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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.
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.
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.