Pirate Party gets 2nd seat in European Parliament

Share This November 4th, 2009 Antowan

If you didn’t know, the Swedish Pirate Party got their 2nd European Parliament seat recently. It is a movement now! There are some seriously peeved and now politically active people on this planet who don’t take everything the recording and film industries say lying down, as perhaps the recording and film industries would have liked them to do. These people are in fact now moving into power seats in some of the most powerful political arenas on Earth where they don’t have to lobby the hard way anymore. Now they are becoming the very politicians who need to be lobbied and they have better privacy and more sensible copyright laws in mind. Odds are they will get it.

Swedish political party “Piratpartiet” or simply, Pirate Party is now the 3rd largest political grouping in Sweden and growing fast. The idea to go political has sparked masses of support and clone parties in other countries are now coming to the fore. It is a movement called the International Pirate Party Movement. The Pirate Party is “block independent” meaning that they disassociate themselves from the traditional left or right as we know it in classic politics in order to garner support on all sides.

What they are asking is not so farfetched. It is actually quite in line with a modern information society that is increasingly information driven and when you read between the lines, all they want is to open up access to information by relaxing the financial binds and restrictions to information in whatever form.
These are their official principles as they stand currently:

• Overall: ”Promoting global legislation to facilitate the emerging information society”
• Copyright: “We claim that today’s copyright system is unbalanced” Hence their position that file sharing (e.g. music) should be decriminalized.
• Patent: “Privatized monopolies are one of society’s worst enemies.” Hence their position that patents are obsolete and should be gradually done away with. Regarding patents on pharmaceuticals, the Pirate Party proposes increasing government support for R&D to make up for loss of private R&D if there were no patent protection for innovation.
• Personal Privacy: “All attempts to curtain these rights (e.g. privacy) must be questioned and met with powerful opposition.” Hence their position that anti-terror laws nullify due process and run the risk of being used as repressive tools.

Recently it was revealed that after the forcible closure (or at least effort at closing down The Piratebay.org there was a 300% surge in new sites to get pirated software, videos and music. It would appear that stopping piracy for the recording and film industry is best done in silence! The more they try to whack and pull out the weeds of piracy the more the spores shoot off in all directions and the larger the resistance. This could well be a fight the rights holders end up losing or at best end up changing the landscape from a legislative point of view into something they would not necessarily be very happy with. It is almost as if the young people using the web have found a special kind of power that the suit wearing executives from large corporations with their million Dollar lawyers just do not know how to combat, because the more effort they put in, the harder they get pushed back. And they are giving it their all, believe you me!

Would be interesting to see if a similar party sees the light in South Africa.

Entry Filed under: Broadband, General, General IT, World Wide Web