Month: September 2013

LNP Plans to Assault Free Speech By Banning Boycotts

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Pirate Party Australia is outraged by a Liberal-National Coalition (LNP) plan to ban environmental boycotts[1]. While specifics of the plan are yet to be announced, it appears to be a serious assault on both free speech and the free market.

The freedom to disseminate information regarding the activities of companies for purposes of increasing consumer awareness and to encourage environmentally sound practices through boycotts is vital for those wishing to act beyond the limited environmental controls legislated by Parliament.

“This proposal is a serious assault on the very fabric of democracy,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “The Government can enforce minimum standards, but activist organisations have the right to pressure industries to adopt higher standards. A free society depends on the free exchange of ideas, and this move by the LNP puts serious limitations on that exchange occurring around issues that millions of people may view as important.”

“By limiting the ability of consumers to leverage their collective buying power to encourage ethical business practices, the Government plans to limit consumers’ ability to decide what ethics they expect companies to uphold,” Mr Frew continued. “Such a plan could eventually be extended to ending the labelling of ethical and environmentally friendly products. The free market includes the right to spend money according to your values, and the Government appears to be trying to impose their own morality — or amorality — on Australian citizens.”

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Talk Like a Pirate Day pillow fight for cancer support!

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MELBOURNE — At 6:30 pm today, Pirates of all persuasions will descend upon Federation Square to engage in a swashbuckling pillow fight. Money raised by the event, organised by Pirate Party Australia, will go toward the charity Childhood Cancer Support. The charity’s website can be found here: http://ccs.org.au

“Despite perceptions of parrots, swords and eye-patches, when Pirate Party Australia talks like a pirate it usually means discussing copyright and patent reform, and other policy areas,” said Pirate Party Deputy President Melanie Thomas. “While it’s not always fun and games, we are more than happy to have a bit of fun for a good cause!”

By hosting a pillow fight on Talk Like a Pirate Day, Pirate Party Australia is hoping to draw attention to the need to better enable research opportunities in the field of health and pharmaceuticals. The Party is agitating for reform of patent laws to assist medical research across a range of illnesses, including cancer, and enabling cheaper access to medication and treatment. It is an unfortunate effect of drug patents that they shut down free market competition which might otherwise drive improved manufacturing and delivery techniques.

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CrimTrac net widened to catch suspects’ families

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In a never-ending quest to distort the presumption of innocence and reduce privacy, CrimTrac — Australia’s law enforcement data coordination agency — is proposing to expand its DNA matching powers.

Currently CrimTrac checks DNA collected during investigations against samples collected from suspects and convicted criminals to find a match. CrimTrac plans to widen the scope of the matches to include familial links, allowing the agency to uncover relatives of the person whose DNA has been found[1].

“DNA, like fingerprints, is a unique identifier of individuals. While collecting DNA from suspects and criminals is a practice that has been extensively used, caution should be exercised when expanding the net,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “There are strong privacy implications for those who may be related to suspects, and to unfairly drag them into criminal proceedings would be a grave error of judgement.”

“It is obvious that there may be advantages in locating relatives of unmatched DNA samples and persons who cannot be located, however it may run the risk of creating a class of persons under increased scrutiny merely because they are related to a suspect or a convicted criminal. What is needed is a high degree of oversight, preferably judicial, to ensure that there is reasonable need to extend the scope of a particular query beyond exact matches.”

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Telstra throttling an unacceptable solution for network congestion

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After an announcement eight months ago that it would be trialling a system to reduce the speed of certain types of data, Telstra has confirmed it will be going ahead with a controversial network management trial. The telco has said it was conducting the trial to identify different options and pricing plans for its customers in an attempt to manage congestion issues[1].

Among the types of data being ‘throttled’ is peer-to-peer traffic, and participants in the trial will be asked about speed differences with applications such as BitTorrent. This raises concerns for the Pirate Party with regard to Internet traffic prioritisation.

Pirate Party Australia considers that ‘net neutrality’ — where types of traffic are not discriminate against — is essential for modern Australia. The Party’s policy pushes for a ban on screening and prioritising of traffic based on content, source or destination, with opt-in prioritisation if subscribers choose[2].

“Net neutrality is vital for a free Internet,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “Throttling certain services and promoting others will damage any new service or product coming online. Differentiated services is a slippery slope to a situation where companies could pay for their content to be prioritised. The next Google or Facebook, being a start-up would not have access to a comparable speed and would find it more difficult to compete with the more powerful incumbents purely because they could only afford access to the B-Grade Internet. For the Internet to remain a place of innovation any attempt to benefit some sections at the cost of others must be resisted.”

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The Pirate Party’s plan for copyright reform

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Pirate Party Australia is part of a global movement founded to fight for reform of copyright laws.

Copyright laws are among the most expansive intrusions by the state into our daily lives. They control what we can see and read and say. They impose artificial scarcity on expression and content, which mimics the genuine scarcity of physical resources. They influence art, culture, and technology.

Copyright laws were intended to encourage creation of content by providing a limited monopoly for creative work, after which material entered the public domain to inspire and inform other artists. However, this historical function of copyright has been pushed aside by the demands of powerful lobbyists. Copyright duration has been extended from 14 years to over a century. This effectively cuts the flow of material to the public domain, and perpetual copyright duration has shifted the bulk of creative material into corporate vaults. The ability to exploit the same material in perpetuity acts against the creation of new material, completely undermining the purpose of copyright.

All over the world, members of the public are being threatened for fictional crimes[1], sued for millions of dollars for copyright infringement[2], and collectively forbidden access to their cultural heritage[3]. Most worryingly, corporate copyright holders have lobbied for the right to monitor private communications and disconnect people from the Internet without engaging in due process[4].

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