In exactly 150 days, Kiwi superstar Lorde will be performing here on her Solar Power Tour. Now, Solar Power is a great album - thematically, it is a beautiful evolution from her sophomore effort Melodrama and features contemplative and cutting tracks like Fallen Fruit and Stoned at the Nail Salon alongside bops such as Solar Power and Secrets from a Girl (Who's Seen it All). It goes without saying that I will be attending the Solar Power Tour!

But that is not my point visiting here today. If Lorde decides that she would like to perform her beautiful cover of Swingin' Party, included on her debut album Pure Heroine on tour, she will have to pay licensing fees to songwriter Paul Westerberg. Why, I ask? By the time a young Lorde covered Swingin' Party, it had been out for 28 years. Surely, that's a long enough time for The Replacements to profit from Swingin' Party.

See, I think we have a fundamental misconception about copyright. Why should you have a monopoly over something, just because you made it? Copyright was initially only created to allow inventors a chance to profit against cheap imitations. It is fundamentally a restriction, and it should be as short as necessary. In the world of music, where songs can become big in a matter of days, the case for such lengthy copyright is even weaker. Why should you hoard exclusive rights for so long?

And the case is even flimsier when you think about another song Lorde could potentially cover. For the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, Lorde recorded a haunting and dramatic cover of Tears for Fears' hit song Everybody Wants To Rule The World. If Lorde wanted to cover this on tour, again, she would have to pay licensing fees. Of course, Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley, and Chris Hughes are in desperate need of this money! It's not like the song went to number 1 in Canada, the United States and New Zealand, or that it's already sold hundreds of thousands copies before Lorde was even born.

But at the end of the day, this isn't about Lorde herself, talented she may be. She's a very rich woman, and she and her record labels can easily pay fees like this if they want to. Unjust it may be, it's not Lorde who really suffers. It is smaller artists, independent artists, who, through unjust copyright laws, are forced to enrich musicians - or more likely, licensing conglomerates who have bought up the rights - for the simple right to perform music.

At the end of the day, if people want the original version, they will listen to that version or buy that version. Cheap imitations, like might be possible in the book publishing industry, are even less probable in the music industry. If you want to try and make a copy of a song, you basically need the original instruments and vocals to be identical, and especially with the latter, that is almost impossible to achieve without the participation of the initial artist. No-one is going to think that Lorde's cover of Swingin' Party is meant to be an imitation of the Replacements' version.

We will fell unnecessarily lengthy copyright lengths clean as a pine, shortening terms of copyright to ten years. This will protect the rights of creatives to profit from their work, while ensuring that people will still be able to innovate after a reasonable time and the original creator will have to compete instead of having a monopoly. This is why the Pirate Party believes that it is time to put freedom over copyright. In this case, the freedom of musicians. Vote two ticks Pirate this election, to ensure an end to unjust, unequal, and unfair copyright laws.