Slashdot Mirror
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."
"They have the biggest balls since balls came to ballstown." -Master Shake, paraphrased
Living With a Nerd
The Pirate Party has them.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I'm so proud, it makes me want to cry.
And move to Sweden.
As if Swedish women weren't enough incentive.
How do those guys find pants to fit with balls that big?
I'm moving to Sweden and starting the Hooker Party.
The party supporters will still get screwed, but not in the way usually associated with politics.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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