Swedish Pirate Party Gains 3000 Members In 7 Hours 410
An anonymous reader writes "Due to outrage over the verdict in The Pirate Bay trial, the Swedish Pirate Party has gained 3000 members in less than 7 hours. It is now bigger than 3 of the 7 parties represented in the Swedish parliament. 'Ruling means that our political work must now be stepped up. We want to ensure that the Pirate Bay activities — to link people and information — is clearly lawful. And we want to do it for all people in Sweden, Europe and the world, continues Rick Falk Vinge. We want it to be open for ordinary people to disseminate and receive information without fear of imprisonment or astronomical damages.'"
Arghhhh Cap'n (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here we go again... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Thief Party (Score:2, Interesting)
The ruling has already made waves in Denmark too (Score:5, Interesting)
I was pleasantly suprised to read a story about the ruling on the Danish public service channel's homepage today. The Danish advokatrådet (council of solicitors) has pointed out that the decision could have consequences for other sites that merely link to illegal files, like Google, and have encouraged the responsible minister to take preventative action. So here's hoping the ruling will end up helping us get some reasonable legislation passed!
What this means (Score:5, Interesting)
We have similar situations all over the world and in Germany too. Legislatory and Courts not understanding the concepts in Network technology and that they require a whole new different approach and perspective for reasonable legislation and judgement. At the same time IT is growing so fast and becoming a central part of our lives that the people affected are a significant political force. I think this is sort of a generation problem too. What I find interesting is that more and more the effect of IT on our lives - and thus on politics aswell - is growing stronger and stronger. I hope this party gains traction in sweden and isn't just a fad.
Re:Wow.... (Score:5, Interesting)
To try to better fit your analogy, wouldn't this case be more like, say, holding the phone company responsible for the alcohol-to-kids store because they listed their telephone number and address? We all agree that this selling-to-anyone store is breaking the law... we just don't think telling people where the store is and what the store sells is illegal.
I apologize for not making this a car analogy.. I will try harder next time.
Re:Arghhhh Cap'n (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone want to start a Pirate Party in the US?
I realize that the chance of a small party grabbing any meaningful power is smaller in a Constitutional Republic than a Parliamentary system, but it's still worth a shot, right? ;)
Maybe we can win some local elections and gain some notoriety?
Re:Here is the theme... (Score:3, Interesting)
and when the laws were about to let disney films FINALLY enter public domain, who STOLE them back?
hmmmm?
people (or corps) in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Re:Are there any pirate party members in office? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an election to the European parliament this year too. There are not so many representatives to elect, but there is usually a much smaller participation. So, if you want to cause a stir, the EP election is a better bet.
And then there's always the church election come fall... ;)
Re:Difference with the US (Score:3, Interesting)
Couple this with the fact that all of us youngin's found a newfound breathe of fresh air and freedom in the internet, but now the government and media are also going through consistently more aggressive means to regulate and control this frontier and what we have is a general feeling of bleak hoplessness conquering us all. Yay!
Re:Difference with the US (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not our system that ensures that, it's the attitude of the people that ensures it. The system is quite well set up to handle as many parties as we want. People just only -want- 2.
My pet theory on that is that people want a simple choice, one or the other. When you give them a complex choice, they get frustrated.
Re:Swedish Pirate Party (Score:5, Interesting)
"By genuine I mean fight intellectual property nonsense, not nut jobs who believe that it is ok to just take others work. They don't sound genuine, however. "
They are genuine. They've been trying to save our privacy for the past three years, but the only time anyone notices is when TPB gets in the news internationally.
They have a plan to eliminate medicine patents and replace them with (existing) centralized funding; the overall pile of money involved at different stages of the mutually assured destruction-like patent market would go down, and R&D could focus on R&D.
They want to shorten the lifespan of Copyright dramatically - I think the plan is for 5 years. (This comes out of a continuous discussion between different fields, where every field believes 5 or 10 years is a great duration for every field but their own, because they have to continue making money; thus the only way out besides continuing the stalemate is to just set a new figure across the board.) They also want non-commercial "infringement" even within the short period to always be legal as an extension of the library concept, where public culture is made available for every citizen.
They've been against the law allowing the Swedish Military Radio Institute to tap any Internet traffic crossing the border to listen for weakly defined "outer threats". Not only is it impossible from within Sweden to tell what'll cross the border or not and easy for actual terrorists (or what have you) to route around or use encryption, in order for them to be able to tap *some* traffic, they must be able to filter *all* traffic. Which means that every byte of Internet traffic inside Sweden (including this reply) passes through a supercomputer scanning for dangerous packets, violating the privacy of everyone and using military resources against its own citizen.
They're also against the implementation of the IPRED directive. This is so horrible it won't fit in a paragraph, and I advice you to google it for more information, but suffice it to say that in the process of the media industry prosecuting alleged file sharers (and the evidence could easily be fraudulent) they get to take your house in custody, search it, keep all your digital storage for evidence, slap you with (explicitly allowed) out-of-proportion fines, place the burden on you in civil court to prove that you didn't do anything and force you to take out a magazine ad proclaiming your conviction.
The Pirate Party is easily played as a bunch of schmucks that just want things for free. I can't rule out that such people are members, but it's not the strategy of the party itself, which is canny to a number of issues related to privacy and baby/bathwater situations. As far as piracy goes, though, I'm personally a member who, thanks to the large scale abolishment of music DRM as of late, download from TPB only what I can't get from iTunes otherwise, which is sadly still rather a lot. Although if they get to twist the courts into assuming guilt or causality, I'm not sure why I should be so eager to indirectly support this kind of behavior at all.
Re:Arghhhh Cap'n (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
You should be ashamed for modding parent up as he clearly is clueless about what it takes to be real party in a country with more than two parties.
The pirate party has more members than three parties that currently has seats in parliament and might by the the end of the weekend have more than four of the seven. That's with a fair margin too as they got twise as many people as of two of them while *only* having 19,790 members in total. 3000 members out of 19,790 is quite a lot.
Also due to the low voter turnout for the EU election the pirate party would need about 100,000 votes to get a mandate and I'm quite confident the 20,000 party members who care enough to take stand on the issue can bring those numbers in.
Re:So what? (Score:1, Interesting)
In Norway ( next to Sweden on not the capital of Sweden as "some" in the US might think) a comedian almost made it as a politician, just based on some comments some years back, I would send money to the Swedish Pirate Party even though I don't live in Sweden just to bring down the multinational organizations ruled by stock holders that has brought down the world economy. This will be my fight against the Man.
I am not a terrorist, not religious, just someone that's had enough of crap from the man.
Suggestion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well I wouldn't steal a car and I wouldn't steal a handbag.
And I wouldn't steal a cd from a brick'n'mortar stall.
But I'd still download music from a pirate torrent tracker.
Because that is copying and not stealing at all.
Re:Difference with the US (Score:2, Interesting)
There are different ways to change the political mainstream. Chomsky has some nice points on this subject. One important one is, that lies and manipulation through media can be circumvented by a constant effort to inform the public with real facts. With the Internet this is getting easier. However, you need a lot of time to do so.
Another important thing is, that change can happend through just doing it. For example, if you are convinced that conventional food is neither good for you nor good for the environment, and then you take action to consum only organic food, and you then tell people that you switched for a reason then this makes a change. A small one, but a convicing one. In the end more people will pick up this direction.
In Germany the market for organic food was growing over the past few years now by 6 to 10% each year, because the people did exactly that.
The same thing can be done in other areas. For example, propagating Open Source and free documents, music and videos, than this will change things as well. Remember the media industry needs to grow every year or they collapse. So if you can slow their growth and build a parallel model for arts, than the media industry will collapse.
Astronomical? (Score:3, Interesting)
Astronomical? Like in millions of millions of stars?
If you compare to Oslo, the capitol of Norway, the closes neighbour to Sweden, the four guys have been sentenced to pay the price of a big house each (that is: four houses in total, in case I get the wording wrong) in the second most expensive part of the city. It's a lot of money (a lot!), but hardly astronomical.
Re:nuclear bunker may just come in handy (Score:1, Interesting)
They supported and endorsed Obama
1: who still thinks wiretapping americans is okay
2 who put bunch of RIAA lawyers on his team
any questions?
Re:Swedish Pirate Party (Score:3, Interesting)
a chronic lack of wealth has a negative effect on sociality
The pirate bay alone distributes millions of works of art daily. And at a damn low cost. If that isn't creating wealth, I don't know what is.
Of course, you will not see it directly in the GDP, because things that can be produced for free isn't worth anything economically, which goes to show just how messed up the subject of economics really is. Introduce replicators into a country and watch the GDP collapse as noone is willing to pay for expensive goods produced by factories, nor for shopkeepers that just distribute factory goods.
What really happens economically speaking is that the relative economic value of a product decreases as production effectivity increases while the real value remains the same. You can generally compensate for such changes by using product baskets to compare economies (although that has its own problems). But if the margin cost of a goods suddenly drops to near zero you'll start to see that goods disappearing completly from the economy, because it is no longer worth making actual transactions with the product. People will just trade it for free on the side. Does that mean that the society is worse off? Of course, not.
Re:Arghhhh Cap'n (Score:5, Interesting)
Scared off my ass (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:nuclear bunker may just come in handy (Score:3, Interesting)
we have all of our Pirate Party servers in that bunker
Target acquired
Bring it on. Atleast the main webserver isn't in my garage anymore. :-P
(No, I'm not kidding, it actually was in my garage, on a 10mbps fiber, until late last summer)
Re:nuclear bunker may just come in handy (Score:3, Interesting)
The new IPRED law states that ISP's have to give out logs to the RIAA etc. after a court ruling. They do not need to give them out if they dont have them, so amazingly Bahnhof is an ISP that is actually looking out for their own customers.
Support the good guys, support Bahnhof.