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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!
Balls or not, they can certainly use a donation or two.
Quantum hacker.
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...
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.
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.
Umm, dude, prostitution is legal in many European countries. Why go through all the work of starting a party when you could just start a "party".
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.
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.