Well I am not familiar with European political agenda regarding copyright.
What do they mean with "deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and reduce surveillance on the Internet"?
Deregulate copyright - currently the definition of online copyright in all countries worldwide is based on the physical concept of a copy. As all activities regarding computers are based on copies of data today (Even streamed video is a copy in reality), this is obviously a flawed concept. The even bigger problem is, that the copyright laws are not made by the people, but are in most countries, 1:1 "copies" of the "suggestions" of the media industry, and contrary to the interests of customers and artists. Again a problem. The next problem is, that the copyright law gets more and more applied to content, it was initially not made for and which it actually should not protect. Censorship is often not implemented as direct and honest political censorship, but actually as copyright - for example the access to Nazi literature, like for example "Mein Kampf" is not banned. The copyrights are just owned by the state of Bavaria and the state of Bavaria does not allow publishing except for special research.
Just as examples of how such abuse of the concept of copyright actually cripples a country:
- Democracy requires transparency. But what if important information is just copyrighted by trivial standards and excluded from publication? Just look at the awarding of contracts, which happens very often without the needed transparency to ensure corruption get be detected.
- If the standards for assigning copyrights are too low, this means for any kind of thing you do in the internet, from writing a song to design a homepage, requires you to ensure that you don't violate other copyrights, regardless how trivial they are. This means, you are always in the risk of getting sued for nothing - and that completely legally. If you fight back, the current laws will result in you getting bankrupt before any decision is made - even if you are right.
This also applies to the patent system. Which was once a system to ensure that hard and long research was not stolen by more lazy rivals, is now applied more and more to trivial things. Imagine for example Amazons infamous one-click patent. The EU currently aims at enforcing such a low standard patent law in the whole EU, permitting also patents on simple algorithms, business models and workflows. At the same time, such a trivial patent sees the same protection times as a more complex patent. What took you 5 minutes to develop and 3 hours to write down, has the same rights and legal power as something developed in 10 years.
Surveillance on the net: Take for example the many forms of hidden censorship or the many projects in many european governments to allow the police to install trojans on PCs. Most such ideas are the opposite of the rule "innocent until proven guilty". You are a small bit guilty already for using the internet, much more guilty for using a P2P protocol (despite it also being used for legal content) and even more guilty if you encrypt your email - Only criminals encrypt their emails, don't they?
The danger is in the combination of internet-incompetent politicians, who have to ask in a press conference about internet regulations, what a browser is, and ruthless media industry lobbyism.
Just to show how important small things can become: There was a court decision lately in Germany which said, that copyright owners have no right to demand the internet connection logs of the providers, which have to be stored because of the EU law on connection logging. A system, initially called for "fighting terrorism and internet criminality", should now, before the ink on the law had dried, already be used for spying on users by the media industry. Of course only to find people who violate copyrights. Nothing else. And a judge or the police should not control what the media companies do with the data. They are not evil.
The legal way of reporting a crime to the police and get a judge decide that the reported crime is valid and reason enough to violate citizens rights, seems to be not very attractive to the media industry: Such correct processes happen extremely rarely and often the crimes are reported in such a sloppy way by the media industry, that judges have to reject the cases en masse. I know one court, which attempted to tackle the thousands of file-sharing crimes by the music industry, only to find out, that out of these thousands of cases, only a few dozen had enough reason to suspect a crime to start the attorney investigating the case. And only very few of them finally ended in the person investigated being guilty.
This is what organizations like the pirate parties fight: The attempts of installing a totalitarian rule over the internet, by the abuse of usually reasonable legal concepts like copyright and patents. Your citizen rights should end in the new media world. You should not inform yourself about corruption, abuse of power or be able to control what your politicians do at all. You don't need to know, and if you want to know what is required to fulfill the role expected of you by the constitution of all european countries, you can feel free to pay a large amount of money for any bit of information.
Knowing why company X got the contract for building a new public building: 500€.
Knowing why you are not permitted to build your house like you want it to be: 1500€
Knowing which politician is paid by which company for "advice or keynotes": priceless - such information still has not to be published to any one, despite small attempts to improve the situation.
The Swedish pirate party would have had likely less members today, if the judge, which decided that the pirate bay operators had been guilty, had not been discovered to be member of a group, which is fighting for more copyright laws and more freedom for copyright owners, and which is supported mostly by companies from the media industry for doing lobby work for them. And things are not better or different in other countries.
Probably I am very wrong, because I am unfamiliar with their views. I would like to see exactly what they are doing.
Yes, and still you rant first and learn later. That is exactly the same process as the subtle xenophobia in many countries, where people rant about foreigners before going buying food from them.
