Policies/Culture and Creative Works

Culture and media
Culture is at the heart of human identity. From the cave paintings to the poetry that was once copied and sent to soldiers in the trenches, culture has always been something shared - a social glue and a bond between individuals and their societies. Cultural sharing is innate to human nature and learning. It is an important driver of human creativity and progress.

In modern times, technology has changed the way in which culture was produced and experienced. The rise of mass-production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries opened the way for new forms of distribution, but also created a means for the owners of industrial mass production to control and restrict access. Intellectual property laws emerged which treated culture as something to be restricted, monetised and made artificially scarce. As technology progressed, however, the ability to mass produce in the digital realm has shifted cultural modes back to their historical norms, opening the way to a new era of grass roots cultural production.

Attempts to re-impose the forms of control and artificial scarcity which governed culture in the 20th century will fail, simply because the technological “moment in time” which enabled such a model to exist has now passed. We believe the time has come to undo the harm done to our cultural commons as a result of 20th century copyright policy. However, this does create a serious question: where culture is freely available, how will artists and creators be paid and supported?

Pirate Party Australia has several answers to this. We will support a basic income guarantee which provides universal support to artists. We also propose a new wave of investment to create new cultural hubs for the community. These new hubs will expand the role currently played by libraries and provide free facilities for creation of music and art. They will also be places where legal obstacles such as obsolete Digital Rights Management (which hampers archivists who seek to engage in digital archiving) can be overturned. Additionally, we will seek to establish a new fund to sponsor artists and invest in the creation of films, literature and visual art. And finally, Pirate Party Australia will seek to provide smaller live music and performance venues with tax breaks to protect and enshrine them.

Pirate Party Australia is also a firm supporter of public broadcasting. We oppose all attempts to sabotage the independence and broadcasting standards of the ABC. The ABC is one of Australia's few highly trusted institutions and its capacity to reach a diverse national audience with cultural programming make it especially important to Australia's artistic and cultural communities. A complete subordination of Australia's media landscape to commercial interests and the political agendas of their owners should be resisted by anyone who supports independent media and the growth of Australian culture.

We believe open, participatory culture and investment in our artists is the future for Australia.

Pirate Party Australia advocates the following reforms:

Develop a network of facilities to support development of art and culture
 * Provide $500 million from existing Federal investment funding to support expanded library facilities.
 * Funding will be allocated by an independent board charged with assessing grant applications and ensuring all proposals are openly accessible to the public.
 * Applications will be assessed on local area population, community need and outcomes of consultation, and quality and innovativeness of proposals.
 * Proposals will be required to maintain and respect traditional library functions.
 * Projects may include development of maker spaces, sound booths, expanded premises, content digitisation and online availability and other cultural and community benefits.
 * Provide additional legal protections to libraries to enhance their cultural value.
 * Allow free use of patented material and full availability of copyrighted material under a Creative Commons Attribution license within physical and digital library spaces.
 * Allow library users to utilise these freedoms subject to a mandate to make materials thus created available under a creative commons license within the library's physical and digital spaces.
 * Maximise public library efficiency by ensuring that digital works become instantly available in any branch (e.g. using filesharing technologies)
 * Ensure libraries maintain, store and make available public records in a standardised format.
 * Ensure libraries provide storage and computation resources to process open data public records. This might include cloud resources, hosting services, and other services to ensure useful access to such content, by any library user.
 * Mandate that any DRM protected product for sale in Australia has an obligation to hand over keys or other mechanisms required to access it in its totality, after either termination of copyright or termination of sale.
 * The disclosure will be to the National Archives until termination of copyright, and held in confidence until it enters the public domain.

Expand funding and venues for artists
 * Repeal 'lockout laws' and allow venues and pubs more freedom to determine their own opening hours.
 * Provide $1 billion from existing infrastructure funding to sponsor Creative Commons licensed artistic endeavour.
 * Funds will be separated into streams to invest in independent films, games, visual art, and literature.
 * Expand current tax exemptions applying to “cultural organisations”.
 * Extend the “Music” category to cover facilities essential to live music, including small-capacity live music and performance venues.
 * Extend the “Literature” category to cover book and cultural exchanges which provide low-cost literary and cultural material to the general public.
 * Provide a central online location for artists containing information for exhibiting, performing, and displaying art, as well as free hosting for exhibiting and displaying digital and digitised art.

Secure Australia's public broadcasting
 * Protect public broadcasters and their boards from political interference.
 * Maintain base funding to domestic public broadcasters at 2012 levels (with adjustment for inflation).