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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."
Once you hoist the Jolly Roger, you excuse yourself from polite society. Isn't that sort of the point of being an outlaw?
One such member was quoted saying
"Aye. We just want to run for pARRRRRRlament!" No ninjas were found for comment.
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.
Sorry, maybe I misunderstand your comment, so let me make sure: are you seriously comparing the account deletion policy on a social networking site to the Nazis? Please tell me I've misunderstood. Please.
Oh yeah, its a really short step from the denial of internet access to wholesale slaughter and genocide.
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
The purpose of Democracy is two fold.
1. To reduce civil wars.
2. To force the government to at least TRY an pay attention to the nees of people besides those directly in power.
First, if you have enough men to fairly win a civil, then you should have enough men to win an election - with much less casualties. In other forms of government, you might have 90% of the population hating the leader, but without democracy the only way to remove them is to fight and die.
Second, a democracy requires the government to consider what everyone else thinks. In most other forms of government, who )(*&@ cares what the peasants thinks.
P.S. There is a third benefit that happens often, but not all the times. Democracies usually have voting fairly often, so it speeds up the process of removing the incompetent, as compared to many other forms. But this is not always the case.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Will you delete a site that /does/ meet the guidelines, but you have a /personal/ grudge against?
That's whats going on here.
But it's a private website. It is the website's call if they want to ban pirates or ninjas.
And it is our call if we want to take them to task for it. This freedom of speech thing works both ways.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's not helpful. It makes your party look like a bunch of nutcase radicals. Think of ELF: it is true that taking care of the environment is good, but setting fires and destroying property as a way to get your point across doesn't help at all.
Whenever laws are unjust, about the only way to change them is through "radical" ideas. Just look at blacks in America after the civil war, they sought to maintain the old order of things in the south and nothing really was done that improved the lives of black Americans, until the civil rights movement where a few "radicals" were needed to bring about change. Same thing with copyright. And no one is going to have any property burned or lives lost with the abolition of copyright, save for perhaps the publishers who were on the way out anyways and served no real purpose.
A reactionary party that goes to the opposite extreme is as bad as the original evil. If you want to change copyright, you are going to need at least some of those pro-copyright lawmakers to help you (unless you can completely take over the legislature, which if that is your goal, looking like a nutcase radical won't help you much either). To get those lawmakers on your side, you're going to come up with something reasonable.
But if the Pirate Party can get enough seats, it would prove that many people do care about copyright and the end result would be copyright is weakened or at least not strengthened. If you have a small to medium amount of people who are willing to shoot down any proposed legislation that strengthens or doesn't weaken copyright, you will have no choice but to try to work with them or face many, many, many angry letters/calls/e-mails.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But that's precisely my point. I don't care what peasants think -- especially when I'm a peasant. Democracy doesn't force government to consider the needs o the people, it forces government to consider the vote of the people.
So if someone has an actually good idea, but it requires, oh, I don't know, a grade ten education to understand, then it can never happen because people won't vote for it because they don't understand it.
So then you start electing people who sound intelligent, not people who actually are intelligent. Those two tend to be inversely proportional.
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
As a german I can tell you - the political situation here is BAD! censorship is back, surveillance is back, corruption... never left
the lockout of the pirate party is just a small puzzlepiece of opposition-oppression, but all in all - yes - we are headding for the fourth reich...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Strangely, the soon-to-be second largest party in Sweden, Piratpartiet, seems to disagree with you. Why are you against free culture?
Maybe you say that culture isn't free to produce. We know that; it's you who are stupid. Why are you against free culture?
Because filesharing is stealing? No, it isn't. Why are you against free culture?
Because the ones producing content have to be paid? No, they don't have to be paid. Why are you against free culture?
But then no content will be produced? No, that is a lie. Why are you against free culture?
Because you like putting annoying kids in jail. OK, I can't argue with you there, but it's a quite expensive solution.
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.
It is easy to belittle those with viewpoints different then yours. Are you from the US? Are you a member of either of the major parties? What jokes - the "we just want to tax and spend like crazy and limit personal freedoms" party VS the "we just want to have ZERO taxes and totally dismantle all forms of government" party. I would say they are as fake as they come.
I think there's a difference between a member doing something against the TOS and a member that you don't like, or have been told to not like. This, to me, is a political deletion, has nothing to do with getting rid of bad members.
I'd hazard a guess that your site isn't thriving if you can't tell the difference between a personal dislike and someone breaking the rules of your site. Where I live, if this happened, the site owners would find themselves infront of the ACMA quicker than you can say "politically unjust act".
Yes, you are an "asshole" as you said, but you're also an idiot too... but they usually go hand in hand.
It depends on what the political contribution laws are in the said country. Once a company starts allowing some political parties their services for free while banning them to others (like the Pirate Party which is a registered political party in Germany IIRC), that might be seen as an endorsement or contribution and could be in violation of some laws dealing with political contributions.
In the UK it's the British National Party (quazi Nazis), membership of this party precludes you from employment in the government, police, etc. Vile as they may be, they are a legitimate political party and legalising discrimination against them is even more vile, as well as the most dangerous precedent imaginable. Unfortunately this policy is actually quite popular in the UK - the sheeple will get what they deserve in the end I guess.