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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."
It's not the file sharing links.
It's the attitude. They are incredibly cool and fearless.
This is just another step along the way from their lawyer letters.
naive and foolish - perhaps.
Some day they will be crushed.. but it will have been a brilliant arc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Long story short, they need PR now. Next year the content industry can shut down the Pirate Party as TPB's ISP like they did with the last one and make most people forget it by 2014. So now they're hoping for controversy and press, because the Pirate Party is virtually untouchable from now and until the national election in September. It is highly questionable if running an ISP can be considered a "political activity", but just creating the debate on it is a victory. The downside is that they are again hitting the media almost as the Pirate Bay Party, when they spend the other half of the time telling everybody they're not a single issue party and there's more to their ideology than that. So they're more looking for someone to stomp their brass balls than not, really.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We've seen the corporate parties perpetrate some of the most in-your-face anti-democratic agendas imaginable. In the US, for example, (get this) corporations are now considered to be people and to have the same rights of free speech! Overturning a century of legal precedent and two centuries of the framers' intent was nothing to these corporate tools.
It's good to see that there's at least one group of pro-democratic politicians who are willing to do something equally as bold in behalf of the People's interest.
If the Pirate Party can continue to show media savvy, they might be a force to be reckoned with, and not just in Sweden.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you were in Japan, Spain, or about 20 other countries, 13 would be above the age of consent. Sweden is 15, which is about the worldwide average. Above 16 is the exception.
And regarding the wide pedo-brush that people like to smear these laws with, dangerous pedophiles don't care about consent or laws in general. There's very little correlation, in fact, between state-enforced moral laws and the amount of child rape, sexual abuse, or teen pregnancies. These laws mostly end up turning early-maturing teenagers into "sex offenders" with a life-long criminal record.
So yes, the criminality of under-18s having sex is very much a political issue and not a universal moral constant.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I agree with you. It is disingenuous to say that running a bittorrent tracker isn't promoting copyright infringement. Unless your tracker specializes in, say, Linux distros (rare), then almost certainly the vast majority of your tracker's use is for illegal filesharing.
People should not make that argument (except in court, where it might juuuust work), because it is transparently misleading.
Instead, people should stick to the point, which is that the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous. That argument is more plain, perfectly transparent, and most importantly, it is true.
No, it's not necessarily ethical; rather, it would be legal (which you probably meant). Two things often align, but are very different beasts. Ethical (or more accurately, moral) viewpoint is with respect to right and wrong; legality just whether it is acceptable according to local legal standard.
And while ethical issues are indeed not black-and-white, they seldom have anything to do with national interests.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes