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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."
The Pirate Party has them.
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I'm so proud, it makes me want to cry.
And move to Sweden.
As if Swedish women weren't enough incentive.
Actually, that's a really good point. As citizens of industrialized nations, we've witnessed some truly weird and vile shit just in the last decade alone due to the final stages of corporatized political parties. Traditional methods, like letter campaigns, protests and such no longer work as well or at all.
In other words, you have to be big and ballsy these days just to get noticed, let alone get anything done.
Works for me, too. If we're seeing the beginning of "4th gen" politics, then democracy might still have a chance.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Democracy is democracy. You get the votes, you get the power.
Can you name a democratic country where everything the government does makes sense (eg. "war on drugs" is prevalent in most of the world). Is having the country run by Christians or oil magnates really any more sensible than pirates?
No sig today...
Sadly, unless you are bringing the parliament on your ship, and moving it over the other ship before boarding it, you won't be covered by that loophole as you won't be 'inside' the parliament ..
Although the Pirate Party may be applying a karate chop type of action in a controversial area it can be pointed out that outfits that want all of this strict copyright type of nonsense rely on the police and their weapons as the ultimate means of enforcement. The political system creates a situation in which the one with the power is just and right. Now the Pirate Party has come up with a clever use of law that trumps the other side completely. Sauce for goose is sauce for gander.
You'd have to get 4% of the people to vote for you, good luck with that.
PS: If it's really your thing there are countries which will oblige you without going through all that hassle.
No sig today...
Ok, the example might have been bad but the point still stands. One can imagine all kinds of illegal/immoral/unethical things done 'inside' the parliament as well, with the protection of immunity as long as you can convince 4% of people to support it.
Which differs from governmental practice in most countries how exactly? Fraud, bribery, extra marital affairs, Who the hell needs imagination? It's common bloody knowledge!
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
If they do it to avoid prosecution why not take it one step further and just start hosting the items themselves?
Because they are more interested in promoting free speech than actually distributing copyrighted materials. They want to show that free speech is absolute, even when it happens to be inconvenient to other parties. They want to make sure that hosting a website that basically lists people interested in engaging in copyright infringement should be allowed as free speech.
It's the same reason the NRA fights assault weapons bans in the US. The vast majority of gun owners couldn't give two shits about high-powered assault rifles, but as long as the debate is squarely focused on those, then their hunting rifles and target pistols will remain relatively unrestricted.
The Pirate Party isn't really interested in providing easy access to your "0-day warez!!11!!!ONE!!1". That's just a means to get people thinking and talking about what free speech is and should be and to focus debate on modifying existing copyright laws, which are, in their opinion, a source of undue enrichment for media consortia.
Given that the *AAs have attempted to manipulate the Swedish legal system, I'd say that this has less to do with the right to piracy than getting pissed that a set of wealthy, largely foreign, entertainment cartels have tried to shanghai their courts and politicians.
It makes you wonder how different things in the US would be if our government had any real concept, let alone the threat of no-confidence.
Also: What they usually end up fighting is "assault weapons" bans.
An "assault rifle" is a military designation for a short-barreled select-fire (i.e. can be switched to fire bursts or continuously) gun designed for use in restricted areas - such a popping up through a hatch in a tank. (They usually fire such a low-powered bullet that the semi-auto (one-shot-per-trigger-pull-only) civilian plowshare versions are banned as hunting weapons. Too cruel: The prey is wounded and escapes to suffer, rather than dying quickly.)
An "assault weapon" is a legal term invented by gun banners to ban civilian guns. It refers to semi-auto guns with any of several scary-looking but irrelevant accessory features, and is used to whittle away at the right to keep and bear arms.
Also: Much of what the second amendment is about is the ability to resist a runaway government - foreign or domestic. It functions as an insurance policy against a runaway government just ignoring the constitution and doing whatever it pleases to the population: The population CAN fight back, and the threat has retarded this tendency of government for over two centuries. (Example: Nixon was rumored to have asked a think tank what would happen if he postponed the elections. Think tank told him over half the population was armed and such an event would be a trigger for an uprising.)
Also: NRA is one of the wimpiest of the pro-gun organizations. For instance: They actually opposed bringing D.C. v Heller to court. Others with more guts: Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO: putting teeth in "Never Again!"), and a number of others.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way