Swedish Filesharers Start 'The Piracy Party'

sp3tt writes "Tired of being called criminals, a group of Swedish filesharers have started a new political party, The Piracy Party (Piratpartiet in Swedish). The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws, reverse the data retention directive passed by the EU last month, and protect privacy with new laws. The party expresses no opinion on other subjects. The Piracy Party's webpage is so far only available in Swedish, at piratpartiet.se The party's goal is to get into to the parliament, which requires 4% of the votes, or roughly 225000 votes. Elections are held in September."

Re:Two questions:

[Anonymous Coward]

you have to be a resident for 7 (or a citizen) years to vote for the national parliment. shorter for local bodies.

Re:Two questions:

[Carthag]

Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and German have the same rules as far as compund words [wikipedia.org] go. Either language can make as long words as the situation requires, but it seldom does require longer words than such as "masseødelæggelsesvåben" (Danish for 'weapons of mass destruction', it's similar in Swedish & Norwegian).

Your two english examples are wrong though, we'd never combine words that way. It would be more like "You have to love languages where you can multiwordcombine in order to singleconceptexpress." Note that those two are the verbal forms of the (literally translated) words multiwordcombination (flerordskombination) and singleconceptexpression (enkeltkonceptsudtryk), none of which are used at all, but are readily understandable. See also Agglutinative languages [wikipedia.org] for some more information on the topic of forming new words by combining others (which does happen in English as well).

Re:Do Swede young males vote even?

[fuvm]

http://www.scb.se/templates/Publikation____47578.a sp [www.scb.se]

Crash course in Swedish:

Ålder = Age
Röstande i % av röstberättigade = Voters as % of allowed voters
Män = Men
Kvinnor = Women
Alla = All
år = years
Förstagångsväljare = First-time voters
Samtliga = All

The Bodström Shield

[liangzai]

Although I agree with many of their positions, they are a bit extreme in their desire to abolish ALL immaterial rights. Such rights, given that they are implemented the right way for a limited period, are useful to encourage invention and artistic production. The main problem of today is the excessive implementations of IM, not IM in itself.

One of their goals is to fire the current minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, and I whole-heartedly support this. He has implemented the "Bodström filters" in Sweden, and the country has thus joined the club of filter regimes (Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Bahrain etc.). He is also the man behind increased surveillance of phones, e-mail and other means of communication in Sweden, and he has been labeled as dangerous to society by many leading newspaper columnists.

The sad reality is that this "Bodström Shield" probably will be implemented in most of Europe rather than be dismantled. This is the unfortunate political trend of today, initiated by the Bush administration.

The Pirate Party says it will allow Mr. Bodström selling hotdogs outside the parliament building, at least in the winter.

The party stands no chance of reaching the required 4% to reach parliamentary seats, although Sweden has many such fringe parties. They may, however, affect the attitude of other parties, which may take a ride on the popular train of file sharing.

Re:Tricky!

[kidtwist]

It would be like naming Al Capone for the US senate to ban the Dry Law.

Al Capone did not want to repeal prohibition. It's what made him money. Professional racketeers usually like the laws they're breaking, it means they're performing a service for which others will pay them.

Re:Two questions:

[Enigma_Man]

The longest Swedish word is: NORDÖSTERSJÖKUSTARTILLERIFLYGSPANINGSSIMULATORANLÄ GGNINGSMATERIELUNDERHÅLLSUPPFÖLJNINGSSYSTEMDISKUSS IONSINLÄGGSFÖRBEREDELSEARBETEN, meaning "preparatory work on the contribution to the discussion on the maintaining system of support of the material of the aviation survey simulator device within the north-east part of the coast artillery of the Baltic"

Loose translation

[Anonymous Coward]

from http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=06/01/03/0045 243&mode=thread [technocrat.net] Here is a loose translation of the Pirate Party's start page:

Phase 1: Gather signatures for the Election Authority

We need 1500 signatures before the end of February in order to enter the parliamentary elections for 2006. In order to have a small safety margin we shall gather 2000 before February 4th, that gives us time to finish the administrivia for the Election Authority (which is nearly guaranteed to dislike us, or what)

Just right now we are validating all the signatures. We have received over 4000 signatures in less than 24 hours. Right now we are going through the whole lot to verify that we can provide them to the Election Authority.

What is this about?

The Pirate Party aims to take up the roll of maintaining a balance of power after the 2006 election. There are between 800 000 and 1 100 000 active file swappers in Sweden, and they are all tired of being called criminals. We need to have 225 000 of them with us to cross the four percent threshold and land in the roll of power balance.

To get one fourth of a criminalized and angry mob with us is far from unachievable. It is that which we shall achieve in the coming nine months.

Are youse serious?

"You had better believe it. This is the real thing."

What is the Pirate Party's platform?

The Pirate Party's platform is the abolishment of immaterial property (copyright, patents, trademarks and patterns) and the derivative effects (extra fees on blank tapes) and is furthermore very strongly interested in protecting personal integrity (among other things that the data retention law shall not be implemented, and an expansion on the privacy of written correspondence to cover all communications, and a constitutional right to personal privacy.) We do not take a position in any other questions, especially not other politically divisive issues. (the point with that is that you should be able to vote for the Pirate Party without changing your position in the left-right scale of Swedish politics)

Furthermore we stand for that Thomas Bodström shall not accomplish new general tasks, as per his escapades with the data retention law

Which is the Pirate Party, Left or Right?

It is quaintly amusing that the Left accuses us of being for the Right while the Right accuses us of being for the Left. The Left reasons that culture is a generality, the Right that immaterial property create market damaging monopolies. Others simply don't care about Left-Right ideology and simply want to put an end to further hinderance of the advancement of technology and society for the sake of a short term profit.

Re:Do Swede young males vote even?

[lordmetroid]

Swedish people love to excercice the power they have thru voting. It's around 95% of the voting population that do so. However, younger people seem to not care as much anymore and I heard numbers like 75% voting qouta. These numbers are from my memory though, so I reserve myself for any errors I have made but it's around those figures.

Re:More Criminals should try this

[Rei]

Applicable definitions of "Steal", from dictionary.com:

"To take (the property of another) without right or permission."
"To commit theft"

Applicable definitions of "Take", from dictionary.com:

"To capture physically; sieze."

Applicable definitions of "Theft", from dictionary.com:

"The act or instance of stealing; larceny."

Applicable definitions of "Larceny", from dictionary.com:

"The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft."

I find it hard to read "piracy" into "stealing", given the definitions. Now, you can argue that the language is obsolete and that it should be included, but then it is *you* who are arguing against the language.

Re:Do Swede young males vote even?

[rodik]

Does anyone know what the 18-30 male voting record is in terms of actually making it to the ballot box to vote?

Well, since you asked, in the last election in Sweden (2002), the figures were:

Males
18-22: 68.2%
22-24: 70.5%
25-29: 73.6%

Females
18-22: 72.6%
22-24: 67.4%
25-29: 80.6%

In 2002, men and women in ages 18-29 counted 1,289,000 persons (out of a total population of just over 9 million).

Courtesy of Statistiska Centralbyrån [ssd.scb.se]

Only in Swedish - of course!

[slavemowgli]

The Piracy Party's webpage is so far only available in Swedish [...]

Why is that surprising? The webpages of the democratic/republican parties in the USA weren't available in Swedish last time I checked, either, so why should the webpage of a Swedish party necessarily be available in English? I'd think they have lots of more important things to do before doing a translation for a bunch of people who can't even vote.

Re:Two questions:

[Hast]

Not really, you can create a lot longer words in Swedish if you want to. Although that may very well be the longest words that's officially avaialable.

Voting rules

[Arioch of Chaos]

"Voting rights to Riksdag elections are reserved for all Swedish citizen who are 18 years of age before or on Election Day and who are, or have at some time been, registered residents of Sweden." - Info from the Swedish election authority [www.val.se]

Re:Do Swede young males vote even?

[ae]

In the Swedish general elections of 2002, 71.1 +/- 6.7 % of males aged 18 to 29 participated. Source: Electoral Participation in the 2002 General Election (PDF) [www.scb.se].

Before wishing too much, though, please note that in Sweden, we don't even have a libertarian party, and most people have no clue that there is a thing like libertarianism. We also have the highest taxes of the world. Our gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita is only 71 % of the US'. Source: List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita [wikipedia.org].

Re:Wow.

[Zachary Kessin]

What makes you think that with more parties there would be less corruption? While in the US you only have 2 real parties (at least only 2 worth paying attention to) in many countries you have more. Here in Israel we have something like 12-15 and it makes patronage and the like that much worse. In Israel you need to get 61 members of the Kennset (parlament) to form a government, but in the history of the ofthe country no party has ever gotten more than about 40 or so. The small parties make up the difference, so a party with 5 MK's can find itself in control of some government ministry, sometimes this works out very well but often it just means that that party uses it position to fund its own program and screw everything else.

Also we use a party list system so the top people are basicly in for life.

Re:Not all parlimentary systems are like that...

[scowling]

I will step in here to answer.

As the original poster said, in countries without proportional representation, such as Canada and the UK, you vote for a candidate in your riding. The leader of the party that elects the most members becomes Prime Minister. The Prime Minister decides who becomes ministers in his or her Cabinet (or Executive). And while the ranks of Ministers are typically taken from MPs from his or her party, any citizen may be appointed to Cabinet. (For example, the former Premier of British Columbia chose Ed John, a tribal chief who hadn't even run for office, to be his minister for child and family services).

In the parliamentary system, all budget votes are confidence votes. If a budget vote fails, the government is toppled and an election is forced (there are exceptions, but they're rare).

A member may also call for a vote of non-confidence in the government, but only under certain conditions -- usually when there aren't enough government members in the House at that moment to prevent a new bill from being tabled, or when the government has assigned time to the opposition to introduce a private bill.

See, the government has absolute power in the House as to the order in which business is read. The Government House Leader need not allow any private bill to be heard or to go past first reading, which makes it difficult for a non-budget non-confidence vote to be heard. Practically speaking, however, any government which does not give the opposition a day or two every legislative session to introduce bills can lose the confidence of their own private members, which is dangerous.

The Canadian government was brought down last month when the Conservatives introduced a non-confidence motion on one of their Opposition Days.

Re:Two questions:

[leenusohleenus]

You could combine a many words as you like and create the longest word in the world. But I believe the longest word in the dictionary of the Swedish academy is "problemformuleringsprivilegium" (agenda-setting, "the privilege to define the problem"). I know a hospital where there was a sign on a door saying "födelsemärkesborttagningsmottagning" (birthmark removal division).

Re:Two questions:

[XchristX]

Sanskrit beat German (or any other IE language for that matter) in verbal combinatorics long ago

Re:Do Swede young males vote even?

[Databass]

"Only" 75% of Sweedish youth eligible to vote do so? I strongly suspect that percentage is sky high compared to american youth voter turnout!

Googling...
Googling...

Yup! American Voters aged 18-24 come up with numbers like 36%.

http://www.civicyouth.org/research/products/fact_s heets.htm [civicyouth.org]

Re:Only in Swedish - of course!

[ichigo 2.0]

Huh? Either you're a very hungry troll or just misinformed. No, English is not an official language in Sweden nor even a recognised minority language. And just so this doesn't become a useless yes-no argument I'll point you to wikipedia. [wikipedia.org]

P.S. I realise I was incorrect about Swedish being the only official language, as there is no official language.

Re:Two questions:

[jd_Solid]

Actually there are no language requirements for swedish citizenship. You have to go a course, but no one learns anything from it, and you get citizenship either way. (My sister-in-law can't speak a word in swedish, but i'll be damned if she's not a swedish citizen).