Free The Case for Copyright Reform by Christian Engström, Rick Falkvinge Page B

and knowledge at your fingertips. We need to help everybody
around us understand that sharing is caring, and that copyright is the
opposite.
     
    We need to document the
transgressions of the copyright industry. Much sympathy was gained for the
Protestant causes as the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition and Bloody Mary
were exposed to the public. There is certainly no shortage of horrendous acts
on behalf of the copyright industry. We need to explain them in laymen’s terms.
     
    We need to explain that there is a better way to both politicians,
artists, and citizens in general. Copyright is just a piece of legislation,
written by humans, that has developed into something that is out of sync with
reality. It is not a holy stone tablet handed down to us directly by God, and
it is not an eternal principle that holds our society together. It is just a
piece of legislation that happens to be broken, and can be fixed. But it needs
to be fixed quite urgently, or we risk creating a kind of society that we do
not want.
     
    To conclude:
     
    File sharing is not just a private matter.
It’s a matter of global economic dominance, and always has been. Let’s keep
sharing and move that power from the monopolists to the people. Teach everybody
to share culture, and the people will win against the constrainers of
liberties, just as happened at the start of this series, when people learned to
read for themselves and toppled the Catholic Churh.
     
     
     

Chapter 5
The Artists Are Doing Fine
     
    How Will The Artists Get Paid?
    “But how will the artists get paid?” is the single most frequent question we Pirates get
when arguing for copyright reform to legalize file sharing.
     
    Ten years ago, this was a very difficult question to answer, and few
would have been confident that they knew if and how the cultural sector would
survive financially in the new era. But today, we have more than a decade’s
experience of a world where anybody who wants can download whatever they want
for free, and where a large portion of the population routinely does.
     
    We now know from experience that the
cultural sector is financially sustainable despite rampant p2p file sharing .
What may have appeared to be an insoluble problem a decade ago, has turned out
not to be a problem at all, but in fact a huge opportunity for artists and
creators, and a boon for sustainable cultural diversity.
     
    Admittedly, it can feel a bit frustrating to get the question of how the
artists will get paid after you have just explained how copyright enforcement
is threatening fundamental rights. Should the question of whether we want to
keep the right to private communication, due process, and proportionality in
punishments really depend on whether it is profitable for artists or not?
     
    But apart from that, it is a relevant question. We all want a society
where culture flourishes, and we all want authors, musicians,
     
    60 and other creative people to have a chance to make a living from
their art. If it had been the case that there actually was a conflict between
this and preserving fundamental rights, it would have been a problem that
needed to be addressed, even if abolishing fundamental rights would not have
been the proper answer.
     
    As it happens, we can see that during the decade when file sharing grew
exponentially, revenues have increased year by year for the both the cultural
sector as a whole, and for each individual segment such as film, music, or
computer games.
     
    The biggest change has been within the music industry. For the past ten
years, sales of recorded music have declined steeply, and the rise in digital
music-sales have been scant compensation. But the music business has never been
healthier.
     
    In an in-depth article published in October 2010, business magazine The Economist wrote :
     
    A surprising number of things are making
money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music
business is not dying. But it is