Just watched Tommy on Media7, good publicity, but it looked he was trying to burp before speaking... reminds me of the 'Thirst is Creepy' guy on the Fresh up ads .

Good on ya mate, great publicity.

Only recently had a chance to watch this; I thought it was great. Excellent publicity and Tommy was very well spoken and obviously knows his stuff. Well done and lets hope we get more opportunities like this in the future!

For future reference, this is
Media7 Series 6, Episode 14
5 May 2011 | 0:24:44 | Classification: PGR
Media7 looks into the collapse of the CTV building in Christchurch and its remarkable rebuild.
(The interview is at the start of chapter 2.)

Not a bad interview I think (certainly better than I could have done), but (as I think someone has already suggested) we probably need to create a library of stock answers. Explaining a position on something is a fine art. It isn't just a matter of stating facts, but figuring out what other people think, and how to deconstruct their position using beliefs that they already hold, and in a way that's not just truthful, but so evidently truthful that it can cut through years of indoctrination. Not something easily done on the spot in an interview.

agreed. when someone makes a wiki page for it, link to it from here.

The FAQ and Policy are a good start. And like I keep saying go read up on Mike Masnick, Nina Paley, Cory Doctorow, etc. They explain the copyright position really well. And I think to start with most people are going to be focusing on our copyright policies more than anything else so we need to make sure we can cover that confidently.

Where we stand on privacy; I've updated the policy on privacy a bit too. My position is that the reaction is completely out of proportion to the threat. The last real terrorist attack in New Zealand was the Rainbow Warrior bombing which is almost a distant memory now. The chances of being killed in a terrorist attack is somewhere close to the chance of being hit by lightning, hundreds of times lower than the chance of being killed in traffic. And many thousands of times more people are killed by heart disease.. so where's the "War on McDonalds" ?

Get on other forums and any time you see a mention of 'copyright theft' start arguing our case. It's good practice for interviews, and it'll help make people think about the issue a bit more..

Yeah, that makes sense to start with the FAQ and Policy (and the Principles/Philosophy page too). I guess I overlooked them because they're kind of essays and I was thinking we need some punchy sound bites, but of course we can pull out any bits from them that would work in an interview. We certainly want to find all the ideas we can from wherever, but we do need to pull these all together into one place.

Having thought about the need for international cooperation between Pirate Parties, it occurs to me that putting together this material is something that could benefit from international cooperation. Having a quick look on the Pirate Parties International website, I find these vaguely relevant pages:
Pirate Dictionary <http://int.piratenpartei.de/Pirate_Dictionary>
Pirate Manifesto <http://int.piratenpartei.de/Pirate_Manifesto_parties_at_a_glance>
But I don't see anything really substantial.

I'm wondering if it might be useful to put stuff up on Debategraph, and try to encourage other Pirate Parties to contribute too. There's already a page for this:
Intellectual Works in the Digital Age <http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nID=34220>
(Although I think it's a bit crap at the moment.)

For reference, here's one that I've been involved with that I think shows what a good Debategraph page can look like:
Abortion <http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nID=585> (click the 'Context' tab to get a tree view)

Thoughts? One problem is that if I start putting ideas from the wiki on Debategraph using my account, then it's all going to come up under my name.

Hate to be "that guy", but while that makes for great politics, it doesn't get people elected. Unless you're in a long-form interview show like Hardline or something, you need to not answer the question. Say what you want to say, not what they're asking.

That depends on what they're asking. If the question lends itself directly to an answer we want to give then it's a bit silly to go off on a tangent and answer a completely different question.

Yeah, that's true. If you get more than one of those questions though they're not a very good interviewer! Also, depending on the skill of the interviewee, answers that go off on a tangent and answer a completely different question don't necessarily have to sound like they're going off on a tangent.

FWIW, a fortnight after the interview, I've come to the conclusion that a good answer to "Is copyright a moral right?" might include a couple of the following (perhaps especially one of the first two and one of the second two):

• making a distinction between deserving something and having a right to it (someone who helps out another and later requires help themselves deserves to be helped, but doesn't, IMHO, have a right to 'help themselves' to something in return, unless the original work was done after the other had agreed to give something in return. I think this is a decent analogy for intellectual works.)
• an example that shows unfair conclusions that would follow from copyright being considered a moral right (e.g. I think most people would agree that if China started sending armed forces to invade (steal) parts of the USA, the USA would have a justification for using force to prevent ongoing theft, but would many people think the USA has a right to invade China to prevent them from ongoing 'theft of intellectual property'? If people have a right to prevent unauthorised copying, then surely we would have to conclude this?)
• examples that show even proponents of copyright don't consider it a moral obligation (e.g. Melissa Lee made a speech in favour or harsher copyright laws comparing copying to assault, but clearly in practice she doesn't actually believe this, since she publicly wrote about copying not 24 hours previously. She wouldn't have committed assault, and publicly written about it, and then made a speech for harsher penalties for assault shortly afterwards. This highlights a disconnect between how people think about copyright in abstract terms, and in reality.)
• mentioning that copyright as an automatic legal right didn't exist until 1710, and wasn't widely seen as a moral right then (this may open people's minds to consider that the idea of copyright being a moral right is a modern social construction.)

The principles/philosophy wiki page has a two (physical) page essay refuting various arguments for copyright being a moral right. IMHO it's a decent essay, and we need to be able to refute each of those arguments if they arise, but there's no way all of them could be refuted in a short answer, and simply picking one or two of these arguments and refuting those wouldn't show that no possible argument for copyright being a moral right could exist. A good short answer needs to call in to question the possibility that any argument for copyright being a moral right could exist, or address the primary underlying reason that people are open to considering copyright as a moral right (which I suspect is a confusion between deserving something and having a right to it). I think the above may be sensible things to cover in a short(ish) answer.

With regards to "Has this been tried anywhere?/Could our policies work?". I think perhaps a decent answer may be that to an extent, it's already working this way. In general, authors make the majority of their income in the first 10 years anyway. It is mainly publishing companies pushing for massive terms to squeeze more money out of back catalogues from dead authors. And in practice payments for personal copies of works are voluntary anyway. The law in New Zealand does effectively prevent commercial copying, but as we see with Melissa Lee, it doesn't currently prevent personal copying. But people who can afford to do so buy commercial copies of works they like voluntarily (mix tapes haven't killed the music industry, and nor have CDs or the Internet). The main thing the extensive copyright terms do is hinder the preservation of out-of-publication works, and the main thing the the law against personal copying does is makes criminals out of many ordinary people, and scape-goats out of an unlucky few. (And maybe mention that research estimates the economically optimal term at 15 years.)

Could use some polish, but that's my attempt for now at answering these questions in short answers.