Does the Pirate Party support prisoners votes?

I ask because…

Europe is asking: ‘Will the Government, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, run the risk of contesting an unlawful general election, or change the law in the nick of time to allow prisoners to vote?’

Waste your vote if you want to, I guess.

Waste your vote if you want to, I guess.

Yes! Rather than using it profitably in the wonderful cause of, er…

*Scans polling sheet.*

Oh…

There’s certainly nothing wrong with voting Pirate party, in that sense it’s just a shame that we’ve had dragged heels for so long on electoral reform that we can’t all legitimately vote for parties like these as a protest knowing that if others don’t do the same that an illiberal alternative will get in.

Do you think now might be a good time for prisoners to be able to vote for MPs in the House of Commons, given that some MPs may be soon going to prison for stealing from the public purse?

Aaron, I am disappointed. Even if copyright/privacy are the only issues that motivate you, I doubt you’ll find a line to disagree with in the Green manifesto. And it covers other stuff, y’know, jobs, the economy, even the environment.

European Pirate Parties have also supported the right to privacy as well as cutting back on copyright, so good luck to them.

I’ve got a black flag in any case. Wouldn’t take much effort to add a skull and cross-bones.

…and I agree with Jailhouselawyer about prisoners’ voting rights.

I write technology books and magazine articles. My books take about 18 months of research, then 6 months of writing, so two years of preparation. They have a saleable period of 18 months, after which technology has moved on so much that the book is out of date and worthless. So given that, you can imagine that I get somewhat upset if, a few weeks after my book is published, I find a pdf of it on a file sharing site (and amazed, why would anyone want to expend the effort to scan 700 pages of a mere $50 book?) I have also found articles of mine published under other people’s names on other magazine websites. If anything, they upset me more because I put a lot of effort and research in my articles (and have a reputation for doing so) and yet someone is claiming that reputation for themselves.

A few years back I got so fed up with it that I gave up completely. Now I ghost write books and articles as work for hire. I do not have to worry about the work being plagiarised by someone else, nor the work being file shared, I have already been paid for it, and the “reputation” is the guy who puts his name on the title page.

I see this as being the way forward in publishing, but it has the downside that it means that the only people who can afford to publish this way are the big corporations (Microsoft, Sun, IBM etc) who are using the books as PR. Small independent publishers have closed down because they cannot find the subsidy for such books. There is also the cost of editing (in tech writing, that means tech reviews, people paid to make sure that the text is correct). If we have a free-for-all then the first thing to go will be the editing and hence there will be few guarantees of the veracity of the work, and a lot of unreadable tosh being published.

Copyright does need to be reformed, especially since the internet makes enforcement impossible. But we have to recognise that content providers need to be paid for their work or else they will not continue to produce it. (Or worse, can I say “this technology is crap do not use it”, like I did before? No, I am now paid to tell people how to use the crap technology, although I do try to find the best way to use it. Do I feel dirty when doing this? Yes, but at least my family has a roof over their heads.)

As I said, my books have a lifetime of 18 months and after that period I regard them as worthless. I have given away the original content to people on request because I have moved on to other things. However, if I could have got hold of the plagiarists who copied my work soon after it was published, I would have happily have applied every single entry in Prof. Evil’s book of “The Most Painful Medieval Torture Techniques” to them. Twice.

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Voting for any party called the Pirate Party is no better than voting for Johnny Depp as our new PM.
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what a yawn.
But having said that, all threads make up the tapestery that is UK today.
so go for it, if you feel that way inclined.

with best wishes.

I presume that Richard Blogger will not be voting for the UK Pirate Party, and nor will I. Pirate Parties are negativist: free exchange of all digital wares is allegedly fair, and fuck the producer. The message is to go on tour (for most bands that is negative income) and sell T-shirts (break even). And hard luck if you are a geeky book writer.

I do not expect governments to resolve digital copyright arguments in the next ten years. However, the pirate idiots make things worse; by definition “piracy” means providers do not get paid.

Richard Blogger: Do you have any stats to show how your book sales fared because of the copy being floated online, either positively or negatively…or are you just taking the view that because it was out there you were making a loss on what you would have realistically taken because it’s easy to think that way?

James: Can you link to anywhere that shows the Green party is for wholesale reform of copyright?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

GRHHHHHHHHHH
Shiver my timbers

As Pope said, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

In fact he said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

@12 Lee Griffin: “Do you have any stats to show how your book sales fared because of the copy being floated online, either positively or negatively…”

The best technology books sell because they contain cracking good examples. (Few books about Windows desktop and server meet that criterion.)

If a publisher and author choose to post sample chapters and sample code online, my attention will be drawn. I’ll give it more attention than to a book with four stars in an Amazon review.

But if you give away a complete book that contains excellent examples and code, there is no economic return.

Charlieman: That last statement is based on a lot of assumptions.

As a tribalist myself, I’d recommend campaigning from within a party that isn’t single issue. If green issues are anything to go by, it starts off niche, goes nowehere inside a single issue party (which I suspect will be the trajectory of the pirate party), then is taken up cross-party when both main parties realise it’s not a party political issue, but an issue of justice. Vote Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern

In fact he said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Busted.

I’ve had the quote a while in one of my notebooks. I should have double-checked.

Let’s call it a paraphrase and I’ll get the drinks in.

I certainly think that, if you aren’t going to vote for any of the main parties, it does indeed make sense to vote for the party which represents the issue you think most important at the moment. It is certainly much, much better than what Neil Robertson suggested in the last post, i.e. not to vote at all, “in protest”.

As to whoever suggested voting Green, well, Lib Dems say the same thing: why vote Green when the Lib Dems already have a perfectly good policy on the environment. I don’t know what the Greens’ policy on copyright/disconnection is, but I suspect voting Green doesn’t quite send the same message as voting Pirate Party.

@Lee Griffin, you may find these links to Green Party policy on copyright interesting:
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/rops/rec.html
policy.greenparty.org.uk/downloads/mfssec.pdf
policy.greenparty.org.uk/rops/ropsec.pdf
policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mec.html
don’t forget the http for the lower 3 lines.

@Aaron:
The sapient swing voter needs first of all to find out if the seat is “safe”. If it is, all votes apart from those for the incumbent are “wasted” in the sense that they do not get any representation in Parliament. There’s FPTP for you. It has to go. http://bit.ly/aFAVcj

In a safe seat, then you are spot on, you might as well vote for your principles.The best signal to send is with a Green Party vote, because it not only covers the Pirate Party issue, but also signals your wish for radical reform of our political and economic system. In other words, you get more bangs for your ballot than voting Pirate, despite their romantic and Depp-like attractions.

If on the other hand you are in a marginal seat, then while I as a Green would still wish for you to vote Green, since that will lever the winner to be more green in Parliament so as to win your vote back. But I recognise that tactical voting is very appealing in a marginal seat, and here surely any thinking voter will wish to vote ABT (Anything But Tory), and if presented with a choice between Labour and LibDem, they will back the LibDem in the hope of getting a well-hung Parliament, with Vince Cable in the Treasury, and Proportional Representation well and truly on the menu.

All voters who care about democracy and political reform are recommended to murmur the words “First Past the Post Has Got To Go” to the clerks as they hand you your precious polling form.

#12. Lee Griffin

You know that such stats are impossible to compile, so we will have to cling to our own conjectures, right?

As Charlieman says, a lot of work went into the book with a lot of source code and detailed descriptions. The first book I wrote was because I was active in the programming usenet groups providing help, and I continued to support my books that way – free help and usually the help I gave was not even connected with the book.

But just to give you the opposite side, for one project, the publishing contract fell through, so I completed it and put the entire thing online (about 60,000 words) with a paypal button and adsense. Over 4 years I have earned about $400 from that, yet there have been something like 100,000 page views. $400 for a piece of work that took me 6 months to write.

Giving content away does not work unless it is used to drive some other business. The “honesty box” approach shows that there are lots of dishonest freeloaders out there.

“You know that such stats are impossible to compile, so we will have to cling to our own conjectures, right?”

Exactly, it’s all well and good someone like you standing up and saying you HAVE lost money, but you can’t prove that you have as infringement isn’t theft. I’m just asking for honesty.

“Giving content away does not work unless it is used to drive some other business. The “honesty box” approach shows that there are lots of dishonest freeloaders out there.”

Assuming that everyone that visited got what they expected from your work, but yes I tend to agree the honesty box approach is a rather wishful concept. But then I tend to think, and sorry if this offends, technology people trying to profit off of their knowledge are trying to run against the tides of expectations anyway. Given the number of people happy to give their source code away for free because it’s the right thing to do to further innovation and development, you’re in the functional minority in trying to profit from it.

At the last election I voted for the “Let’s have another party” party. To my huge surprise they didn’t win the seat, or any other seat.

Exactly, it’s all well and good someone like you standing up and saying you HAVE lost money,

Where did Richard claim he lost money? What he’s saying is that others have benefited from his work without giving him anything in return.

benefited copied

Re: Charlieman @ 6.40pm

“The best technology books sell”

Is all that needs to be said. Any Software/IT professional will tell you that there’s just no substitute for having a proper book on your desk that you can refer to. It’s laughable that you’d try to explain poor sales of a shit book by waving your hands and shouting “Those bloody pirates!”.

‘If they stand in my area, I’ll vote for the Pirate Party not because I believe in everything they stand for, but because I want this issue to get the scrutiny and focus it deserves. The DEB should be scrapped, and parliament should start again from scratch, drafting a law that has the propagation of knoweldge at its core’

The trouble is, by voting for the Pirate Party you are not sending a message against the DEB, you are encouraging people to believe that they need the DEB because the alternative is not a fair political compromise but an extreme.

@17 Lee Griffin: “Charlieman: That last statement is based on a lot of assumptions.”

I thought that there was one core assumption: that if the same content is available electronically for free or as a book for money, sales of the book will be lower.

I would wish to rephrase my final sentence, however. “But if you give away a complete book that contains excellent examples and code, there is no economic return *from book sales*.” Quite a few technologists have made money by using free software and information as a loss leader for their consultancy work or public speaking. Dave Winder and Mark Russinovich immediately come to mind. I can also think of many others who have not followed the loss leader route.

The reason is similar to that why many music artists resent piracy. If you are a stage performer who can maintain high ticket prices, piracy helps to spread your work and thus generates income. For the majority of artists, however, live performance is the loss leader that promotes record sales.

In technology, Red Hat Linux is an interesting example. Red Hat was one of the first popular Linux distros and was essentially free of charge unless you required support. A lot of commercial software developers certified their work to run on Red Hat and a few others, which boosted the popularity of those distros. But Red Hat still didn’t make enough money until it turned itself into a commercial distro. They created a free Red Hat alternative, Fedora, but if you want the fully supported Red Hat and the support for third party applications, you have to pay.

25, less explicitly than implicitly, but para 2 of his comment at 9. though I never intended to use the term Lost money to mean net loss, more a loss of potential earnings.

29. The assumption is based on the idea that some, most or all of the people would have paid for the book in the first place.

“Any Software/IT professional will tell you that there’s just no substitute for having a proper book on your desk that you can refer to.”

Um, I won’t, sorry. I’ll say there’s no substitute for the growing movement of open source coding through collaboration and community development that means not only can you usually find an answer to your problem online; but if you can’t there is usually a more than helpful community happy to help you for free simple for the benefit of the profession.

25, less explicitly than implicitly, but para 2 of his comment at 9. though I never intended to use the term Lost money to mean net loss, more a loss of potential earnings.

Presumably pirates see some value in the product or they wouldn’t pirate it. Richard isn’t seeing any of this value. Therefore he has ‘lost’ potential earnings.

if you give away a complete book that contains excellent examples and code, there is no economic return.

That last statement is based on a lot of assumptions. … The assumption is based on the idea that some, most or all of the people would have paid for the book in the first place.

No, it’s a tautology: if you give something away… there is no economic return.

Go ahead and vote “Pirate” if you want to, sir. If they believe what you believe, it’s not a wasted vote. A real wasted vote would be when you vote Labour in the vague hope that somewhere inside the machine there is something progressive.