Swedish Pirate Party Predicted to Win EU Parliament Seat
 

Pirate Bay guilty verdict surges membership to over 42,000, and leads pollsters to predict it will surpass the 4% threshold necessary to get a Swedish seat in the assembly.

The conviction of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site for facilitating copyright infringement continues to reverberate in that country.

Many youth have been angered over what they see as an intrusion by foreign, primarily US-based, entertainment industry conglomerates into the private affairs of a sovereign country. They understand that copyright laws were essentially written in a world before digital content that no longer exists and paralyze the ability of citizens to freely communicate and interact with pone another.

Adding fuel to the fire was the recent disclosure that the presiding judge in the Pirate Bay trial, Judge Tomas Norström, is an active member of several pro-copyright groups, rendering his decision anything but unbiased in the eyes of many.

The Pirate Party, an advocate of copyright law reform, has seen its membership surge since the trial ended, rising from a little over 10,000 to well over 42,000.

“We young people have a whole platform on the internet, where we have all our social contacts - it is there that we live,” said Malin Littorin-Ferm of the party’s Ung Pirat youth league to a crowd protesting the verdict in Stockholm. “The state is trying to control the internet and, by extension, our private lives.”

The Pirate Party is determined to make file-sharing legal in Sweden, and it now can count of the support of many now galvanized by the court’s decision.

“People know that it isn’t enough to listen to ordinary politicians in order to make file sharing legal,” said Jan Lindgren, head of the Pirate Party’s Stockholm district to Radio Sweden at the Pirate Bay trial. “The only way to change that is to vote us in – both in the EU and the Swedish parliament.”

According to a new survey, the Pirate Party has gained enough voter support to do just that, and pollsters predict it will win 5.1% of the Swedish vote, well above the 4% threshold necessary to win a Swedish seat in the assembly.

The poll, commissioned by Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, also says the Pirate Party is the second largest among those aged 19-29yo. It ranks 4th among 30-44yo.

“These citizens have never previously had a significant issue with which to become involved,” said Rickard Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate party. “It is not that politics does not interest young people - it is that the former generation’s problems and political solutions do not interest the youth.”

Let’s hope the poll is correct. It’s about time file-sharers had someone representing their interests for a change.

The election is set for June 7th.

Please comment!
Romano

Now that's interesting. I didn't follow the case closely, but I am aware about the general issues and such. And I always thought that internet and related IT issues could only be discussed in a responsible way on the political arena when the people who used it for something else than paying bills and shopping and that really understand what the internet means get involved politically, in the party way, not just raising their voice or lobbying halfheartedly.

And copyright is an essentially flawed idea: although I hope to sell what I create in all the mediums I am involved and make a living from it, copyright laws seems more intent on protecting the right of the publishers to benefit from your work than on protecting the creator.

The world continue changing and advancing, and obsolete laws created with the viewpoint and the paradigm of the past cannot even hope to regulate the ever-advancing world. Laws should not be simply patched at every change, they should be though again from scratch and replace the old ones. Only by creating the laws with the eyes of today we could create a legislation that makes sense today.




(I hope I could make my point clear... 4:56 a.m. in the morning here. And I want to make clear that, although I am talking about law-making here, I am more of an anarchist kind of guy, with more trust on self-government and cooperativism than on capitalist representative "democracy").

Never in my life have I met a judge I didn't want to punch in the face, and it seems this one would make my knuckles itchy. Not to go into details, but due to my mother's second divorce many years ago, I've had to appear before court to testify and each judge was a pompous arrogant thick headed moron. Considering that most judges are so self righteous, to a level where they think their shit doesn't smell, it's no surprise to see such level of corruption where they actually let a judge like this rule over a case where he's obviously biased.

Well, it's very likely the case will get a different turn after the appeal - it's unlikely this verdict will stick.

judge is supposed to be "arrogant", judging on pure facts and don't involve personally in the matter in any way

No, a judge is meant to be OBJECTIVE. Arrogance means that the judge already believes he knows it all before the case has even been brought forward meaning that testimonies won't alter his oppinion. In this case, it's obvious that the judge was going to rule in favour of copyright from the get go so how can you have justice?

In my personal experience, judges are devious scumbags. If, like in this case, they already strongly lean towards one side, they'll often undermine the other side. There's a reason why court rulings are so often overthrown after the appeal. The ideal would be to have a judge that has no strong oppinion about the situation and let him make up his mind based on the merits of the case. Giving it to a judge who is the opposite of this, shows a real lack of sense on the side of the justice system.

Robot judge? :borg:

I AM THE HONORABLE ROBOT JUDGE. ORDER IN COURT PLEASE!

You know, piracy would be awesome if there were actual pirates plundering delivery trucks containing games, but it's just not that way.

:hihihi:

It's really not that hard to find a judge that doesn't lean strongly to one or another side. It reminds me of this case where a judge had to rule a rape case mere months after his own daughter had been raped. He dealt the maximum punishment and even tried to pin "attempted murder" on him to be able to cross that limit. The press got word of it and the result was that it was ruled that the judge was impartial which nearly got the rapist out of jail. It goes to show how dangerous it is to let a judge rule over a case where he's too closely connected to the subject matter.

Well, you know, here sometimes appear on the news the "asphalt pirates", which is the nickname we give to those that intercept cargo trucks on the road, and steal the cargo or the truck itself with the cargo. It's not as romantic as one could believe, nor as colorful as true pirates. That's why global warming still goes on the rise.