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Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that as the European Parliament elections loom, StudiVZ, Germany's largest social networking site, has opened up to political parties for election campaigning. That is, if you aren't the Pirate Party. "The other political parties were allowed to have a special account to show they are an organization and not an individual. The Pirate Party, however, was not allowed to have one and instead operated on a standard user account registered by an individual. StudiVZ noticed that the Pirate Party account was not a "real person" and despite it having a thriving network with hundreds of followers, it was summarily deleted. This means that it is impossible for the Pirate Party to have a presence at all on the largest social networking site in Germany."
Update: 05/02 19:17 GMT by T : Reader riot notes: "FYI: I just translated the press release to English."
But it's a private website. It is the website's call if they want to ban pirates or ninjas. I do some coding for a social networking site and we will delete accounts if they don't meet our guidelines (the site targets a specific audience, and we want it that way). The 'net is a big place... big enough to allow site owners the right to keep out unwanted parties. Don't like the site's way of doing things, go elsewhere. It isn't like there aren't a dozen social networking sites trying to fill the big boy's shoes.
But I'm an asshole I guess, as I have also never seen the problem with an apartment not renting to people with kids, or restaurants not seating kids, but that is illegal.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
The Pirate Party is hardly a 'fake' political party. It has a well developed platform including protecting privacy (on and off the internet), copyright reform, and patent reform. In the 2006 elections in Sweden it recieved 34,918 less than 9 months after it was founded, making it the 10th largest (out of 40) political party in the election.
Officially registered pirate parties exist in Spain, Austria, Germany and Poland, while those in the USA, United Kingdom, Argentina, Finland, and Australia are currently unregistered, but active.
They have actually run for a state election in Germany, although only receiving .3% of the votes. It is possible the social networking site is unaware that the Pirate Party is an actual party: nothing I saw in the article indicates otherwise. It is also possible that the company is unaware of what's going on, and the entire situation got lost in bureaucracy. It was likely just some support person who deleted the account for violating the terms of service.
For the most part I agree with the platform of the Pirate Party, but it gives the impression that their primary purpose for existing is to support piracy of songs, software and movies, which I don't support. Their marketing department could probably use some work.
Qxe4
Not ALL Parties are allowed on that social network (StudiVZ) - only the ones which are currently in the Parliament... which the Pirate Party isn't... I'm angry about the lockout, too, but this report is just plain exaggerating!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I can't speak for our German sister party, but as a member of the Swedish pirate party, I can assure you that the Pirate Party is not a fake party.
It's a party that has developed and gained support due to the increasingly anti-democratic attitude of our elected parliamentarians. Last year, parliament voted for a law giving a government institution the right to wiretap all international telecommunications traffic without warrant, suspicion and with minimal public insight. This year the IPRED directive was implemented with the added bonus (for record executives) that private corporations could go to court on their own (and not through the police as is common practice) to request information from ISPs on who was using a specific IP at a specific time. I'm sure you haven't missed ACTA if you've read /. with any regularity. The data retention directive will be implemented in Sweden this fall.
The Pirate Party is against all this. While the party is also of the opinion that non-commercial file-sharing of copyrighted works should be legalized, this is really sort of secondary. In order to enforce a ban on filesharing, you have to implement a totalitarian state that can monitor what every person does all the time. This is in our opinion NOT acceptable.
And many agree with us. In the first poll for the upcoming European Parliament elections, we got 5.1% of the vote, enough to grab one seat, with the Pirate Party not even being an alternative presented by the pollsters, and we are now the fourth, soon the third largest party in Sweden with over 42,000 members.
"The Pirate Party aren't revolutionaries because they aren't fighting for anything in particular" That is just plain wrong, the Pirate party is fighting _for_: - A reform of copyright law - Personal privacy - Abolishion of patents In each case the Pirate Party has very specific ideas how things should work. // An actual active member of the Pirate Party, so shut up or we'll throw you over board! AAAARH!
America is quite capable of outlawing political parties, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act as an example and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA#History.
As a democracy if enough people wanted to be communist to amend the constitution (over 2/3rds) then the will of the people should be respected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism