Posts Tagged ‘Pirate Party’
World’S First Pirate Isp Launches In Sweden
The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the countrys ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.
To defend the rights of BitTorrent users worldwide, the Swedish Pirate Party volunteered to provide bandwidth to The Pirate Bay after previous hosts got into legal trouble in May. At the beginning of July, the Pirate Party surprised again. Not only would they be The Pirate Bays new host, but they would use Parliamentary immunity to run the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.
Now the Party have made another interesting announcement. Together with technology partners, they will enter the broadband market with Pirate ISP, a new service designed to deliver consumer Internet in line with the Pirate Partys ideals.
Gustav Nipe, student of economics, long-standing Pirate Party member and CEO of Pirate ISP told TorrentFreak that Pirate ISP is based on the hacker ontology. If you see something and you think its broken you build a patch and fix it. With that as a reference point we are launching an ISP. This is one way to tackle the big brother society.
The Pirate ISP is needed in different ways. One is to compete with other ISPs, let them fight more for our internet. If they dont behave there will always be someone else taking their share, Nipe added.
Aside from the competition angle, Gustav Nipe told TorrentFreak that the Pirate ISP will maximize privacy for all its customers. Operated by ViaEuropa the company behind the iPredator anonymity service Pirate ISP users will remain anonymous.
The service began beta testing in the city of Lund yesterday with around 100 residents of LKF, a housing organization whose aim is to provide quality accommodations at a reasonable cost.
After the first two weeks of testing, the initial expansion aim is to take 5% of the market in Lund and then set up in further locations around Sweden. This is a reasonable aim according to Nipe, who told TorrentFreak that they start small so they can assure quality service to all their customers.
At the Hacknight conference in Malm, Nipe told Shane Murray from nrli.tv that they will not allow the Swedish Government to monitor Pirate ISP users and will refuse to retain logs. He warned that any attempt to force it to do otherwise will result in a constitutional issue.
Nipe was also clear on how Pirate ISP would respond to outside interference, in particular that from the United States.
They can bring on whatever they have, we will refuse to follow there. We dont agree with what they are saying and we dont agree with the laws they are making so if they have an issue with us, then we will have an issue but thats it.
For most potential Pirate ISP customers who intend to use the service to file-share, the immediate threats will come from closer to home, primarily from Henrik Pontn at Svenska Antipiratbyrn, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau. Nipe said they are prepared to deal with this challenge.
It would be a pity to reveal all the tricks that we have, so we will save those for later. But we have ways to ensure that no customer should have to get a sad letter home from Henrik Pontn.
For his part, yesterday Pontn seemed unimpressed.
Our investigations have focused on people with much higher safety. The question has been asked a thousand times before, he said. When the police come calling, they must disclose the information.
It seems that the wider Swedish public wont have long to wait to discover if Pirate ISP can live up to its promises. According to Nipe they will roll out big in Sweden at the end of this summer.
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Swedish Pirate Party To Run The Pirate Bay From Parliament
Swedish Pirate Party intent on running the Pirate Bay from Parliament
You may remember that, back in May of this year, the Swedish Pirate Party became the new ISP of the Pirate Bay. That alone was not only surprising, but proved to be politically spectacular in the rawest sense of the word. Now the Pirate Party wants to take their stand even further, and plans to use a section of the Swedish Constitution to allow them to host the seemingly indefatigable TPB from inside Parliament.
The Party announced their plan in a blog post at their official site on Friday. They state that while there shouldn’t be a need for such drastic action, that hosting the torrent site from within the walls of Swedish Parliament would carry “an important symbolic value.” There’s not much doubt that they’re right about symbolism there.
The Party references a section of the Swedish Constitution that protects MP’s from prosecution if they’re acting in accordance with their political mandate. In this case, hosting the Pirate Bay would not only fall under that wide umbrella, but would also provide a measure of immunity that would be much harder to crack than ever before.
Whether or not the Party will be able to pull this off hinges on the coming September elections, which as TorrentFreak points out, currently shows a 4% gap that needs to be filled for the party to get a seat. Given their success last year in winning a seat in the EU Parliament, I’d say they’ve got a decent chance.
Dutch Pirate Party Joins Election Race
Following in the footsteps of the Swedes and Germans, the Dutch Pirate Party has decided to join the national elections being held this spring. The Pirate Party booked a surprising victory by scooping two seats in the European Parliament last year, but has yet to score its first elected seat in a national Parliament.
2009 was a breakthrough year for the Pirate Party movement. With more than 7 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party secured two seats in the European Parliament.
A few weeks later, the Pirates in Germany entered the local Parliament after a member of another party switched sides.
In 2010 the Pirate Parties hope to continue this hot streak, especially during the Swedish national elections later this year. However, Sweden is not the only country where a Pirate Party will end up at the ballot. In the UK the local Pirate Party hopes to compete as well and the Dutch party has now decided to do the same.
In recent months there has been a lot of political debate regarding Dutch copyright law which currently allows people to download copyrighted movies and music for personal use. Several established parties have shown interest in criminalizing file-sharers, something the Pirate Party hopes to avoid.
Instead, the Pirates would like to shorten the copyright term to 5 years and legalize sharing of all copyrighted material on the Internet. Tim Kuik, head honcho at the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, is not afraid of politically organized pirates and described the Partys plans as short sighted and unrealistic.
Samir Allioui, Chairman of the Pirate Party, told TorrentFreak that hes very happy with Kuiks negative comments. He gives people a good reason to vote for us, he said, referring to the negative view that most people have of BREIN.
If elected, the party will do everything it can to stop abuses of copyright, promote Net Neutrality and push for patent reform. The party is further committed to increasing transparency, strengthening fundamental rights and protecting privacy.
Despite the enthusiasm of the partys members, there is still a long way to go before they can actually compete in the election on June 9th. One of the biggest hurdles is the requirement to deposit a sum of 12,000 euros, a barrier which is meant to prevent too many parties from entering the election.
Samir is confident that they will be able to raise the money in the weeks to come. He encourages all sympathizers to become a member of the Party and help to get the Pirate Party on the ballot.
Source: torrentfreak.com