User:JSagert/Sandbox/Manifesto

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This document is based on the Program of Principle (Unrevised) dated June 22nd.

Last edited on July 5th, 2009

Refer to http://www.piratepartyofcanada.com/forum/read.php?5,22,page=1 for an up-to-date discussion on these topics.

Introduction
Our goal is to change the global legislation and to benefit the evolving information society-which is characterized by openness and multitude. This will be done by increasing the amount of respect for our fellow citizens and their privacy, as well as by reforming intellectual property laws. The Pirate-Party of Canada’s values are based on three fundamentals: We now stand in a society of surveillance in which nearly the entirety of our country is registered and monitored. It is not a state that is found to be consistent with a modern lawful society, in which all citizens are given the respect they deserve, and their right to privacy protected. The ideology of “Copyrighting” material was created to benefit society by encouraging the creation, development and dissemination of culture. The achievement of these goals requires a balance between society’s demands for access and dissemination and the author’s requirements for recognition and compensation. We have come to believe that today’s copyright is out of balance. A society where culture and knowledge is free and accessible to all on equal terms benefit the society as a whole.
 * Personal integrity must be protected
 * Culture must be set free.
 * Patents and private monopolies are harmful for society.

We argue that widespread and systematic abuse of today’s copyright actively discourages these purposes by limiting both the range and access to culture. Private monopoly is one of society’s archenemies. It leads to excessive prices and large hidden costs for the citizens. Patents are officially sanctioned monopolies on ideas. Larger companies are fighting feverishly to break records in the number of patents owned; which they can and often do use against smaller competitors in order to stop them from competing in the larger market. The monopolist’s goal is not to keep a fair market price and compete on equal terms with the customer’s benefits, price, and quality in mind. On the contrary, the patent laws are used as a lever to raise prices to a level in which those in a free and fair market would never have paid, and to impose restrictions that would never normally be accepted. We want to limit the possibilities of creating unnecessary and harmful monopolies. Trademarks are primarily a protection for the consumers. We believe that the trademark laws in essence work well today, so we propose no changes at this time.

Democracy and Civil Rights and Liberty
The defense of an individual’s privacy is statutory in the Canadian Constitution. From this fundamental right run several other important human rights, such as: -Freedom of opinion, expression and information. -The right to culture. -The right to personal development. All attempts by the government to restrict these rights must be questioned and face a powerful opposition. All forms of powers, systems and methods that the state can use against its citizens must be under constant review and scrutiny by elected representatives and directly by citizens themselves. When the state monitors people who are not suspected of crimes, that constitutes a violation of the individual’s privacy in an essentially intolerable manner. Every citizen should be guaranteed the right of anonymity that is understood in the constitution today, and the individual's right to determine their own personal data must be strengthened. The Pirate Party takes a stand against special treatment of terrorist crimes in law. The penalties and the offences that already exist for acts that harm or threaten Canadian citizens or their property are adequate. The antiterrorist laws that exist today put the legal security in jeopardy and risks being used (in its extension) as a repressive measure against immigrants or dissidents. The state should respect the constitution even in practice.

Respect for the citizens and their integrity should mean that principles such as: ban of torture, legislated integrity, legal security, mere conduit, and privacy of correspondence, are not open for compromise. The Pirate Party intends and will act to expose and bring down a government that the Party feels does not live up to the respect for human rights, as we are to expect from a democracy. We also believe that such respect should be unconditional, for example, based on ancestry, ethnicity, religion, sex, handicap, age, sexual orientation or political opinion. The privacy of correspondence will be elevated to a general secrecy of communication. It must therefore be prohibited to intercept phone calls of others and read another e-mail, SMS or other messages in the same way as it is now forbidden to read someone else's post, regardless of the technology and provider. Any exceptions to this rule, in each case, remain a well justified exception. Employers may (or may not) be an exception to ensure technical functionality, or if, in direct connection with the employee's duties, authorized to take part of his messages. The state shall have the right to gather evidence and conduct surveillance of its citizens only if there is a suspicion of crime. The state shall in all other cases assume that its citizens are innocent and therefore respect their right to privacy. This privacy of communication must be given strong protection, since the state has in many occasions shown itself as: incapable of managing information that it has had at its disposal in a confidence-boosting way. We aim to abolish the so-called ”data-storage-directive” and strengthen the protection of the individual’s privacy. Foundations of democracy should be safeguarded.

The Culture Must Be Set Free
When copyright law originally was introduced it regulated only a creator's right to be recognized as a creator of a work. Later, it was extended to also include commercial copying of works and now also restricts the private and voluntary workers rights. We believe that this result is, for society, an unacceptable development. Today, economic and technological development have made copyrighting completely unbalanced and have instead made the unfair advantage of a few large market players possible, at the expense of consumers and society at large. Millions of classical works, songs, movies and artworks are held hostage in media companies' vaults, not requested by their focus groups enough to make it worthwhile to give them, but potentially too lucrative to be released. We want to make all of these works free and available to everyone, before the celluloid of the films is destroyed by time. Intellectual property rights are a way to legislate on the material characteristics of intellectual property values. Ideas, knowledge and information are by nature non-exclusive; their common value lies within the fact that they can be shared and disseminated.

We believe that the copyright law needs to be brought back to its origin. Legislation should be amended so that it is quite clear that it only regulates the use and copying of works in the commercial context. The sharing of copies, or otherwise dissemination or use of another's work, should never be forbidden as long as it takes place on a non-profit basis without profit motive. The commercial part of the copyright law should remain active, however, reform is necessary. The idea behind the copyright law has always been to find a balance between conflicting interests in the commercial arena. Today, the balance has been completely lost and needs to be reset. We want the term, thus the exclusive right to produce copies of the work for commercial purposes, to be reduced considerably to a period such as a few years (less then five) from the work's publication. The commercial protection-range shall be regulated so that the general rule makes you free to create new creations that build upon others, so called derivatives. To the extent that it may be justified to derogate from this general rule, such as direct translations of books or the use of new music in commercial films, the exceptions should be explicitly listed in the law. We want to create a reasonable and balanced copyright law. All non-commercial acquisition, exploitation, processing and dissemination of culture must be explicitly encouraged. Techniques that aim to limit the consumer's legal right to freely copy and use information and culture, so-called DRM technologies, should be prohibited. In cases where this is not practicable, or a ban would entail great inconvenience for the consumer, the products containing DRM-technology should be, in any case, provided with clear warnings. Contract clauses designed to prevent such authorized dissemination of information are to be declared void and of no legal effect. Non-commercial dissemination of published culture, information or knowledge - with the exception of private information - may not be restricted or penalized. As a logical consequence, we want to abolish the private-copying-compensation. We want to create a cultural commons.

Patents of Private Monopolies Harm Society
Patents have many effects that damage society. Medical patents bear the blame for: the unnecessary deaths from diseases that would have been treatable were it not for said patents, the distortion of research priorities, and a growing and unnecessarily high medical bill for the richer parts of the world. Patents on genes and life, such as patented seeds, lead to unreasonable and harmful consequences. Software patents inhibit technical progress in the IT field and pose a serious threat to small and medium sized IT companies. Patents allegedly encourage innovation by protecting those who invent and invest in new inventions and manufacturing techniques. However, large companies are increasingly using patents in order to prevent smaller competitors from competing on equal terms. Instead of encouraging innovation, patents are now being used by the larger companies as “patent carpets” (a large spider web of patents used by larger companies in order to make smaller ones get stuck) in open warfare against other players to avoid competition. These patent holders often have no intention to further develop the patents or technologies. We believe that patent system has played out its role and that today, it actively hinders innovation and the creation of new knowledge.

In addition, a look at all products and innovations that can not be patented shows that patents are really not needed – the driving forces from being the first in a market is fully sufficient to create innovation. Inventors are to compete with innovation, customer value, price and quality rather than to be accorded a state supported monopoly on knowledge. To avoid having to pay armies of patent-lawyers liberates resources that instead can be used to create real innovation and improve the products at a faster rate, which will ultimately benefit all. We want to abolish the patent system, gradually. Apart from using the patent laws, the big companies try to gain monopolies in other ways. By keeping data storage formats secret and by, in other ways, hindering or preventing interoperability; they create a lock-in effect, which restricts competitor’s abilities and impairs free and fair functioning of the market. This leads to higher prices and lower rates of innovation. When the public sector makes contracts or produce the information, this must be done in a way that actively works against the maintenance or emergence of private monopolies on information, knowledge, ideas or concepts. Initiatives such as Open Access, which aims to make research results freely available, should be encouraged and supported. Private monopolies shall be resisted. The public sector shall archive and make documents available in open formats. It should be possible to communicate with the authorities without being bound to a particular supplier of software. The use of open source in the public sector, including schools and libraries, should be encouraged. Open formats and open source should be encouraged.

Closing Words
We want to protect the individual citizen's privacy and fundamental human rights. When the state routinely monitors and records of its citizen’s communications, this leads to the abuse of power, the lack of freedom and legal uncertainty. We demand a correction of these injustices. We demand justice, freedom and democracy for all citizens. Today's intellectual property rights lead to harmful monopolies in which important basic democratic values and the innovation of grass root based intellectual property may suffer. Intellectual property rights should be enriching individual people's lives, enabling a healthy business climate and creating knowledge and culture, thus benefiting the whole society. Our work with this is now focused on parliamentary means and hence we seek mandate from the citizens to represent them in those issues on which we have taken a stand herein. The Pirate Party does not strive to be part of an administration. Our goal is to use a tiebreaker position in parliament as leverage, and support an administration that drives the issues in our platform in a satisfactory manner. When they do, we will support that administration on other issues where we choose to not hold opinions of our own. Our primary goal is as follows: We will take a stand in any political issues if they are connected with the principles declared herein or with any kind that may jeopardize our democratic and human rights as citizens of Canada.
 * To stand united around our protection of the right to privacy.
 * Our will to reform copyrights.
 * The need to abolish patents.