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Swedish Anti-Piracy Lawyer Gets New Name 'Pirate'
An anonymous reader writes "Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet (in Swedish) reports that Henrik Pontén, a lawyer of Antipiratbyrån, a Swedish organization against file sharing, has received a notification from officials that an application for change of his name has been approved and a new first name 'Pirate' has been added to his name. Authorities do not check the identity of persons applying for name changes. Pirate Pontén now has to apply for another change in order to revert the change."
There is also the possibility that he did this too himself, nobody knows since who ever changed his name is anonymous.
And know this, the news article was published on the day before the Swedish election. Very suspicious timing by the anti-piracy agency here...
In Sweden if you're trans and want to change to a name of the different gender you need approval from social servcies, which among other things requires you are sterile. Yet a lawyer can add "Pirate" to his first name without the agencies even checking the identity of the applicant. Hurra fÃr myndigheter!
Or we could admit that speculation either way is pointless. People do fake crimes, and Occam's Razor != knowing.
mentions an official stating his name will be reverted "in due time"
What are they waiting for? Oh! That's right... an anonymous application!
On the note of applications, this article will probably precipitate a flood of similar immature requests. Maybe the department should suspend applications for a short while until appropriate changes in the procedure are put in place. Hopefully, it doesn't require any legislation and is simply a directive from some official to change the policies.
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
But goddamn that's a brilliant prank.
In my mind, this is actually a little beyond childish prank territory.
To all you folks who are going to write in with "ZOMG LMAO! Grow a sense of humor!" and so on, ask yourselves: would a straight-up act of identity theft be as funny if it were aimed at an anti-copyright lobbyist? This isn't a prank--the man's signature was forged on an official document, and then (apparently) submitted to the Swedish tax authorities. I don't know about Sweden, but in the U.S. that's pretty heavily criminal conduct.
They weren't fraudulent wire transfers, idiot. They were perfectly legitimate, small value transfers. It just so happened that there was a processing fee greater than the value of the intended transfer amount. Furthermore, Occam razor doesn't mean jack shit. "The simplest solution is USUALLY correct". It doesn't mean that the simplest solution is ALWAYS correct.
It's perfectly legitimate to suspect that this guy did this himself to make the pirate party look more childish and discredit them. We've seen the anti-piracy fucks do weirder, stupider and more far fetched things in the past.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.