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Swedish Pirate Party To Run Pirate Bay From Parliament
rdnetto sends in this clip from TorrentFreak. To pursue these plans the Pirate Party needs to win 4% of the seats in Parliament in an election coming up in September. "After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament. ... The party has announced today that they intend to use part of the Swedish Constitution to further these goals, specifically Parliamentary Immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for things done as part of their political mandate. They intend to push the non-commercial sharing part of their manifesto, by running The Pirate Bay from inside the Parliament, by Members of Parliament."
Balls or not, they can certainly use a donation or two.
Quantum hacker.
Unfortunately for them I don't see how this can work. The Swedish Constitution states that:
[...]If, in any other case, a member of the Riksdag is suspected of having committed a criminal act, the relevant rules of law concerning arrest, detention or remand are applied only if he admits guilt or was caught in the act, or the penalty for the offence is imprisonment for two years [or more, I assume; I don't speak Swedish so can't check the translation].
[Chapter 4, Article 8]
Under Swedish law copyright infringement carries a penalty of two years imprisonment, so I don't think they will have any criminal immunity.
The submitter seems to have confused immunity with prosecution and immunity from civil lawsuits; matters carried out as part of a political mandate are only immune from civil lawsuits (the criminal immunity, above, would appear to apply or not apply irrespective of whether the actions were part of a political mandate). What's more, this civil immunity can be waived by a 5/6 majority of those voting - I can't imagine this would be hard to arrange against an unpopular single candidate.
I'm not a Swedish lawyer (believe it or not!) but I hope they've checked with one because they seem to be relying on more protection than they actually have.
Don't mistake The Pirate Party for the Pirate Bay.
The latter deals with links. The former is best described as the political branch of the Internet.
it's in my head
They only want to run the trackers. You know, those things that are like search-engines. No infringement anywhere in sight, except for in the deluded minds of technofobic geriatric judges.
I'm a member, an activist and a supporter since the same day it was started but I'm not part of the core team.
They had a debate article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet today and they have it translated to English here. Basically they say that they will host it until its legal status is clarified. That means until it's clarified legal or when it's not possible to appeal to any higher courts.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Wrong. The Constitution does not grant citizens any rights. ALL rights are assumed to be wholly enjoyed by citizens. What the Constitution does is grant some specific rights to the government, and places hard-line restrictions against any laws which might infringe on certain rights; such as freedom of worship (thus, any law allowing or preventing marriage is unconstitutional), restriction of the freedom of the press (speech), barring the right to assemble (free speech zones, anyone? permits, anyone?), bearing of arms (no assault weapons, anyone? I'd say that is an infringement), no search and siezure without probable cause unless you have a warrant (homeland security theater and patriot act, anyone?)
Don't worry a lot of people get it backwards and don't understand that ALL rights are retained by Citizens except where specifically granted to the government by the Constitution.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50