April 20th, 2009
PirateBay's Sunde calls for fundamental changes to copyright
The Pirate Bay is not a piracy operation but rather a “semi-political group” and an “art project,” Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde told the Globe and Mail’s Matt Hartley in a post-conviction interview. “It’s a bit of everything.”
Sunde went on to make an interesting argument about the place of copyright in the evolving century: It’s a law that now serves chiefly to enrich megacorporations at the expense of the community. Choice bits:
It’s a political thing and The Pirate Bay is a tool to make people aware of [intellectual property] and to … not break it, but ignore it, rather.
Simply put I would say that today copyright and intellectual property is based upon the notion that big companies will make a lot of money out of it, which is not why the community would want some kind of intellectual property and we need to redefine that, we can’t have the copyright that has been abused by these companies for so long and we need to redefine what kind of copyright we should have,
if we should have any type of copyright, which I think would be the best, we’re not for abolishing copyright, we’re just for really major remodelling of it. I would say–to be more fair with how people want to use media, how people want to use the information they can get that they want.It shouldn’t be about the money, it shouldn’t be about I have to pay this in order to get this type of information which is kind of what the Scientology church is doing, we should accept now that we have the biggest library ever. We have the biggest biggest library, and it’s so huge and everybody should have a way to use this.
And the whole idea of “culture can’t be free” is not the issue. We’re not saying that everything should be free, it should be free and so on, we don’t say that it doesn’t have to be for free, it just has to be free in terms of freedom.
To be more current in the way of thinking in the terms of intellectual property, to see what the need is, to see firstly what the society needs and not what the big companies
