Pirate Congress 2015/Motions/Policy and Platform/Cultural Policy

Preamble
Culture is at the heart of human identity. From the cave paintings to the poetry that was copied and sent to soldiers in the trenches, culture has been something shared - a social glue and a bond between individuals and their societies. Shared expression creates shared experience and values and has allowed the human race to progress.

In modern times, technology 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 increasingly control and restrict access. Laws around intellectual property grew which treated culture as something to be restricted, monetised and controlled by vested interests. 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 boom of grass roots cultural production and a golden age of shared experience and artistic production.

Attempts by some to freeze in place the centralism and artificial scarcity which governed culture in the 20th century will fail, because cultural sharing is an innate part of human experience and human nature. In addition, the damage to the cultural commons as a result of 20th century copyright policy is enormous, as is the cost for dealing with it. However, it creates a question which must be taken seriously: where culture is freely available, how will artists be paid and supported? Artists, writers and film-makers are a critical part of society, and revenue must be available to encourage the creation of product for society's benefit.

Pirate Party Australia believes this can be facilitated in several ways. Pirate Party supports a basic income guarantee which will provide a universal support to artists. This can be built on with a 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 digital rights management restrictions can be overcome. Many obsolete forms of Digital Rights Management (DRM) hamper archivists who seek to engage in digital archiving and preservation of physical and museum content. To directly support artistic creation, we will also establish a new fund to sponsor artists and invest in the creation of films, literature and visual art. Finally, we will seek to provide smaller live music and performance venues with tax breaks as a way to reverse the decline in such facilities and recognise their cultural importance.

We will also stand firmly behind public broadcasting in Australia. Pirate Party Australia will oppose any attempt to sabotage the independence and broadcasting standards of the ABC. The ABC is one of Australia's few highly trusted institutions. Its capacity to reach a diverse national audience and its high focus on 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 would be undesirable for anyone who supports independent media and the growth of Australian culture.

Open, participatory culture and investment in our artists will unleash a creative boom for Australia.

Develop a network of facilities to support development of art and culture

 * Provide $500 million from the Asset Recycling Fund 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.
 * Expand the Archival role of libraries
 * 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.
 * Allow disused private property for use by libraries
 * Private property which is disused and empty should be usable by the commons to create a Library.
 * Library would function as a regular tenant, but would not pay rent. If a use is found for the property, the library must shut down or move.
 * Property under use as a library is not subject to squatting laws.

Expand funding and venues for artists

 * Provide $1 billion from the Asset Recycling Fund 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 location for artists online containing information for exhibiting, performing, and displaying art, as well as significant, 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).