Andrew Robinson is leader of the Pirate Party UK, and therefore a notional arch-nemesis of the UK electronic publishing industry. I wanted to know more about his ideas and the drives behind them, so I read the manifesto and wrote to him, and he kindly consented to do an email interview. I had - as you will imagine, reading the exchange below - follow-up questions, but we got lost in the summer break and I haven't been able to reconnect yet. I'm posting this as-is, in the hope that I will be able to add to it later.

[Note: it's been pointed out to me that as of Sunday, Andrew is a former leader of the Pirate Party UK. From which I learn an important lesson in journalism: do not give people as much time as they want to answer your follow-ups... *sigh* ah, well. I shall now chase down the new fella and ask my next set of questions of him...]

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NH: First up, you're called the Pirate Party, but actually you're not wildly piratical.

AR: True, the name we've inherited from the original Swedish party is a bit of a mixed blessing, but it's definitely memorable, and nobody has been able to come up with anything better. I think with time it will become just another party name, 'tory' for example was originally an Irish term for an outlaw.

NH: The right to format shift, for example, is very much in line with a growing sense among people that you purchase not the object but access to the material. DVDs and books are seen as a delivery mechanism, not a product. At the same time, the manifesto makes a very clear statement that you want artists to be able to continue to profit from their work. It seems to me that what you most strenuously object to is not intellectual property as a concept, but rather what you see as the appropriation of popular culture (like the tune to 'happy birthday') by big companies, and the use of IP as a bludgeon to stifle things like mashups and new works.

AR: Yes, we seek a fairer balance in copyright law, that takes account of advances in technology. A law that was written to deal with businesses running expensive printing presses isn't well suited to an age where duplication costs are zero, files are intangible, jurisdictional boundaries are regularly crossed, and everyone owns a computer that has cut and paste functions.

NH: One of the things I find frustrating in the discussions of Internet copyright and so on is the sense that it's all 'tear down' without any sense of what comes next; do you have a vision of how the creative industries would work in your world? Would it all be online cottage industries selling direct to the consumer via the Internet, for example?

AR: This is an interesting point, is it the job of politicians to look purely at what is morally right or wrong when making laws, or should we also be expected to devise new business models to replace ones that have been made obsolete by technology? In a way, it's odd that the Pirate Party is expected to extrapolate our moral position into business practices, however it's very easy to do so. Simply put, the middlemen will have a much smaller role, and the public will deal directly with the creators of content. File sharing will be understood by content creators as an indispensible source of free advertising. I find it amazing that in the US, record labels are still getting into legal trouble for paying radio stations to give away their product (payola), when bittorrent gives them a way of giving away music at zero cost.

NH: The manifesto makes the case that filesharing promotes artists, and in some cases there's no doubt of that - although writers, for example, cannot really do a 'live show' to take advantage of that in the way some musicians can. For many if not most, it will come down to units sold in some sense - even if the model is free-to-consumer. Advertisers want to see eyeballs on pages, after all. Where does the money come in?

AR: There is plenty of evidence to show that the heaviest users of file sharing tend to also be the biggest spenders on media. People understand that artists need to be financially rewarded, and because file sharing gives them the ability to try before they buy, they are far more likely to find an artist they really care about than someone walking into a record store in the 1990s was when they had no way (apart from a bit of radio coverage) of knowing which of the 20,000 CDs on the shelves they were most likely to enjoy.

There will always be people who won't pay for music, but there have always been people who won't pay for music, they just listened to the radio in the past. The only difference in the file sharing age is that these people now have access to a wider variety of music. The record companies seem to be operating under the principle that if they can restrict the flow of music enough, these people will eventually break down and buy a Lady Gaga album because that's the only music they get to hear, when a far better strategy would be to open up the floodgates and find out if there is any music out there that such a person falls in love with enough to want to pay for it.

NH: I sense a strong desire in the manifesto that human creative life continue in a form which is less shackled to industrial media titans, but I also see some possible unintended consequences. Let's say, for example, that I write a book which, over the course of a decade, becomes very popular. Under your ten year copyright term, it then enters the public domain, whereupon one of the Hollywood studios makes a successful movie from it. I don't get paid because my work is out of copyright, and they make a fortune from my sweat and toil. (Book sales on the back of movies are variable.) Rather than relieving the public of burdensome IP, your policy seems to have spared the studio the expense of dealing with me, giving them a decade of profit, or more with sequels - and at the same time removing any artistic control I might have, so that my anti-war story can become the next GI Joe.

AR: These consequences will inevitably happen at some point (currently life + 70 years + next January the first), we are simply discussing when they happen. When any law is changed, there will be winners and losers, in this case the movie studio gains from not paying you (but let's be honest, they are famed for not paying people, and making you sign away artistic control anyway), and the public gains from not having to pay you, and from you not being able to prevent movies they want to see from being made. I could make a case that this benefit to the movie industry would more than offset their imaginary losses due to file-sharing. I expect what would actually happen is that you would do a deal with the studio to use your name on the film, and the public would quickly learn to look for attributions when deciding which films to see.

NH: I find it fascinating that you link IP with privacy. It seems obvious to me that the two are bound up with one another, especially in the area of DNA and so on, but people don't always make the connection.

AR: The great thing about discussing pirate politics is that you never know which parts of what you say are going to strike someone as obvious and which are going to provoke disagreement or sudden changes of opinion. It's fascinating to watch the reaction of an audience when I say 'copyright is a free speech issue, because allowing someone to own an arrangement of words takes away everyone else's right to say them.'. Usually part of an audience will think that's just me playing with words and will happily ignore it, another part will think it's so obvious and uncontroversial that I didn't need to say it, and another part will think it's the most profound thing I say all night.

NH: Do you think we need to formulate rights regarding who owns the specific DNA of an individual? I'm thinking of a hypothetical person who is immune to a particular disease, say: do they own that immunity, or does the state have a claim on it in the name of the public good?

AR: We want to neatly sidestep this thorny issue by outlawing medical patents. We believe that drugs and treatments are simply too important to give anyone a monopoly over - they are, after all, a matter of life and death. Of course the obvious question is 'why would anyone develop new drugs if they don't get a monopoly over them?'. The answer is odd, but simple, we would introduce a 'reverse tax' on medicines. With all drugs being generic, and therefore cheap, the NHS will save a fortune because it no longer has to pay the high price of patented drugs. We would give that saving back to the pharmaceutical industry, with the proviso that it must be spent on research. This has 4 big benefits over the current system, firstly the drug companies no longer have any incentive to push a not very good drug they have invested a fortune in, secondly they have no incentive to chase expensive solutions to minor western ailments over cheap solutions to serious third world problems, thirdly we can supply the third world with cheap generics, and fourthly we and introduce the benefits of competition into the process of bulk drug manufacturing.

NH: It seems like the ultimate test of where rights begin and where state power ends. More prosaically, I see an obvious connection between privacy and image rights: who should be thought of as owning a person's image?

AR: Indeed - I often say that we are in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance state without having the necessary debate on the ethics and desirability of this first. Sadly we have a situation where even the police don't know the law (see recent stories about police intimidating photographers who were trying to go about their lawful business), and hardly anyone thinks deeply about what should be private and what should be public.

NH: It seems to me that people associate IP with being told they can't burn mix CDs or share downloads much more than they do with the protection it affords them - the power to prevent their holiday snaps from being used in a brochure, to assert ownership over their bodies and over their written work or photographs, as several football bloggers recently did in their confrontation with a national newspaper. Do you think the public is really aware of what it means to weaken IP? And where do you see the balance between loosening IP to allow the Internet to function without undue restraint on discussion and creativity, and exposing individuals to exploitation by entities - corporate or governmental - they have few enough tools to resist as it is?

AR: This is an issue that I think society urgently needs to address. We have introduced pervasive CCTV surveillance and we are allowing the police to track every car in the country through automatic numberplate recognition cameras without having a debate about how much surveillance is too much, where 'public knowlege' stops and privacy begins, or what the potential implications of automated data mining are.

Our solution is to campaign for a reform to the law that draws a clear line in the sand, 'if money is being made, the artist gets paid'. This, combined with a more sensible copyright duration, would make things much clearer for everyone.