft investigations within the RCMP admitted to lacking the ability to tackle filesharing. Legalizing filesharing for personal use is a common sense approach that both saves money and facilitates the flow of information. Again, I want to put out the idea of putting forth a vote on the 19th as to whether or not we should add the legalization of filesharing (including copyrighted material) for personal use to our platform. Anyone else agree with this sentiment?

It is already in the interim platform and the proposed platform.

i get the analogy but it really is impossible to moderate the internet without heavily blocking and filtering traffic. a free internet like the one we mutually agree should exist is incompatible with one where even a single person is punished for transferring copyrighted files. as for the scope of the 'crimes', there a billions of file sharers to put on trial and only a few thousand murderers. the same murder analogy used when one suggests legalizing drugs. we can't stop drug use with authority because it's so widespread so it's best to not criminalize it at all.

This should be platform #1.

Everyone loves file sharing. File sharing is a positive thing that helps the world be a better place.

Why is this not part of our main platform? We're the pirate party for heck's sake

I agree it would be the most popular topic to lead with. Canadians want to hear about the issue of file sharing. If I was ever trying to sell the pirate party to someone I would ask them if they have an mp3 player (which nearly everyone has) I"d ask them how many songs they have and where they downloaded them(could be 1000's and normally downloaded free) and then I could say. Imagine if you paid a dollar for each song, would you have spent 1000 dollars for all those songs even since you can copy 1 song a thousand times at no cost?

I think that would sell it to anyone age 30 and below.

It's there, but it's not front and centre. Why? Because it's redundant. As you say, we're the Pirate Party. If we say that we're for non-commercial file sharing in press interviews, they will talk about nothing else. We have much more to offer to a much broader range of people, which means that our larger platform needs to get the most attention.

I don't buy that we should worry about redundancy. We have to play to the lowest common denominator. For every one person who understands Net Neutrality there are ten who love to download music and movies for themselves and their family for non commercial purposes.

If we are redundant, people will understand. Our platform is logical and worthwhile and deserves lots of votes and support. We need someone who can debate the details when it comes down to it, but in our advertising we should use broad strokes that will attract an audience. We could base our platform on being "so much more than just filesharing" but I think it's absurd to not have filesharing front and center. We're the pirate party.

People are going to think we're a joke if we don't stand up for filesharing.

Point ^

Ayes, you have a beautiful slogan hidden in there!


This slogan puts filesharing front-and-center for people to see, but forces them to say "Really? What else do you stand for?" .   I agree with Mikkel that there's no point to purposefully and boisterously beat the file-sharing drum, but we can certainly leverage it as a slogan, or advertising tag-line, to get people asking about our platform. I think that's something the PR Committee should consider.

Here the problem....

If we allow the focus to shift away from file-sharing to our other platform points that we will become a bogus abstract party that doesn't really stand for anything.

Privacy, for example, only really matters when you have something to hide. Sure we all recognize it as an objectively important issue but it really doesn't hit home until our livelihood requires it. For pirates, privacy matters when we are illegally downloading. The same for net neutrality, we all know that it is something intrinsically valuable but what really matters to us is that our torrents are not throttled. Anti-censorship and freedom of speech pertain to the right of torrent websites to provide us with meta-data. These are all important ideas outside of the private party but without real world applications they are just abstractions. The pirate party provides these real world correlates when we advocate file-sharing.

The current threat to this is people with anti-file sharing agendas that join the pirate party under the guise of  our other platform points and then proceed to dilute our mandate by over-emphasizing things like anti-censorship and privacy while quietly arguing against file-sharing. I can only imagine these folks spreading anti-file sharing rhetoric with the massing looking at them and going "He is a member of the pirate party and even he is against downloading, who are we to argue".

These elements already exist in our party and if we don't strongly advocate file-sharing as our main issue, they are only going to become more numerous.

No need to be too specific about everything in our platform. Instead, our platform should oppose any restriction and censorship imposed on any emerging / established technology. This would include filesharing technology. Filesharing technology could be compared to the World Wide Web. When web started, it was used as collaboration tools by scientist, now it has widespread applications. Of course filesharing technology such as torrent have many advantages over other technology like ftp.  So it is a technology with great potential and it would be a shame to outlaw it. It just does not make sense unless you are a lobbyist for the stubborn old school major labels.

But it does not make sense to name a specific technology on our platform.

I like the idea of being all about allowing technology to live up to it's potential.

No. No. No no no no no no. Privacy matters to everyone, and everyone has something to hide from someone. Sure some value it more than others, but few people would argue with the importance of privacy.


Absolutely. One point I often make when speaking to the media is that the current prevailing school of thought in government and big business is trying to fit the Internet into their existing business models, not unlike approaching the printing press and only using it for illuminating manuscripts rather than embracing its full revolutionary potential. We want to climb aboard this new cultural revolution and see where it takes us. I think even now, 40 years later, we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the social effects of the Internet.


I do support pushing the filesharing aspect of our platform more. Until now, I've been focusing on selling other aspects of our platform in an attempt to broaden our member base/appeal rather than dedicating ourselves to one niche group that will never alone get us elected. However, we can certainly do more to reach out to the people who take the importance of our platform for granted.

Congrats Mikkel, you just turned my premise into a perfect syllogism. If privacy only matters when you have something to hide and if everyone has something to hide then privacy matters to everyone. Doesn't prove my premise, I will admit, but it does leave open the possibility then you and I are not actually in a disagreement over the subject.

Just ask that lady who some rogers rep tied her cell phone in her maiden name and such to her normal bill and sent it to the house... She was using that phone to cheat on her husband and he found out :P

Privacy is important. Without it you would not have your rights against unreasonable search and seizure and the government could just roll up whenever they please and go through your belongings.

Government Transparency is important because the more a government is able to hide the less accountable they become to the people they are supposed to represent.

i like to think that we're a forward party and not get bogged down with the directions of left and right like other parties have.