Rick Falkvinge, piratpartiet

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Artiklar: 1-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120, 121-150

New Lows In Neverending ACTA Corruption
2011-11-23 12:27:00
Corruption – Henrik Alexandersson: The harshly criticized ACTA agreement (which, among other things, may result in severe limitations in the freedom of the net) has been reviewed by the Legal Services of the Europe an Parliament. Rumors state that the resulting report is very critical of the agreement. The report has been classified as restricted (meaning secret for all intents and purposes). TRANSLATED ARTICLE This is a translation of an article by Henrik “Hax” Alexandersson. The original is here. A discussion about this report was announced for today’s meeting with the European Parliament’s committee for international trade, INTA. Behind locked doors. Of course, this led to protests — from Members of the European Parliament as well as from activists on the outside. Somebody got cold feet, and it was announced that the discussion had been postponed until the next meeting. But late last night, INTA’s coordinators had a meeting — an...

Copyright Monopoly Study: ?Without Copyright, No Computers?!?
2011-11-22 14:11:00
Copyright Monopoly: A report named “Copyright In The EU — What Next?” landed on my desk. I didn’t have to read any longer than the introduction, explaining the values, to shake my head in disbelief. The name of the report is the EU-esque IP/A/STOA/FWC/2008-096/LOT6/SC1, and it begins with the usual “copyright [monopoly] is difficult, there are many troubles on the roads ahead, it is territorial, international cooperation derives from Berne 1886 and WIPO Copyright Treaty 1996″ etc etc etc. Then, it tries to give the background for policymaking. I get to, and balk at, this part in its section 3.1.2, “Copyright basics” (my highlights): The so-called copyright industries are comprised of two main groups: the core copyright industries are based upon the creation distribution, and sale of copyright products and services (e.g., magazines, motion pictures, recorded music, software). Copyright dependent industries are defined as those indu...

What Does It Cost To Buy The Internet?
2011-11-20 15:54:00
Infrastructure – Emma Opassande: What does it cost to buy the Internet? I have the impression that the amount is sufficiently small to make it appear like a good investment. Now, the Internet has not been for sale in the traditional way, but appears to be open to monopolization by law. And this has happened in a relative calm and peace, since the critics of this behavior have been dismissed as just being interested in downloading music for free. Martin gave a very good walkthrough of pirate policy to Sofia Hård. I’m reacting somewhat over his choice of words, that Sofia is “out of her depth” — because, after all, what she’s writing is what a lot of people think they know about pirates. At the same time as pirate issues keep getting relegated to “you only want stuff for free”, the lobby organizations have been working diligently towards politicians and received legislation intended to help them — since all those pirates steal...

Censoring The Net Is A Human Right Violation
2011-11-18 21:31:00
United States – Travis McCrea: As anyone with an Internet connection knows right now, the United States Senate is looking to pass the “Stop Online Piracy Act” SOPA. Looking at the list of organizations that support this legislation would lead you to believe that it is a great tool to protect the “intellectual property” rights of artists. This entry is cross posted from PirateWho?!, a website dedicated to promoting the Pirate Ideology primarily in North America. Organizations that support this Act are: U.S. Chamber of Commerce Motion Picture Association of America Independent Film & Television Alliance National Association of Theatre Owners Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc., National Music Publishers’ Association American Federation of Musicians Directors Guild of America International Brotherhood of Teamsters Screen Actors Guild National Cable & Telecommunications Association Recording Industry Association of America Alliance ...

Huge Win In GA Opinion From European Court Of Justice
2011-11-17 14:38:00
Copyright Monopoly: An opinion from the General Advocate in the European Court of Justice today slams the door shut for the copyright industry’s strategy of suing people who share culture and knowledge. This is part of the long-running conflict with the copyright industry in Sweden suing an the Internet Service Provider ePhone for access to subscriber data under the Swedish grotesque over-implementation of the European IPRED directive. EPhone has won the case in the district court and the appeals court; the copyright industry has appealed it to the Swedish Supreme Court which, anticipating the request from the parties, asked the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an opinion. (In the European Union, the ECJ is the highest court, above the national Supreme Courts. To save time, the national Supreme Courts can ask the ECJ for a pre-verdict on some specific aspects in order to shave a couple of years off a case in the last step of appeal.) Specifically, the ECJ was presented...

After German Law Annulled, Pirates in Europarl Through At Least 2019
2011-11-16 16:00:00
Pirate Parties: Last week, a German court struck down the German five-percent barrier for elections to the European Parliament. This means that the German Piratenpartei will get its first EU seat at about one per cent of the votes total. The court decision is a testament to German courts still working, and we remember how they also struck down the Data Retention Directive as unconstitutional. (Unfortunately, this last fact has not prevented the EU Big Brother Hawks from clapping their ears and going la la la la la.) As Germany has 97 seats in the 2014 EU elections, and lack an initial threshold, this means that every party will get its first seat at 0.7 to 0.8 per cent of the vote, using the Sainte-Laguë method for seat distribution. The German Piratenpartei has never been at those low levels in any election, or for that manner, in any poll since its first election. It is currently polling well above the five-percent barrier that doesn’t exist any longer. Thus, regardless...

SOPA Supporter = A WIMP
2011-11-16 06:59:00
Copyright Monopoly – Andrew Norton: If there’s one thing that makes US Politics amusing, it’s the sheer effort that is put into legislation, or at least the legislation’s name. Wrap a bill in a catch backronym, even if it is the opposite of the bill, and it is almost certain to pass! US politics is filled with acronyms. From positions ? POTUS, FLOTUS, SCOTUS (President, First Lady, and Supreme Court of the United States respectively) ? to bills, USA PATRIOT Act being the most famous (standing for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, possibly the LEAST patriotic act in 50 years). Currently, SOPA and PROTECT IP are the two hot bills in Congress (Stopping Online Piracy Act, and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) and in the spirit, it’s time to christen the supporters of that act with their own moniker. They are…...

European Politicians Respond To Euro Crisis By Outlawing More Bad News
2011-11-15 15:18:00
Freedom of Speech: This is so far out you couldn’t make it up. As the Euro crisis worsens, European politicians have resorted to dealing with the problem by outlawing unfavorable financial information that concern the Euro. EU Observer has the story this morning. This is an The Onion story. This would be hilarious if we saw it on a parody TV show about North Korea. That’s the kind of contexts I’d expect to see this story in. But these are not politicos in The Onion or North Korea, these are EU politicians that claim to be defending the liberties of the Enlightenment, specifically including freedom of speech. And yet, here they are, literally outlawing bad news. The next time we see something on the net that they perceive as a threat against the status quo or against a favorite political project, we should remember that they are prepared to go so far as to outlaw bad news when those messages don’t fit their preconceived notions. The net will not be defend...

A Dystopian Future Is Not Inevitable
2011-11-13 18:00:00
Swarm Economy – Zacqary Adam Green: As the unemployment crises of developed nations persist, there’s a growing sentiment that technology is to blame. It’s not just a neo-Luddite backlash against progress, but a fear amongst tech proponents that the bleak predictions of cyberpunk fiction may be coming true. They don’t have to. It’s debatable how much technological progress is to blame for the current unemployment crisis, but it certainly will be a central issue eventually. Software engineer Jon Evans sums up the problem quite nicely: America, Europe, and Japan all seem to be lurching from crisis to crisis without respite; most of the developed world is struggling with debilitating levels of unemployment; but at the same time, the tech world is booming like it?s 1999. Doesn?t that seem kind of weird? It?s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys ...

Three Policies to Rule Them All
2011-11-13 00:15:00
Infopolicy – Andrew Norton: In March of this year, Rick produced his ‘Pirate Wheel’. A system that tried to set out his view on what the Pirate Party stands for. I, myself, had my own version, one that was based on 3 legs or pillars, without which there is (in my opinion) no stable support. It seems to be a truism in Anglo-politics, that a ‘single issue party is a waste of time’. Same with a 3, or 5 issue party. That, in fact, if you don’t have a comprehensive plan on every conceivable topic, you must a waste of time, because you’ve ‘not thought things through’. The idea is one that seems to resonate, but isn’t all that true when you think about life. How detailed are the rules and regulations you have to follow every single day? Do you need a specific set of instructions for handling each and every junction as you travel to work/school, do you need to plan out ahead of time what you plan to say to people you might mee...

Origins Of The Pirate Party: Privacy, Sharing, Innovation
2011-11-07 06:07:00
Pirate Parties: I sometimes see claims in media that the Pirate Party was born out of The Pirate Bay, after the raid on May 31st, 2006. This is wrong. It has entirely different, and earlier, origins. The stories that claim the party was born out of the raid on The Pirate Bay do have one point, though, and that is the observation that you can generally see what gave birth to what by putting all the related events on a timeline. That which happened earlier are possible causes of things further down the road. However, putting things on a timeline and looking for proximities is not enough. You can’t spot just one event and claim it was the birth of a new global political movement that was born two days later or something like that; it takes months and months of thinking and planning before something can be started. However, once that thinking is done enough, the formation can be triggered by such an event. This is also what happened. The Pirate Party has its origins in three ...

Pirate Party Voted Against Censorship In European Parliament Today
2011-10-27 15:18:00
Freedom of Speech: Today, the European Parliament voted on whether to introduce web censorship with the intention of combating child pornography. The Pirate Party representative was unfortunately only one of two representatives who voted against it. When it comes to child pornography, the subject is so stigmatized that people are expected to give up any of their other duties to fight it, regardless of whether the methods are even effective and proportionate. I am not prepared to give up the duty of defending the European Convention on Human Rights, reporters’ rights to protect their sources, freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, and due process of law. Neither is our Member of European Parliament. Unfortunately, all but one of the others were. In particular, the debate quickly turns dishonest. If you are opposing legislation claimed to fight child pornography, the finger is immediately pointed at you for defending child pornography and suggesting you maybe even...

OMGWTF: Passwords of 93,000 Politicians, Reporters, Bloggers Leaked
2011-10-26 00:20:00
Sweden: In what is arguably the largest-scale security breach so far in Sweden that didn’t come in the form of a parliamentary decision, a leak of 93,678 password-email combinations became public today. The accounts belong to all the top reporters, politicians, and bloggers in Sweden. Somebody trolled the entire establishment with gleeful precision in using this data. William Petzäll, a high-profile defected Sweden Democrat who is now an independent Member of Parliament, started tweeting an apparent revenge on his former party this morning. Petzäll claimed that the leadership of the Sweden Democratic party (“SD”) had had access to most reporters’ and competing politicans’ email accounts for years, and that this was how they navigated their way into Parliament last year. To prove his point, he tweeted a number of MD5 password hashes and matching email addresses. As pretty much the entire political press was already paying attention to his tweets, th...

Damn. This Is What It Looks Like, Isn?t It?
2011-10-25 09:00:00
Corruption: One of the key insights of the Pirate community is that power is expected to corrupt people. It is not just that it is possible, rather, it is near inevitable. Therefore, you can’t trust people to not be people; instead, you must design the system to survive human nature. I had one such epiphany last week as I got a routine mail from one of many seeking contact with me. Since stepping down from party leadership, my role has primarily been to connect people, observe and give feedback, and think aloud — acting as a classic senior Greycloak without any formal decision power. Now, our movement is clearly in an underdog position against an establishment who are defending its positions of entitlement. We do not want to fix their structures; to them, we are the problem, not the fix. Therefore, being regarded as a disease in the system, you come to expect that your rights are ignored and the privileges of the nobility upheld; a two-tier justice system is enforce...

As German Pirate Party Hits 10%, Some Thoughts On The Next Five Years
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Pirate Parties: This morning, the German Pirate Party hit double digits in a nationwide poll. That was a landmark event, no matter how you look at it. As the first double-digit poll reverbs in the five-year-old Pirate Party community, I’d like to take some time to reflect on these and the next five years. Not only is the German Piratenpartei polling at double digits, by the way: they are also in Kingmaker Position, holding the balance of power between the German political blocks. If this was the next election result, that means that they can ask for basically anything and make it happen in Germany and Europe. Next German elections are two years out, but this is already turning a lot of policymaking around. (Side note: with polls around these numbers, it is imperative that the party leader with support is available to be visible faces of the party on all available media time. While completely not my decision, I would therefore suggest that some of the Berlin money for assi...

LIVE: File Sharing Trial in Sollentuna, Sweden
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Copyright Monopoly: Today [October 17, 2011], a trial against culture sharing took place in Sollentuna, Sweden. A citizen was accused of the “crime” of sharing 45,000 tracks of music. Live coverage took place here and is now concluded. 14:15 A summary of today’s impressions: the defense tried the approach used in Göteborg against the 15-year-old on trial there, claiming that they didn’t know that files would be shared on downloading. As the defense worked in Göteborg, it is conceivable — but impossible to say how likely — that the same defense will work here in Sollentuna. What speaks against it working here would be that the defendant is working as a systems administrator, which may make it hard to claim lack of knowledge of computer and application operations. 11:55 The trial is closed. Verdict will be communicated on October 31 at 11:00 CET. 11:55 The public attorneys claim compensation. 11:53 The defense pounds strongly on the argument th...

Column: DRM Needs To Be Banned Because It?s Toxic
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Columns: With the European Greens? adoption of the Pirate perspective on the copyright monopoly, I have received a few questions from entrepreneurs, the copyright industry lobby, and libertarians why we want to ban Digital Restrictions Management. It?s a good question that deserves a good answer. First of all, DRM is a type of fraud that robs citizens of their lawful rights. The copyright monopoly is chock full of exceptions that allow copying in many circumstances; DRM takes no notice of this whatsoever but establishes and enforces a superset of restrictions that goes well above and beyond those of the law. Therefore, to begin with, a ban on DRM can be seen as a form of consumer protection. Read the full column over at TorrentFreak >>.

The Internet?s Library
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Activism – Travis McCrea: When you suffer writers block, I find the best solution is to rip off someone else’ work (and take someone’s work who is promoting a product that you own), this is an article written by aeliusblythe (a commenter here) about The Ultimate Ebook Library (TUEBL). Just a quick side note, I wanted to write something about TUEBL myself, but aeliusblythe is much more intelligent than I am. Plus, I am doing planning for #OCCUPYVANCOUVER. Also the site may be down or shaky today, because we just came off a long down-time due a shaky server move… so everyone will be downloading their books. :) Be patient. TUEBL, or The Ultimate E-Book Library, is the place for books. DRM-free books. Users can downloadbooks that they want to be able to read freely on their choice of devices. And true to the symbiotic nature of user-driven sites, they can also upload their own DRM-free files for others to use. So far, it is home to over 6000 titles, but if ...
Mer om: Books

If You Play By The Rules, You Will Always Lose
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Activism: People sometimes ask me if I have a motto to live by. I have several, but one stands out. I have posted it to the inside of my front door, so that I see it every time I leave my house. It reads, “If you play by the rules, you will always lose.” Some people interpret this as an instruction to bend or break the rules. It’s not. It’s the insight that you can live beside them; that you should actively choose to not let the rules apply to you. Think Matrix (a shame that movie never got any sequels, but that’s beside the point of this article). Rules are written to apply to other people than the one writing the rules. It is a way of corralling people. Even though the rules technically apply to the writer too, those rules are written to keep the writer on top. You can easily find many examples of this — rules for students in a university, for example, or the entire job market. And yes, politics. Definitely politics. Following the rules mea...

The Teachers? Guild ? A Short Story From a Parallel Universe
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Copyright Monopoly – David Xanatos: Imagine a world, in which when you teach something to someone the knowledge is considered your “intellectual property”. Your students are not permitted to teach the things they have learned from you to anyone else, neither for money, nor even for free. To become a teacher, one must buy into the guild for a lot of money, inherit rights from someone who was a teacher, or teach something that hasn’t been learned from anyone, i.e. something newly invented. NEW CONTRIBUTOR David Xanatos joins the Falkvinge & Co. team today, opening with this article. Being a teacher was a very powerful position. Having a monopoly to teach and usually even your own districts to educate exclusively, a teacher could charge any price. Furthermore, teachers even had the right to dictate the purpose and conditions on which the knowledge they taught was allowed to be used. People living near each other were sometimes infringing on these right...
Mer om: Fantasy

We Demand Separation Of Corporation And State
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Corruption: A quote flashed by in the night in my Twitter flow: We Demand Separation Of Corporation And State. This was the most mediagenic soundbite I’ve seen in a long time, one that I took immediately to heart. While it was quoted in a context of Occupy Wall Street, it relates to everything we do. In the Swedish Pirate Party, we sometimes talk about Lessig’s Journey and how it relates to our experiences. Lawrence Lessig started out by creating Creative Commons, and after ten years, realized that more is needed to fight the creepage of the copyright monopoly; that it is a symptom of a much larger problem. He is now fighting corruption full-time instead. Our experiences are similar, although we have chosen a different route: where Lessig and similar people tries to fix the system from the outside, we try to fix it by flushing corrupt politicians and their power from the inside. The problem isn’t necessarily Parliament; the problem is that Parliament doesnR...

Novi Sad, You?re Doing It Right
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Serbia: I’m currently wrapping up after having given a presentataion on changing the world in Novi Sad, Serbia. To my astonishment, the city has a fully-built city-wide wifi without login. I always enjoy traveling East Europe, as the cities and environments are so asymmetrical compared to West Europe. For instance, I walked around the entire city center yesterday trying to buy a mouse for my laptop, to no avail. There simply weren’t any electronics stores at all. However, what I did find was even more amazing. Despite not having any visible consumer electronics, there is a city-wide wifi with the name GradNoviSad — meaning The City of Novi Sad — that does present you with a splash screen, but does not require any identity or credentials. The splash, I guess, is an attempt to say a polite “Hi and thank you for using Novi Sad’s network”. Apart from being a very sound infrastructure investment, with the best imaginable bang for the buck, t...

Huge Victory As EU Party Group Adopts Pirate Perspective On Copyright Monop
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Copyright Monopoly: The fifth largest party group in the European Parliament has adopted the Pirate Party positions on the copyright monopoly straight off the bat. This is a huge victory for the pirate perspective. Just like the Greens needed time and effort in their time to explain their new and odd perspective, the pirate perspective of openness, transparency and accountability gradually gains its foothold. Now, the European Green group (of which the Swedish Pirate Party is a member) has adopted the Pirate Party’s perspective on culture completely. This expands the exposure area of the pirate perspective considerably. (A primer on the European Parliament is that it is not composed of individual parties, but of party groups. The elected parties join together in groups. There are seven such groups in the European Parliament, and these groups act like individual parties would in a national parliament.) These are the positions on the copyright monopoly that are now adopted ...

My Two Heroes: Arkhipov and Petrov
2011-10-24 17:23:00
Activism: I’m sometimes asked if I have any heroes or other people I look up to. I do; I have two. Most people have never heard of them, and yet they have both shaped the world more than any American president, Chinese chairman, European commissioner or Soviet premier. The common factor between these two men, both officers of the former Soviet Union, is that they show that it is a matter of life and death that individual people have both the ability and the conscience to bend, break and disobey the rules, orders and laws. It is not just a matter of life and death for individual human beings, but as I have learned, even for all of humanity. The first man’s name is Vasili Arkhipov ? or ??????? ??????? in his own tongue. He was a liutenant on a Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The date was October 27, 1962. Their sub had been discovered and was under heavy barrage of depth charges from American warships for forcing it to surface. Hair-raising eyewitnes...

Awakening
2009-10-29 16:00:00
Jag har inte skrivit på ett tag. Jag har varit i UK förra veckan och har överlag haft ett fullt mötesschema, och det jag såg i London skrämde fullständigt vettet ur mig. Det har tagit lite tid att komma tillbaka till verkligheten. Som tur är kan vi glömma deras hot om att stänga av fildelare. Lord ...

Öppet brev till musikindustrin
2009-10-20 19:11:00
På min engelska blogg skriver jag ett öppet brev till musikindustrin, efter att ha öppningstalat på en av deras större konferenser här i Storbritannien, vilket onekligen gav intressanta reaktioner.

Dagens läsning hos Emma
2009-10-15 15:28:00
Dagens läsning står Emma för, med sin postning “Tungt idag. Nu får vi göra det själva istället.” Gå dit och läs. Anaïs instämmer och jämför med Marianne, på det sätt som bara hon kan göra.

FRA-voteringen är över
2009-10-14 16:54:00
FRA-voteringen är över. Idag, den 14 oktober, svek våra folkvalda representanter ännu en gång det uppdrag som de är tillsatta att sköta: att skydda medborgarna från staten. Röstsiffrorna var 159 för FRA, 152 mot, och 1 gul (avstår) (korrigerat: det stod 7 först). 37 var frånvarande. (Siffror för reservation 2. På reservation 1 var det en ...

Live: Camilla Lindberg (FP) om FRA
2009-10-14 16:43:00
Camilla går upp i talarstolen och deklarerar att det visserligen har skett förbättringar med lagen, MEN att hon kommer att trycka gult (avstå).

Live: Max Andersson (MP) om FRA
2009-10-14 16:41:00
Gah! Jag känner inte igen Max Andersson! Han har rakat av sig skägget och ser inte längre ut som en fältbiolog, utan som en politiker!! Andersson inleder skarpt och konstaterar att det har varit ett antal direkta sakfel som förts fram i kammaren under dagens debatt. Han går vidare med historiereflektioner: “Det vet väl alla att IB-affären ...