TorrentFreak

Yesterday both the Swedish Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay disappeared from the Internet causing concern among their users. While they have both now returned, it appears that the Party downtime was caused by the unauthorized use of their servers “for commercial purposes”, something which is expressly forbidden.

The recognition of the Pirate Party in a US state might have been considered the last obstacle to overcome before widespread acceptance of the movement as a viable political force. Yet there might be another country more obstinate than the US when it comes to registering political parties, and that’s Russia.

It’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.

After weeks of public protests on- and offline the Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigned and escaped the country last Friday. Today, the head of the transitional government, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, announced his new cabinet members which include a familiar name. Slim Amamou, the Pirate Party member and freedom of speech activist who was arrested just a few days ago, is now the (deputy minister) State Secretary of Youth and Sports.

A censorship war has unfolded on the streets and on the Internet in Tunisia over the past weeks. Freedom of speech activists are demanding less censorship regarding the country’s growing social unrest, but instead of giving in the Government is shutting down the blogs of activists and critics, as well as talking over Gmail and Facebook accounts. The situation took a turn for the worse this week when several net activists, bloggers and members of The Pirate Party were arrested for reasons unknown.

Wearing “Piracy is Illegal” T-shirts and carrying several boxes of complaints against file-sharers, a group of movie industry representatives showed up at the Attorney General’s Office doorstep in Portugal this week. By clogging the judicial system they hope to raise awareness of widespread online movie piracy. However, this ideal may backfire as the local Pirate Party believes that the actions of anti-piracy activists may very well be illegal.

Five years ago the first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden. In the years that followed the Party shook up the political climate in its home country and the European Parliament where it holds two seats. Now, five years later, founder and chief architect Rickard Falkvinge is stepping down as leader. He will focus on promoting the Pirate position internationally, while Party deputy Anna Troberg will take over the reins.