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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."

3 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whoa. by etnoy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Balls or not, they can certainly use a donation or two.

    --
    Quantum hacker.
  2. Re:I love it ... by Kijori · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:I love it ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.