Yes... and no!

Read the... constitution, from the... Declaration of Independence all the way through the bill of rights. Freedom of speech is the GOVERNMENT being unable to silence our thoughts about the government or speaking our minds.

Freedom of speech does means the ability to state your views (freely, without fear of punishment for holding or expressing those views).

Freedom of speech as it is implemented in the [USA's] constitution refers to the government's inability to restrict you from expressing your views (as well as to related concepts like the ability to compel speech in certain circumstances).

But in real life there is more to freedom of speech than what the US (or any) government may do. Arguably corporations have even more power.

Respect is earned, not inherently given.

Once again, there is a bit of both. Humans are inherently deserving of some respect, and a certain dignity of treatment, by virtue of their humanity. Beyond that, respect can and should be earned, or may be lost.

But however heinous someone's views, they are still worthy of a certain dignity - to accord them less is to diminish yourself.

The telcos own fibre, whose value has been artificially inflated by a government-granted monopoly, so it is perfectly reasonable for the government (or "the People") to demand in return certain standards of behaviour with that monopoly fibre. Behaviour which is in the public interest, rather than the short term economic interest of the Fibre company. Otherwise that would be government welfare, and that's just evil, right?

And even if someone else builds an open network to compete with the local monopolists' highly monetised, high-cost, not-dumb-pipe access network, they still need to connect it to actual customers, right? If you keep the current US local-monopoly regulatory framework, what makes you think that the monopolist will provide a fast and unthrottled connection to their competitors, at a reasonable price? After all, they are not just dumb pipes...

I don't see how things are supposed to get better (for consumers), in the world you advocate.

Competition does not necessarily cause the saintliness you hope for...

In the UK there is plenty of competition, but the ISPs understandably want to increase profitability. Thus they cloud the market with "unlimited [with "fair" usage limits]" deals and offers of "up to" XYZ - note that free market theology assumes a perfectly informed customer base, and its benefits don't necessarily follow where that doesn't happen.

More seriously, they want to move away from being "dumb pipes" to entities that can "monetize" (read "charge for") everything. Just the same as the USA's local monopolies do.

So competition will not necessarily guarantee good behaviour - especially where customers don't understand the market, and where providers collude in a race to the bottom.

It's all very well to point out that some people abuse the system. But the solution to that is not to abolish a system that is there for a very real reason - the solution is to tackle the abuse.

As with Social Security and benefits, so with regulation of communications. Some regulation is needed to stop abuses like... well I'm sure you can think of some... but bad regulations (like the bizzaro US local telecomms monopolies) are an argument for BETTER regulations, not for none at all.

Why would they head to Fox when their contract expires? Don't Fox have that rule about cancelling shows if they are any good?

Copyright is not just about the criminal law:

Let's be honest here. The Pirate Party believes non-commercial filesharing for a song that came out 5 minutes ago should be 100% legal. This "from the 1940s" stuff is just an attempt to make themselves sound more reasonable.

I think the factor you're neglecting is that filesharing is also a civil matter between the infringer and the copyright owner. The owner can sue for damages - as they always could. Nothing I see in the Pirate Party platform suggests they want to abolish that right.

On the other hand, copyright owners tended not to sue the students who indiscriminately taped copies of their music and distributed them to their friends. The studios produced advertising campaigns claiming that "home taping is killing music", but still the music did not die.

I don't think that filesharing is quite the death sentence to the "creative industries" that you seem to fear. There is some evidence that filesharing has an promotional effect on the shared music and artists. There is also clear evidence that the number of lost sales is significantly lower than the number of shared copies - not all copiers would have purchased an copy (any more than they would have done in the days of taping music from radio, CDs or LPs). There is also clear evidence that there are people who will pay for a legal copy, even where "free" unauthorised copies are available, and "value adds" can assist this - things like like album art, the higher quality of CDs over MP3s, and availability of the full catalogue without depending on vagaries of fileshare networks.

So, while there is some damaging effect from non-commercial filesharing, it's not as big as the studios pretend, it's NOT going to kill music, and it's not an area that the criminal law (funded by the taxpayer) needs to get involved in. The last people who need state/corporate welfare are the music and movie industry!

You're wrong! It's pretty safe to join, without making civilisation collapse.

The Pirate Party isn't fighting for responsible copyright laws, they want to gut the whole thing.

From the Aussie Pirate Party FAQ:

What are your main policy areas?

We aim to protect civil liberties and promote culture and innovation, primarily through... [various free speech, privacy and anti-censorship issues... ], and

        * Reforming the life + 70 years copyright length

        * Decriminalisation of non-commercial copyright infringement

Do you support abolishing intellectual property entirely?

No. We believe that the original goals of intellectual property protections, which are to promote creativity and invention, are reasonable. We don't believe that prosecuting non-commercial file sharers for copying a song from the 1940s is reasonable, however.

Do you think that commercial copyright infringement or patent infringement is ok?

No. Our position is that companies should pay for the use of copyrighted works and patented designs.

It's something called public service broadcasting. I know for some slashdotters that's a bit like socialism, and therefore evil... but there is broad support for it in the UK. Not least because the Public Service output of the BBC seems... better than Fox. People like the system because (on the whole) it works.

Maybe it's because the BBC doesn't have that strange Fox TV rule that if a series is any good it must be cancelled :-)

If they would just start selling full episodes of Top Gear (amongst others) over here in the states...
--
In 2009 we confirmed yet again that indeed you can buy everything in New York City.

Everything but Top Gear, it seems...

last year James Murdoch criticized the BBC for providing 'free news' on the internet, making it 'incredibly hard for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news.'

So where does Murdoch's mythical right to extract money from the public come from? Or, more to the point, Murdoch's right to prevent anyone from competing with services he might prefer we pay for?

Especially when the public have already paid for the news to be gathered, and the BBC are only making available (at modest extra cost to the BBC) the information they have already been paid to gather - to the people who paid for it (even if it is also available to non-licence payers).

Isn't it the BBC's mission to inform and entertain? And why not do that via the internet as well as the airwaves?

And if we're being even pickier, we should probably mention the law and practice of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in retaining DNA (I don't know what it is, but suspect it matches the situation in England, policing and justice not being devolved yet).

That's without considering what the law and police practice might be in other related "British" jurisdictions like the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibralter, and various overseas territories.

It's complicated. And mostly it's wrong.

it's not UK police, it's English Police

If we're being picky, it should probably be all the police forces in England and Wales. There are quite a few of them.

But (given the speed technology moves at, and the slowness of laws "catching up"), it makes more sense to legislate what people can and cannot do, rather than the technology they use.

So if the problem is tracking users without warning them, ban that - and make the ban apply whether they use cookies, flash cookies, or magic spy-rays from their monitors. Just like the law forbids murder, without a special law for murder with guns, murder with hammers, murder with rolling pins.

If you are not getting enough money, raise the price.

If you need a continued revenue stream from old sales, move to a rental model.

If software was sold, rather than rented or leased, then it should stay sold. Devious tricks like Autodesk is trying should be banned.