With the Lisbon Treaty being signed by all European Union member states, the Pirate Party has gained another seat in the European Parliament. The second Pirate Party seat will be occupied by the 22 year old Amelia Andersdotter, who will become the youngest Member of the European Parliament.
The Finnish Pirate Party has condemned a massive claim for damages against the operator of a file-sharing hub. The individual is facing a claim of 3.6m euros ($5.4m) from an anti-piracy group, this despite claims that there is no evidence of any specific infringements, merely high bandwidth usage on the individual’s ISP account.
The German Federal elections took place this Sunday and the Pirate Party, hoping to gain a seat or two, ramped up the pressure. Despite strong showings in the local council elections a week or two earlier, they failed to win a seat in the Parliament, getting only 2% of the vote, falling short of the required 5% minimum.
Canada has had its very own Pirate Party for a few months now. The party is currently trying to get federal approval, a goal that should be achieved in the coming week. In the meantime the party’s members haven’t been sitting still and today sees the launch of their very own BitTorrent tracker.
Next week the German Pirate Party will compete in the elections for the German Parliament, but this week the country’s youth already cast their votes. In the youth polls nearly 9% of all votes went to the Pirate Party, a result that the party hopes to match in the upcoming election.
Herbert Rusche, the co-founder of the German Green Party and former member of the German Parliament, has joined the Pirate Party. Rusche praises the party for its open structure and its efforts to protect people’s privacy and fundamental rights. Those issues, he says, are the ones established parties fail to address.
The UK Pirate Party has been officially registered at the Electoral Commission and is hoping to follow in the footsteps of its successful counterpart in Sweden. With all the recent controversy surrounding anti-piracy legislation and lawyers going after alleged file-sharers, the party has become necessity.
Just two weeks after the Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, the German PiratenPartei has gained a seat in the German government. Jörg Tauss has left the Social Democrats Party (SPD) and has joined the Pirate Party.
With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of rum and loads of pirate chants.
The Pirate Party has won a huge victory in the Swedish elections and is marching on to Brussels. After months of campaigning against well established parties, the Pirate Party has gathered enough votes to be guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament.
In their race for one or more seats in the European Parliament, the Swedish Pirate Party has gathered support from all layers of society, including some well known public figures. One of them is Lars Gustafsson, one of Sweden’s most prolific writers, who openly expressed his support for the Pirate Party today.
