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Swedish Pirate Party Gains 3000 Members In 7 Hours
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.'"
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!
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've been endorsed by said party to run for Congress in Tennessee's fifth district. Check the sig.
Former US House candidate, TN-5