Page:Principles 2.0.pdf/2

 and more movies than ever before. However, most of our cultural heritage is locked up by copyrights, left rotting in vaults, unpublished and out of print. We don't need to encourage creators any more, we need to set them free. We don't want to hinder innovation, strangle our minds and hold back our ideas any more. Ideas, music and knowledge can not, by their very nature, be exclusive property. When shared, they multiply. When given away, they enrich giver and receiver alike.

The anti-competitive contracts that large parties use to control single creators are immoral.

The artificial limits imposed by strong distributors upon consumers' rights are illegal.

We wish to promote a constructive discussion of the duality of IP law, describing the negative consequences for the little man. We wish to form fair rules for how producers' and creators' needs can be met while strengthening consumers' powers by adapting IP law to new technological breakthroughs and environmentally friendlier business models.   The Problems with Patents Patents were supposed to encourage the dissemination of knowledge and information by offering a time-limited protection for those who invent and invest in new inventions and methods. We believe it is only fair and natural that inventors and investors alike shall be able to gain remuneration for their work and ideas. However, patents today are mainly used to prevent innovation by hindering competitors. When created, the patent duration of 20 years was a third of the inventors' lifetime and still a reasonably short timespan compared to the general pace of development. Today, 20 years is nothing to a large corporation but an eternity for society to wait for innovation. This equation no longer computes.

Patents are used to block competition, big pharma stops developing countries from copying patented AIDS medicines, farmers get sued when a patented GM crop is accidentally spread on their fields, software patents cement the monopolies of big software houses, small inventors are dragged into courts for years to defend their patents and industry wants to patent your genes. We say it's time to put a stop to this madness.

We aim to abolish patents.

We wish to see a society where small and big parties alike can compete on equal and fair terms with weapons like quality, customer benefits and price instead of with patent attorneys. This will liberate resources they can use to innovate for the good of all.   The Importance of Trademarks Consumers have a rightful need to know what they buy and companies have a need to protect their trademarks in order to compete fairly. There is a strong public interest here that we wish to address. We aim to strenghten trademark protections between