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Pirate Party Wins At Least One European Parliament Seat
reeeh2000 writes "According to TorrentFreak, with half of polling stations now closed in Sweden, the Pirate Party has at least one guaranteed seat in the EU Parliament. Currently, the party is sitting with 7% of the vote. Depending on how the remaining districts voted, the Pirate Party could win another seat, for a total of two."
Reader lordholm adds a link to an article about exit polls in Sweden (link in Swedish) indicating that the Pirate Party will score two seats, writing "According to the polls, the pirate party is the largest party in the 18-30 year age category of voters. The final counting of votes (including around a million postal votes) will not be done until later next week."
A fantastic result. It seems that democratic representation means something even to filesharers! Who would have thought that they're not all teenage hoodies checking out of society!
http://www.thelocal.se/19928/20090607/
Among voters aged under 30, some 19 percent are believed to have cast a vote for the Pirate Party.
"They are the biggest party among young people, bigger than both the Social Democrats and the Moderates," said politics professor SÃren Holmberg.
As I was just telling my girlfriend, one way or another, it should be the first time the EP gets people who actually understand present day computer technology.
This is one great big middle finger to the big parties who have ignored the privacy issues. Just this past month it's been very clear that the large parties are trembling because of the massive streams of voters who abandon them for the Pirate Party just because of these important issues. I really hope they will get with the program and realize that they can't dismiss the privacy debate and say that it's just a loud bunch who don't get it (the so called "pirates").
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
As a Swede, I am very proud that Sweden once again leads the way and is the first country to take an important issue seriously - wait until the next election and see Pirate Parties from countries all over Europe!
:wq!
your name is listed at the top your post, there's no need to 'sign' it
It should be noted that although they call themselves the Pirate party, the focus of the party is on questions of privacy and integrity. Issues where voters have been repeatedly ignored and even betrayed by the established parties.
While one of the laws recently shoved down voter's throats, despite promises to the contrary, have been aimed towards curbing piracy, the real outrage has been against the privacy and integrity issues with this and other recently passed laws regarding interception of domestic communications etc. (Well, that, and giving corporations the ability to petition courts to perform searches that, under similar conditions, would not be granted even to the police.)
They also want to reform patent and trademark law, but that's it. However, the issues that they are dealing with, most importantly the right to privacy, are in my mind (and obviously many others) much more important than the issue of whether taxes should be at 31% or 32%.
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
What concerns exactly? That it's illegal to download copyrighted stuff? That's not a concern that will be taken seriously by anyone outside the pirate party. I mean this is the party who seriously proposes replacing pharma patents with all drug R&D being government funded. Their policies appear to be incredibly flimsy, there's not even any discussion of the content providers POV on their English website. It's just "p2p should be free, drm should be illegal, nobody needs to make money after 5 years anyway".
The Pirate Party have policies against software patents, so this is good news also in that respect.
Their voting weight will be small, but they can help make the group dynamics of the European Parliament more favourable to campaigners against software patents (much as the Greens did in 2002-2005, and still do).
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I mean this is the party who seriously proposes replacing pharma patents with all drug R&D being government funded.
In a country with sky-high taxes, government healthcare, etc. that could very well work. Now, in a more capitalist economy such as the USA, it would fail, but in a more socialist economy such as that of Sweeden, it could very well work.
It's just "p2p should be free, drm should be illegal, nobody needs to make money after 5 years anyway".
P2P for non-profit use should be allowed because it eventually helps the content producers. DRM should be perfectly legal to break and should require warning labels when it is used. And really, after 5 years most of the money from most works have dried up (or releasing them to the public domain wouldn't hurt sales), however they could be built upon, expanded and generally contribute more to the world.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Woah... they went from 0 to 100kph in like 1 second. If I was the other parties i'd be taking notice. One seat probably isn't going to change much but it has been amazing to watch this whole thing unfold and the threat it all posses to the other parties if they don't stop taking money and order's from big business/brother...
... [snip] .. It's just "[snip] nobody needs to make money after 5 years anyway".
If you quit your job today you'd expect to still be getting paid 5 years from now I assume?
In Europe though, you guys actually have a democratic system that lets you have more than the two government determined choices. There were plenty of parties that shared the Pirate Party agenda, at the very least you could have voted to block the lesser of the two evils like we have to do in the USA.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Seems to me like people in Europe enjoy more freedoms than we do here in the US - the self proclaimed "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave".
That's what you get with a single party system, my friends. And no, this is not a typo - Dems and Repubs are pretty much the same party with minor variations. There's nowhere near the diversity of political opinion in the US as what you'd see in Europe. We need a raving, rabid, card carrying socialists to balance the equation somewhat on this side of the pond. All branches of the government have been licking the Big Business' behind for far too long.
How does my copyright on the code that I write harm the public, culture and future history?
Sweden has for a long time been known as an advanced IT nation with widespread computer use, broadband connections, IT companies and so on. In the last few years that has come to change with new repressive laws like FRA and IPRED, but today we took back some of our lost pride. It's good to see that we give Europe a voice for a reformed copyright and patent law, free culture, and privacy and democracy on the Internet. Even if it's difficult for this person - most likely Christian Engström - to affect decisions directly among 735 other MPs, his presence will have two important consequences:
1) It gives Brussels some sorely needed competence on these issues to act as a counterweight against lobbyists trying to influence decisions.
2) It sends a message to the other parties that they cannot continue ignoring the rights of their citizens forever.
I voted for the Pirate Party and I hope this result will be the first step towards a European Union that cares more about our rights online.
Yeah, that's a little deceptive. When is the last time a song was banned in the US? If you are an adult, have you ever had trouble purchasing a violent video game in the US? If you are a member of an extremist group (non-violent, at least), do you need to hide that in the US? Can you buy military style weapons in the US? You may not agree with some of the freedoms we have in the US, but they remain available.
I could come up with a list of things that are more accessible and free in the EU. It's give and take. Each area has advantages when it comes to freedom. I don't think you can make a blanket statement that one area enjoys more freedoms than the other without qualifying which freedoms are most important to you.
If you quit your job tomorrow, would you keep getting paid until 70 years after your death?
IIRC they didn't even want to be a "real" party. They basically wanted to get enough votes so other, established, parties would pick up their issues to harvest those votes back.
I forsee the same development we had in the 80s with the Greens all over Europe. Nobody took the "eco-loonies" serious, nobody cared about environment issues, so a party was founded and behold, it was important enough to enough people that some "fluffy treehugger party" gained enough speed to become an established party. The Greens started out as a one-issue party as well: Environment and pollution. Now they're something the "established" old parties have to deal with.
You'd guess they should've learned their lesson from the 80s, that they should pick up other parties' issues before they become strong enough that voters don't consider it a "lost vote" if they cast their vote for them. Appearantly, parties don't learn from history more than the average person does...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm a content provider. I make games and sell them.
No, you are a content producer. Two vastly different things. You make games. On the other hand a studio that does nothing but buys the rights of other games, puts them on disks and distributes them are a content provider. They provide content, they do not create it. As another example look at YouTube, YouTube is a content provider, they provide content, however they are not content producers in that they do not make videos for YouTube (well, there are a few, but not very many)
BTW, as a content producer, I disagree that p2p helps me in an way. In fact, I strongly refute that.
Well I suppose you either don't patch your games or require patches to be played as with servers, or have enough money that you can afford bandwidth for how many players you have. Also, have you ever released any of your older games via P2P? Having visited the site in your sig I can say that I have never heard of any of your games (well, save for the link on your sig on your /. posts). I don't know how popular your games now are, but a few good older releases can help people buy into a developer, such as with used games. I buy a used game that 0% of the profits go to the publisher or anyone other than the game store. However, if that game is really amazing, I might tend to buy more games in the future from them (possibly new).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In terms of voting power a single MEP sure doesn't contribute much, but the main benefits of having the Pirate Party represented is that there is now one person on the inside that can report on everything that threatens privacy and integrity or furthers the copyright maximalist agenda. He can expose and bring all those issues to the public eye, where other MEPs may or may not be interested in doing so. The other benefit is that he can talk, build alliances, educate and speak to the other MEPs as an equal, not as an outsider with an agenda, because he now has actual voter mandate to do so. There are also a lot of other MEPs from other parties that care about these issues, and there is now one person whose only job is to bring them all together and drive these issues in the direction we want.
The nationalists may have gotten a few seats, but in this issue most other MEPs are engaged against them, educated about it, and know exactly that they do not want to work with them, so it's much more of an uphill battle for them.
Since shops use the police and court systems to arrest and prosecute thieves is their business model messed up too?
In the last year there was 12 Trillion dollar spent on bailing out banks. By non-communist parties. Again, who actually HAS an understanding of basic economics? Neither the banks nor existing parties in power, apparently. The worst thing is, nobody still knows how this immense amount of bailout money is going to be paid back, everybody is just trying to act as if nothing happened.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
What does basic economics tell about digital goods, as they have an infinite supply and a zero marginal cost of production?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Let me chip in.
In my opinion, the length of copyrighted should be bounded such that a work will revert to the public domain while it is still somewhat useful and relevant.
For literary works, I would say less than one generation after it was written, 15-20 years sound about right (cf. the Statute of Anne, which "created a 21 year term for all works already in print at the time of its enactment and a 14 year term for all works published subsequently.")
(Note: with the advancements in communication and distribution in the last 300 years, the length of copyright should have decreased instead of increasing.)
For computer programs, at most a "software generation" (to be defined). Probably 10 years or so.
Excellent display of customer relations practices there, cliffski.
Well done.
Somehow, whenever I get curious as to whether you have managed to muster up some resemblance of manners, up you pop and demonstrate the opposite with glaring obviousness.
Well done, indeed.
Flame away, if you wish, thus proving the point, yet again.