TorrentFreak

Today the Dutch Pirate Party had the chance to become the first democratically chosen Pirate Party in a national parliament. Although the Pirates tripled the number of votes compared to last election, it was not enough. Leading up to today’s elections several polls put the Pirate Party at one seat or more. However, in the [...]

Next week the Dutch will elect their national parliament for the coming four years, and for the second time the local Pirate Party is on the ballot. According to most polls the Pirates have a decent chance of securing at least one seat, a milestone for the movement as it would be the first democratically chosen Pirate in a national parliament. One of the main goals of the Pirates is to fight increased censorship and the growing influence of the copyright lobby.

The Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN is going all out to make The Pirate Bay inaccessible to the Dutch public. After successfully blocking The Pirate Bay through court, and then censoring proxy sites that linked to it, they are now demanding that the Pirate Party should be banned from “discussing” how easily Internet censorship can be circumvented. The political party is baffled by the proposed gag-order and has asked the court to lift all censorship efforts.

Yesterday the Dutch Pirate Party announced it would sue the local anti-piracy group BREIN. Through the lawsuit the Pirates hope to overturn a recent order that prohibits the Party from operating a Pirate Bay proxy site in The Netherlands. Today the party booked a first victory in court as the Court of The Hague ruled [...]

The Dutch Pirate Party is taking local anti-piracy group BREIN to court in the hope of overturning a recent order that prohibits the Party from operating a Pirate Bay proxy site. The Pirates claim that the Hollywood backed group is guilty of “legal harassment” and “trampling people’s freedoms.” They demand that the court overturns the previous ‘ex parte’ verdict to allow the Pirate Party to be heard.

The integrity of the judge who handed out a negative judgment to the Usenet community FTD has been called into doubt. After it became apparent that the lawyer representing the movie studio and the judge were giving copyright courses together, the Pirate Party is hinting at a corruption scandal.

Following in the footsteps of the Swedes and Germans, the Dutch Pirate Party has decided to join the national elections being held this spring. The Pirate Party booked a surprising victory by scooping two seats in the European Parliament last year, but has yet to score its first elected seat in a national Parliament.