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Pirate Party Unites In Australia
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that the Pirate Party has opened a branch office in Australia and is recruiting office bearers and supporters. The group updated the Australian website it registered last year and advertised for a president, treasurer, secretary, and supporting positions. A party spokesman, Rodney Serkowski, said the group was close to establishing a beachhead in Australia. He said that with 300 supporters it was on its way to signing the 500 it needed to become an official Australian political party. 'We are currently an online community, working together with the intention of becoming a registered party, and we're coming closer to reaching that goal,' Serkowski said. 'If we can get the required 500 members, and be registered by year's end, I think it is highly probable that we will contest the next Federal election in Australia.' At the weekend about two percent of Germans voted for the Pirate Party, although it needed five percent to gain a seat in the Bundestag."
During the elections on Germany the Pirate Party there could rake in 2% of all the votes: almost a million people voted for them! Kudos, and keep going!.
If the U.S. doesn't want its own Piratpartiet, the government had better consider that the reason these branch offices have popped up is precisely because of heavy-handed laws that attempt to usurp the inalienable rights of users to download content for free off the internet.
Any action against Net Neutrality, for one, will be one step towards establishing a Pirate Party here at home. Any action that tries to legislate morality on the internet will be one step towards a viable Pirate Party third party. The only real chance legislators have in the U.S. of stopping the growth of the Pirate Party here is ironically to embrace the tenets of the Pirate Party and implement the freedom of information it espouses.
Princess Leia once put it very succinctly, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
The website link is here. :)
Disagree != mod troll.
I signed up as a supporter. If you're Australian and involved in IT so should you. Even if you're not but care about censorship and IP related issues, sign up. Dont let people whose policies are dictated by industries who only have how much profit they can squeeze out as their only lobbyists on such issues.
Help fight for your own rights, dont rely on others to do the work for you. Its time, step up.
Sign up! Sign up! Sign up!
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Pirate_Party
This may not sound much, but it is actually pretty good for a new and totally unknown party with a scary name. Hopefully the aims of the party (internet Censorship, civil rights etc) will now get some public attention.
There are two tables for the results of Berlin. The first one shows the results for the 'Erststimme' (first vote) which is used to elect a direct candidate for your district. Since there were no direct candidates from the pirate party for Berlin, the number of votes is 0. The second table shows the results for the 'Zweitstimme' (second vote), which is used to assign the seats in the 'Bundestag' proportionally to all parties that gained more than 5%. As you can see, the votes for the pirate party do appear in this table.
I hope this helps. But mind you, the German election system is extremely complicated.
Greetings from the Germany.
I want a British pirate party now. We need one :/
That's okay, because we've got one! Just passed 500 paid-up members, too.
Pirate Party UK