I was almost excited... (Score 1)

...and then I read what he had to say:

> There should be an exemption for non-commercial use in copyright.

I totally agree. Assuming you bought a work as a consumer (you most certainly didn't steal it in the first place) you should be free to use it for non-commercial purposes.

> We're not in favour of abolishing copyright, or artists getting nothing.

Great!

> When things are copied and somebody makes a profit, that profit should go to the artist.

Hell yeah, woo! Kinda hard to police at times, but at least the artist has the law on their side.

> When something's copied and there isn't a profit... well, that's a situation our law doesn't really have any way of dealing with at the moment...

Er, no. The law does deal with that - you can't copy stuff even if there is no profit. You might not think that this is the best way to do things, but you are wrong to say that the law does not handle this context.

> ...which is why people who copy a movie are lumped in with people who steal cars.

You seem a bit confused. People who steal stuff are theives and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. End of conversation. This is a totally separate issue to the non-commercial use of consumer-purchased media.

> Our copyright law is horribly outdated and its skewed one way because all the lobbying is on the side of big businesses.

Welcome to the real world, hippy! Big business has money to lobby with, people with no money (that's msot people on the planet) just get to vote. I guess that's why your move to form a political party makes some sense.

> This ties into our thoughts on patents. They've moved away from a way of encouraging invention to being a way for companies to lay claim to large areas of innovation. The Toyota Prius is an example of this. There's 2,000 patents covering the Prius, which isn't encouraging other companies to create environmentally cars, it's blocking them.

Bloody good point. Apart from the "environmentally cars" bit - that doesn't make any sense.

> We want to see laws in place before it happens, rather than after, so everybody knows where they stand.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. So you've got a crystal ball somewhere handy, have you Mr?

> We need to point out that we're saying very sensible things

I think you'll find it's more powerful to actually say sensible things, rather than have a mixture of great ideas and contradictory, ill-thought-out nonsense.

> when people actually listen to what we've got to say they'll realise we're being serious

Stupid people will flock to your defence on the internet. That means jack at the polls. If only your arguments weren't full of holes your enthusiasm might have been put to better use.