Options for engaging the WAR ON SHARING

It is obvious that a healthy culture must legally encourage creative individuals. Likewise the role of government must occasionally include intervention in the private sector when failure to act will result in catastrophic social effects. Neither of these concerns apply directly to the debate over "sharing". It is unethical, immoral and illegitimate to craft Laws for the purpose of protecting the sales of a particular industry.

The corporations who thrive on packaging, promoting and arranging commercial sponsorship are not essential to the function of a free society. Their fate rests solely upon the decision of consumers to purchase their products or not. Despite the long history of criminal practices in the motion picture and record industries they deserve our sympathy as stake-holders in the current cultural situation -- but this sympathy cannot be legally extended into the form of special protectionist rights.

Copyright Law does not require a "fundamental rethinking" for the digital age. This school of Copyright Revisionists have long existed with a single aim -- to promote their profits at the expense of public interests. Legitimate laws protecting creators and inventors from the resale of their materials by other parties during their lifetime are fine but this is not an open invitation to a feudalism of intellectual property claims.

It is quite obviously within the rights of all human beings to :

(a) not support an industry through the non-purchasing of their merchandise.

(b) to freely share purchased materials, included information patterns, with whomever they choose provided they do not offer it for "resale without considerable modification."

(c) to freely create sharing systems, in the manner of public libraries, which provide a free alternative for access to information and entertainment.

Options for Challenging Unethical Internet Laws

1. Make the moral and legal case in favor of sharing with people who are not online.
2. Vote for your local chapter of the Pirate Party or their affiliates.
3. Disregard unjust laws and encourage others to increase their reliance on file-sharing.
4. Take advantage of emerging software systems that protect anonymity and elude regulations.
5. Have no fear of outrageous criminal prosecution -- this is the free gift of a podium on which to call out the immoral actions of the government in response to the doctored data and ridiculously self-serving claims of old media promoters.
6. Refer to the pro-sharing population as the mainstream and constantly assert your position as the present, intrinsically-held feeling of the majority.
7. Acknowledge the valid points of the opposition argument before denouncing them.
8. Struggle only succeeds when it is informed by reality. Take time to "let go" of your need to be released from the limitations of the current situations. Attempts to evade the current web of relationships limit our ability to steer into future benevolent arrangements.
9. Print and distribute your opinions on this subject, or those found in congenial resources such as the declaration of principles at http://docs.piratpartiet.se/Principles%203.2.pdf
10. Hold or attend private and public gatherings designed to symbolically demonstrate support and to discuss options for benevolently steering society in the appropriate direction.