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Swedish Filesharers Start 'The Piracy Party'
sp3tt writes "Tired of being called criminals, a group of Swedish filesharers have started a new political party, The Piracy Party (Piratpartiet in Swedish). The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws, reverse the data retention directive passed by the EU last month, and protect privacy with new laws. The party expresses no opinion on other subjects. The Piracy Party's webpage is so far only available in Swedish, at piratpartiet.se The party's goal is to get into to the parliament, which requires 4% of the votes, or roughly 225000 votes. Elections are held in September."
I wish I was Swedish! In the US a few years ago, I tried to convince some local Libertarians to run strictly on the "right to copy" platform. It seems most of those guys wanted to run on the "Smoke Pot" platform, which will generally get you nowhere except with stoners.
The big news here, to me, is that Sweden seems to allow minority opinions into their parliament (similar to Costa Rica and other countries). In the US it is near impossible to get a minority opinion into even a state legislature -- democracy and gerrymandering prevent the minority opinion from ever seeing the light of day.
225,000 votes is a LOT of votes. Does anyone know what the 18-30 male voting record is in terms of actually making it to the ballot box to vote? In recent local elections that I've witnessed (I like to watch), I haven't seen anything but blue haired ladies with walkers hitting the booths. I don't think I saw one person under the age of 40 at my booth (and I witnessed the voters for over 3 hours). I'm not sure how well this would work even if our voting system did allow for minority parties with minority positions to get elected.
Does bork bork bork mean "freedom to copy" now?
If their aim is to abolish immaterial law, then how do they reconcile that with protecting privacy? After all, that would be immaterial law, would it not?
I think this party would have much better support if they tried to reduce copyright terms to something more sensible like ~15 years, to see what affect competition with a more contemporary public domain would have on the market, before jumping headlong into abolishing copyright altogether.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
More pirates means less global warming
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
Hopefully, most people on Slashdot are educated enough to know that "stealing intellectual property" is not even possible, by definition. (Well, maybe it is possible with some sort of memory erasing device.)
That's great. It must be absolutely awesome to live in a country where there's more than two political parties.
Err, wait a minute.
*thinks*
...
I mean, it must be absolutely awesome to live in a country where there's more than one political party.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Your two english examples are wrong though, we'd never combine words that way. It would be more like "You have to love languages where you can multiwordcombine in order to singleconceptexpress." Note that those two are the verbal forms of the (literally translated) words multiwordcombination (flerordskombination) and singleconceptexpression (enkeltkonceptsudtryk), none of which are used at all, but are readily understandable. See also Agglutinative languages for some more information on the topic of forming new words by combining others (which does happen in English as well).
Or better yet, Any swedish girl wants to marry me? =-)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
To a Swedish Piracy Party?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws
So, er, if trademarks and similar are abolished, how do you make sure you're voting for the real Piracy Party, and not something with the same name but vastly different policies set up as a stunt by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau?
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
At least, I think that's what that would mean; I can't remember if "Unterführer" can be split, and it's been about six years since I used German conversationally for any length of time.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
I guess I'm the only one on Slashdot who thinks it's reasonable for record labels to want to make some money. I strongly agree that suing the grandparents of kids for downloading is going way too far, I strongly believe in the concept of fair use and I strongly believe in limiting the time span of a copyright. But when folks are downloading songs from the Internet that they have not paid a single bit of royalties for then it doesn't seem to me that the record labels are being unreasonable by being upset about that.
I know, I'm the only person on Slashdot who feels that both sides in this issue are somewhat wrong, so please feel free to flame me.
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Actually, I'd say it's the english rules that are the strange ones. The rule in Swedish, and I believe in most germanic languages, is simply: do not put spaces in nouns, adjectives or verbs (or in any other "word" for that matter).
Think about the english noun "water tap". Notice that it's just that - a noun. If "water" was an adjective, then it would be an adjective and a noun; but it isn't, since if it was, it would make sense to say things like "the tap is water". The first word in "rusty tap", however, Is an adjective.
Though English puts spaces in nouns, it doesn't usually put spaces in adjectives (it's written "able-bodied man" instead of "able bodied man"). I guess that would just be too confusing..
To sum it up, English puts spaces in its nouns. Most other germanic languages don't. Who's being weird? =)