Pirate News Top Three 23/04/2013

Worried About Accidental Illegal Filesharing? Get Insurance.

The Local has reported that the Swedish Pirate Party has unveiled a “File-Sharer Fine" Insurance, which will pay out on any fines a person receives as a result of file-sharing. The argument goes that it can be difficult to know what is legal to download and what isn’t, as a result of poor copyright policy as well as contradicting laws in different countries (e.g. regarding mp3/mpg licences). The idea comes from planka.nu, a similar scheme in which people can insure against getting caught without a ticket on the Stockholm Metro system. It would be interesting to see what the premiums would be like and how they are calculated.

Full Article At The Local: Pirate Party launches file-sharer fine insurance

 

International Pirate Parties Compared

With the ever-growing Pirate Movement straddled across many continents and very largely influenced by their respective memberships (and rightly so), The Pirate Times has started working on a table which compares the policies that national Pirate Parties have decided to campaign or have a policy on, although at the moment it is very general. Interesting points include the focus on Church-State Separation in a number of Eastern European states, as well as the obvious near-unanimous agreement on policies such as Patent Reform, Privacy and Net Neutrality.

Full Article Available At The Pirate Times: The Pirate Times Pirate Party Policy Comparison Table

 

Cameron To Opt-Out of EU Social Media Policy?

It seems popular right now to slag off anything that comes from the EU; the apparently undemocratic institution we elect MEPs to every year is a force of evil, makes it illegal for us to call ourselves British anymore, etc. etc. Although this might win votes, it seems the current government is taking the very position it criticises the Labour Party of doing; namely opposition for the sake of opposition. David Cameron seems to be intent on opting-out of EU legislation that would mean companies such as Google and Facebook are required to remove all of your data if you request it. I’ll leave the question open as to whether this seems a good idea or not.

Full Article At Pirate Party UK Blog: Opinion: Cameron Wants to Forget The Right to be Forgotten

Pirate News Top Three 28/02/2013

1. Pirate Bay Hosting Sails To Spain And Norway

 

As a result of pressure put onto the Swedish Pirate Party, the decision was made by both the Swedish Party and The Pirate Bay to move its web hosting services to the Pirate Parties of Spain and Norway. Although The Bay had already moved most of it's services "To The Cloud", the Swedish Party was still providing web hosting for the website. Now, bandwidth will be split between the Spanish and Norwegian Pirates, who will be providing The Bay with an "exit node". It is most likely both of these countries were chosen as a result of of their respective courts ruling in favour of defendants of filesharing cases.



Full Article At Wired UK: The Pirate Bay moves to safer shores, Norway and Spain

2.  64 Pirate Parties Worldwide

 

The number of Pirate Parties worldwide has now reached 64 in total, with 50 of those being active and/or registered in their respective countries, according to The Pirate Times. Australia, Norway and Poland are those most recently to have a Pirate Party registered with the governments of their countries. What's more, there are more 600,000 people are following a Pirate Party on Facebook or Twitter worldwide. Tunisia, Serbia and Isreal have more than one country claiming to be the official one. Maybe the Copyright movement should do a double take at those figures.

Full Article At The Pirate Times: The Pirate World 2013

3. Pirates Without Borders

 

European Pirate Parties of different countries sharing a common language have started to "twin" and share common knowledge between each other. Known as “grenzenlos Piraten-Partnerschaft” (or Borderless Pirate Partnership), parties in German-speaking parts of the Netherlands and Germany are meeting up to share/copy ideas, with those from Brussels and Liege likely to follow. Here's hoping this could be replicated between UK and Irish Pirates.

Full Article At The Pirate Times: Pilot project for International Pirate Partnerships Announced

Pirate News Top Three - 25/02/2013

In a new daily feature, a daily summary of the top news in the 4 areas I cover in this blog: Pirates, Green, Gaming and Politics. In this first post? Pirates!

Just as a quick summary; the Pirate Posts will feature issues on technology, media, copyright, and the politics of these issues. Under no circumstances does this blog link to or condone pirate activities; it is my personal belief that, although copyright law needs reforming, one should always obey whatever the current laws are. For free music, film and software, choose only those freebies for which the copyright holder has given permission to download freely. A good start would be Frostclick, Frostwire's sister site, which includes only legal free downloads. If you are caught knowingly breaking the law, you deserve any penalty you get!

 1. Live Chat With Your Pirate In Parliament!

If you are a member of the European Union (or even if you are just interested) and willing to listen in Nordic at times, join your Pirate Party MEP for a live chat every Thursday at 17:30 in the UK (18:30 CET). The first of these was held in the Thursday just gone, with such fascinating insights as how lobbyists tried to trick MEPs into softening Data Protection laws for consumers. I wonder if any of our mainstream parties would be so open and direct with it's constituents!

Main Article by The Pirate Times: What Would You Ask A Pirate MEP?

2. Nintendo Wants Websites Blocked

Each year companies get to submit a list of proposals to the US government on how they could improve copywrong enforcement across the world, known as the Special 301 Report. Included in Nintendo's letter are such reccomendations as adding China, Spain, and Brazil (among others) to the USA's watchlist; publicizing raids and other sanctions to increase awareness; and giving stronger penalties to copyright infringers as well as taking to court more high-profile infringers. Nintendo's operating income has been around 37.3 Billion Yen (around £270 million) each year.

Main Article by TorrentFreak: Nintendo Wants To Hunt Game Pirates And Block Websites

3. Firefox Launch OS At Mobile World Congress

Mozilla has "Unleashed The Fox"; those attending the Mobile World Congress will be able to experience Firefox OS and The Fox firsthand. This is an interesting development, as it marks the first mainstream Mobile OS entirely created by a not-for-profit organisation. It will be interesting to see how it fares against Google's Android, which has already cornered most of the mobile market. Although Android is mostly Open Source, it is developed by it's for-profit parents Google.

Main Article by The Mozilla Blog: Moblizing Mozilla: Blazing Your Own Path

Professors Hunted Down For Pro File-Sharing Opinion

Torrentfreak reports that Roger Wallis (a multimedia professor brought in to explain the positive aspects of file-sharing during trials against the Pirate Bay founders) had numerous attacks on his credibility during the trial after making the statement that piracy can actually boost sales in certain circumstances.

It isn't new for large corporations to use lawyers to attempt to discredit professors for disagreeing with their views (just look at anyone trying to portray anything negative about pharmaceutical companies), but it does represent an act of desperation on the part of the music/film industry that they have to resort to such personal attacks.

Full Article at Torrentfreak: "Pro File-Sharing Professors ‘Hunted Down’ by the Copyright Lobby"

Legally Download "TPB AFK": A Documentary on the Pirate Bay Trials (from The Pirate Bay; licensed for free distribution)

FBI Agents Torrent Pirates Of The Caribbean (or they may as well)

With the help of ScanEye, a Bittorrent monitoring company, TorrentFreak has reported that a number of IP addresses for the popular file-sharing protocol come from non other than those registered to various FBI agencies. It is also likely that these would have been downloads for personal use, as they were spread across a number of months. This contrasts with their behaviour in undercover "entrapment".

Would people working for one of the biggest "intelligence" agencies in the world really be so careless? As one commenter points out:

At the end of the day, even the FBI's staff are just regular people like you and I who want to experience and share culture with everyone abroad.

It would certainly be ironic if the agency had to arrest its own staff as a result of RIAA/MPAA tracking.

Full Article at Torrentfreak: FBI Employees Download Pirated Movies and TV-Shows

Abandon Ship! German Pirate Party Shipwreck In Elections?

In the last couple of weeks the German Pirate Party has failed to secure a seat in the state Parliament elections in Lower Saxony, with momentum fading since the rise of pirate parties across the world following attempted shutdowns and arrests over Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay.

This follows an apparent tirade of negative press and bad publicity over arguments within the party, as well as claims of being unable to shift the opinion that The Pirates are a single issue party concerned with copyright.

However, the profile of the German Party has in general risen since first coming onto the scene a year and a half ago. They are concerned a seperate political entity rather than a fringe party, and the recent result should increase state funding for the party.

Full Article at The Pirate Times: Lower Saxony Pirates Fail to Gain Seats in State Parliament

A New Blog, An New Attempt At Design

While watching the events surrounding the SOPA bill, and wanting to get into political blogging of some kind, I decided to create a new blog.

Not one to be a bit un-controversial, I decided to create a logo and caption based on that of the Green Party and the Pirate Party, as they are both parties I support and as I believe they are both compatible to create a kind of mega eco-tech-savvy chimera of some kind.

Anyway, there are my results. I will be getting back into the HTML course shortly as well.

Related articles

• We are still against SOPA/PIPA (plus best practices on marking CC-licensed works) (creativecommons.org)
• Green Party calls for sustainable economics that puts society, democracy and jobs first. (greenparty.org.uk)