As of this weekend, Yahoo started to filter some of Pirate Bay’s pages. For some mysterious reason, several pages from the tracker disappeared from Yahoo’s index. Unintentionally or not, a search for “The Pirate Bay” doesn’t show a link to the homepage of the popular BitTorrent tracker.
Two weeks ago we reported on Greens EFA launching the pro-filesharing campaign “I Wouldn’t Steal“. With new editorials in Swedish newspapers coinciding with The Pirate Bay’s charges, it seems the Green Party is looking to push the issue forward, thereby supporting The Pirate Bay.
Greens EFA, a coalition of two political parties that currently have 42 seats in the European parliament, have launched a pro-filesharing campaign named “I Wouldn’t Steal”. Their goal is to counter the anti-piracy propaganda put forward by the entertainment industry, and encourage people to download and share.
Last week, seven Swedish MPs wrote to a prominent Swedish tabloid newspaper ‘Expressen’ to express their dissatisfaction with proposals for dealing with copyright infringers. Now, that number has increased to 13, and the issue seems to keep growing.
As previously shown, BitTorrent can be a boon to the independent film-maker. Usually a lack of money restricts the distribution of a film, but occasionally the content works against it. As well as the promotion of new, aspiring talent, torrents can be used to spread films which may be politically discouraged from more usual methods.
Pirates are innovators, they signal market problems and lead the way to new business models. Nevertheless, they are tagged as thieves by many. We invited Matt Mason, author of the book “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism”, to write an article on the “pirate’s dilemma” for TorrentFreak.
The US Pirate Party has no candidate for the upcoming elections, but who do the pirates vote for? Barack Obama, and the party strongly urges all its members to support his campaign, and vote for him in the primaries, and later this year in November.
We’ve been waiting… and waiting… but STEAL THIS FILM II has finally been released, and it’s available for free. The League of Noble Peers announce that film is intended to ‘bring new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think ‘after intellectual property’, think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity’.
27th January 2008 will see only the second election worldwide to include a Pirate Party on the ballot. It will not, however, be in Sweden, but the German state of Hesse, in south-west Germany.
