 There we go. So, I'm going to talk a bit about copyright and patent reform. At the end of this seminar there's a book with a little bit more material called the case for copyright reform. They are free for the taking. I'm happy if you take one and read them. If you know somebody else who might be interested, take two. So, I'm Falk Vinge on Twitter for those who use Twitter here. If I say something funny, if I say something quotable, if I say something stupid, feel free to quote me on Twitter. I love seeing my name quoted. So, just to kick this off, how many in here have heard of the Swedish pirate party before? Let's see a show of hands. That's about two thirds. That's typical norm. So, just to kick, how many have heard of any other Swedish political party? Scattered hands here and there. And that's also typical of whatever I could say. I think that's kind of funny. That tells you something. That there's something happening here. So, I founded the first pirate party in January. On January 1st, 2006, we've now spread to 70 countries, as was told. We have seats in the European Parliament, in the Czech Senate, and state level parliament in Germany and on many local councils across Europe. And you'll notice that this is titled the European Pirate Academy. That's just a non-profit that we use to give public presentations. So, how copyright and pattern reform can make us all safer and wealthier? We'll take a look at why is there conflict between civil liberties and copyright monopoly? And what is the monopoly anyway? Why am I calling it a monopoly? What's its purpose and how pattern monopolies and copyright monopolies have prevented wealth and safety? Saving jobs is counterproductive to tomorrow's competitiveness and how to fix this. So, why is there conflict? When we look at how our parents communicated, and for that matter how we communicated when we were young, we would have typically sent a letter in the mail. We would take a paper and write words on it using a pen or a typewriter. We would put this letter in an envelope and put it in a mailbox. That letter had certain characteristics to it. It was, first of all, anonymous. We and we alone determined whether we identified ourselves as sender of this letter on the inside of the envelope for only the recipient to know, on the outside of the envelope for the world to know, or frankly not at all. Or if we wrote a pseudonymous name, if we wrote something else, that was entirely our prerogative. It was secret in transit. Nobody had the right to open your letters just for the fun of it. Under court order, if you were under previous and individual suspicion of a very serious crime, your mail could be opened, but no mail would be opened just to see if you were sending a copied drawing. It was untracked. Nobody had the means, nor the right, nor the capability to see who was communicating with whom. And perhaps most illusively, but also importantly, the mailman was never responsible for the contents of the message. And to illustrate this, most postal services in Europe are still that country's largest distributor of narcotics. You would hold the sender and receiver responsible for using the postal services to distribute illicit drugs, but you would never hold the postal service as such responsible. And all these four characteristics are being threatened as we transition from an offline communication to an online communication. And what we are saying is that it's absolutely reasonable that our children have the same rights in the environment they communicate entirely regardless whether somebody can no longer profit. Because when you say this that our parents could send anything they wanted to anybody else, anything that they could put on paper, the copyright industry in particular will start up and scream, you cannot be serious. We can't make a profit if you allow this. And I say, well, that's interesting, but it's also completely irrelevant to the discussion. Because we don't determine civil liberties based on who can make a profit or not. We based it on what our ancestors fought, bled, and sadly sometimes died to give to us as their children. An entrepreneur's role in society is to make money given the current constraints of technology and society. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties even if they can't make money otherwise. Worldwide we are seeing an attack on these four liberties. It's only the excuses of that matter, which tells me that a cadre of incumbent industries are trying to preserve profits in the face of civil liberties and that concerns me. If you want a funny example, I'd take Arizona bill number, which was an assortment of free speech. This was a state-level bill in the United States. It tried to criminalize hate speech, but it went pretty much over the top in that it went as far as saying that you cannot even annoy people online. As in all of these listings you couldn't do online was even the word annoy. That's when it becomes almost a parody on itself. Imagine I fly home from Dublin tomorrow and in the airport I see three books. I see Fellowship of the Ring, I see the Two Towers and I see Return of the King. I come home, I log on to my favorite fantasy and book forum and I write in outrage how Hollywood has turned this epic trilogy in their utmost greed and they couldn't just resist turning Lord of the Rings into a book. And then I sort of bring out my large bowl of popcorn and watch the ensuing entertainment happen. I mean, yeah, that might be a prank, but should it really be criminal? That's when it becomes a problem when lawmaker thinks that this is actually a good idea and I'll be returning to more such good ideas historically that we think are just ludicrous today. So let's take a look at the copyright monopoly and you'll see that I call it a monopoly for good reason. Some would call it property and that's a play on words. You'll notice that copyright monopoly lawyers never talk about property. They talk about exclusive rights because lawyers are precise. When you buy a chair, when you buy a chair, you have the receipt in hand. This chair is your property. There are many ones like it, but this one is yours. You have the receipt in hand. It's made from a mass drawing at a factory somewhere. In contrast, when you buy a DVD, the exact same things apply. It's one identical copy out of many made from a massive copy at a plant somewhere. You hold the receipt in hand. This DVD is yours. Now, there are certain things you can do with a chair. You can take it apart and use it for new projects. You can make an identical copy and sell it. You can even put it out on the porch and charge the neighbours for using it if they're stupid enough to do so. But with a DVD, none of it applies. My point here is that the corporate monopoly limits normal property rights. It is not property. It is a limitation on property rights. Now, there might be perfectly valid utilitarian justifications for this monopoly. I'm just saying that if you embrace property rights, you cannot land in the conclusion that the corporate monopoly is good. Exclusive rights. Right. Monopoly likes the limit property. And this is obviously a game of words because most people tend to associate property with a positive connotation whereas monopoly has a negative connotation. So, I'll freely admit to the fact that I'm also using this game of words and saying the corporate monopoly, but as we move ahead, I want to be clear on the concepts. The purpose of these monopolies is sometimes described as making money. The purpose of the law is to allow an artist to make money. That is not true in any legislation I've seen across Europe or indeed the Western world. The only clear, really clear justification for the copyrighted patent monopolies are in the United States Constitution. The United States Constitution where it's super clear worded that this monopoly is justified if it promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. This is a direct quote from the United States Constitution to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. That means that there's a balance here. The corporate legislation is a balance, but it's not the balance you typically get from the corporate industries. It's not a legitimate stakeholder and that is such a challenging notion that I'll repeat it again. The corporate industry is not a legitimate stakeholder in the corporate monopoly legislation. They are beneficiary, that's different. This is a balance between the public's interest in access to knowledge and culture and the same public's interest in having new knowledge and culture created. The progress of science and the useful arts. The public is the only stakeholder. It's a balance between two interests of the public. So no entrepreneur has any right to profit. That goes with the name entrepreneur. You take a risk, you might win out, you might not, the world owes you nothing. And that's not even the purpose. So let's take a look at how all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. There's something called a red flag act that happened in the UK in 1856, I believe. Does anybody here know of that? One, two, three, okay. So what the red flag act was that when the automobile was invented, well it wasn't called the automobile, it was called something people could relate to, it was called a horseless carriage. People, it was a revolutionary new invention and people weren't easily convinced it was a good idea because new things scare people and it doesn't just scare people, it also scares animals at the time. So there was something cropped up that was called the red flag act of 1865. It said that every car must have a crew of three people. It must have a driver. Okay, I can live with that. Google's driverless car didn't exist back then. It must have a stoker, essentially a machinist. And it must have a guy walking in front of the car waving a red flag. Warning people of the car coming. What that did was limit the car's utility to walking speed. And here's a contemporary drawing which probably just came out of copyright since it's 1865. It turned out much later that, obviously this limited the car's utility to safely and slowly, not avienna, transporting people in cargo to railroad and stagecoach stations. And it turned out much lighter that this was due to lobbying from railroad and stagecoach industries who pretended to embrace this new technology publicly but in reality lobbied for laws that would limit its utility to not challenge their status as transportation kings of the hill. We are seeing a repeat of this right now. And just to illustrate how, when insanity strikes, how people can copy insanity, I think it's a good idea. I'd like to mention Pennsylvania's law. Pennsylvania's red flag act that they took in 1896, 40 years after Britain's template. The law passed the legislature unanimously and it stipulated that any car driver that sees animals, horses or cattle, up ahead on the road, had three actions. They must, A, stop the engine, B, disassemble the vehicle, and C, hide all the parts in the nearest shrubbery. And this passed the legislature unanimously. It didn't become law due to the governor vetoing this law but that was a close call. So again, is there a right to make money? No, there isn't. And I'd like to give a counter example. Ice makers of the early 1900, early 20th century were the largest industries, largest industries in most cities. This industry was sewing up ice blocks from frozen lakes in winter, storing ice blocks on sodas, in barns, and then carrying these blocks of ice out to households who had ice boxes before households were electrified. Then came electricity, then came refrigerators. The largest industry in most cities disappeared in five years. There were many, many personal tragedies here and yet not a single person suggested a 3,000 euro tax that would, 3,000 euro refrigerated tax that would go to the Ice Men's Union. This is what we're seeing now, right? You're seeing proposals of broadband tax that will go to obsolete industries. So technology has always changed business models and arguably always will. So how does this prevent wealth? The current gatekeeper copyright system is actively preventing people from making money. There is a gatekeeper system that determines who gets seen and who doesn't. Fortunately, these publishing houses are deteriorating, but it's still there. And this percentage of, can I have a guess? How many, how big proportion of artists are being kept out of royalty by this system? Anybody? Anybody? 55%. 55? I know it's more than 90. More than 90? Anybody more than 99? More than 99.9? More than 99.99? It's actually six nights. And I'm not making this up, it breaks down like this. 99% of artists do not get signed on a major label. So they shut out of the system. Of these, of those who are signed, 98% fail. Do not make money. And out of those who succeed and are signed, less than half a percent ever see a cent in royalties. So when you're asking, well, if you're changing the copyright monopoly, how can artists possibly make money? I think that's a very odd position since you're defending a system where six nine, six nine percent are not seeing royalties. So how shall the artists get paid? In contrast, we're seeing that musicians' income is up 114% since file sharing started. This is a Norwegian study, and they are doing that essentially by circumventing the entire gatekeeper system. The decline of the publishing houses is the best thing that could possibly happen to artists. The disrespect for the copyright monopoly by 250 million Europeans is the greatest transfer of wealth to the incumbent publishers to the people who actually create something. So the record leg was collapsing. It's a good thing. Looking at patents briefly then, there's a quote from the Economist in 1851, which had enormous foresight where they said that the granting of patents inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run off the schemes that may enable them to leave the attacks on the public, begets disputes and quarrels between inventors, provokes endless lawsuits, the principles of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just. And this was just ahead of the United States enacting their first patent monopolies. I think this is an incredible foresight on behalf of the economists, because this is exactly what has happened. And we tend to confuse wealth here with cash flow, as in when we're speaking of saving jobs. I think that's even now. I think saving jobs, no. Okay. When we're speaking of making money, making wealth, that tends to be in the context of the incumbents having a preserved cash flow. We are making 10 million, whatever, 10 million euro on this product. We should along come somebody who would only make one million of it or even sell for one million of it. But the thing is that's a good thing. If you make less money on something, that means that we have learned how to have the same output at less cost. That's innovation. And the incumbents are obviously trying to prevent this because they are trying to safeguard their cash flow. And it's crucially important that patent monopolies are in an incumbents game and that saving jobs in this manner is counterproductive to future competitiveness. If you have jobs that are obsolete, then it's much better to allow leapfrogging other economies by allowing competition. Patent monopolies didn't derail just recently. They had said by some historians that the Industrial Revolution didn't really take off when patents on the steam engine expired. You had broadcast radio which was delayed in a patent by 5 to 10 years. The aviation industry in North America was an endless quarrel of lawsuits by the Wright brothers and others until the First World War erupted, at which point the North American government, the US government, went in and nationalized all patents because they needed it for warfare. FM radio, the same thing and so on and so on. And it's important here that today's corporate giants and patent monopolies were born in patent-free environments. If you look at Novartis, for instance, born in Switzerland where there were no patents, if you look at the telecom giant Ericsson was founded on what would today be a patent infringement on Siemens. The list goes on and you see this patent repeating again and again and again that those who want the most protection are those who were founded when this protection did not exist and where they could not have been founded had such protection existed. We want to create the next generation of industries because that's much more competitive than freezing time in today's incumbents. Some say IT patent monopolies are clearly a derailer of some industries that clearly need them like pharma, which is typically the poster boy for the necessity of patent monopolies. And I'm going to pop that balloon by using the farmers' industries' own numbers, just taking one example. Pharmaceutical patents kill. People in the third world are legally prohibited from using their own knowledge, their own raw materials in their own factories to cure their own people. And I think there are deep, deep moral problems with that. So let's take a look at this. The question is who would pay for R&D if there weren't any patents? That's the one money question. So let's take a look at who pays for the R&D today. These numbers come from the pharmaceutical industry's own publication. This was published in 2006. And we observe here in this diagram that healthcare subsidies across Europe on average count for 83% of the total pharma income. It varies a bit across countries. Ireland has 10%, but it's still a fairly high number. So governments through health insurance stand for 83% of pharma industry income and the individual patients for 17%. So how much does this cost? What are the costs here? Well, you have manufacturing and you have research and development, as we said. So if you have generic drugs, when you're manufacturing generic drugs you have no R&D costs. You're seeing a sharp reduction in prices from 70%, which was the result of a study in Sweden, to 93%, which was the result of a recent price drop in India when a cancer drug was used to force licensing under the TRIPS agreement. So it costs about 30%. Let's just assume it costs about 30%. That is a very conservative general estimate that includes everything related to manufacturing. So if this is the manufacturing and we add R&D on top of that, which, according to the pharma industry's own numbers, is 15%. That gives us R&D. So adding this up, we come to 45% of today's pharma revenue. The rest is pattern monopoly deadweight. And this is using the pharma industry's own numbers by, as a thought experiment, if we outsource the R&D to public universities, which tend to be good at competition, I wouldn't normally ask a government to do research, but public universities are usually good at this. And then just outsource the manufacturing. We would cut the government's pharma bill in half. We would allow developing nations free access. We would save money, save lives, and there's even plenty of room for expanding the research and development. So in this, we demonstrate how pharma patterns are actually giving a higher tax bill, less medication, shutting people out of healthcare, all while making the bill more expensive. By showing, therefore, that pharma patterns are counterproductive to most goals we set, it follows that all other industries must be questioned, since pharma industry is typically the poster ball for why you need pattern monopolies in the first place. So how do you fix this? Final section. Technical activism, we have plenty of that. We have plenty of entrepreneurs who are creating disruptive systems. Academic activism is going on everywhere where people are examining the scenarios that are playing out right now and trying to predict what's happening next, and then political activism. Also described as political change where I and people like me come in. We are, like I said, the plan needs to be to face out pattern monopolies. That's obviously a long-term goal, and one step of the way would be to allow for independent invasion. It's very questionable if putting one device on top of another, like this, should be illegal because somebody else did it first on the other side of the planet that I haven't heard of nor seen them. Reducing the corporate monopoly to commercial activity only, this is where it was just 20, 30 years ago in practice, reducing the term of the corporate monopoly to a reasonable length. Today it lasts for the authors of life plus another 70 years. Since this is supposed to be an incentive to create, I don't know of any author that keeps writing books after they are dead and buried, so the term is at least 70 years too long at this point. We suggest 20 years, which is more than enough to cover any investment. We allow for samples, remixes, etc. Today creating is illegal. Art is illegal. The entire hip-hop mash-up scene is illegal. Fortunately, no artists have ever cared that what they create is illegal. They do it anyway. They don't wait for the law to change. But this is a problem. Killing various compensations, such as the blank media levy, which has repeatedly been handed out to a rent-seeking industry whenever there has been new technology, simply because they can get away with it. But I don't see the fairness nor the justice in having a single mother pay 20 euros to the copyright industry when she buys a games console for her children, which is the case today. And finally, banning digital research mechanisms, the RM, because making copyright laws is Parliament's job, not publishing houses. This is doable tomorrow. There's a proposal that has been taken up by one of the major party groups in the European Parliament already, so it's politically realistic. It's becoming mainstream. And there's the synopsis of it. It's a lot more detailed in this book about this proposal and the background to it. And that is my presentation. If there's a contact address here, if you want to get in touch with the nascent Irish pirate party now or at a later time. And this is how you get in touch with me.