During the German elections earlier this year nearly a million people voted for the local Pirate Party, in Iceland the national Parliament has three Pirate MPs, and the Swedish branch of the Pirates currently has two seats at the European Parliament.

To coordinate the international agenda Pirate Parties International (PPI) was founded in 2010. The organization currently represents the interests of 43 parties worldwide, from China to Chile.

One of the goals of the umbrella organization is to facilitate international operation with other global organizations, to monitor and influence the political agenda. This week PPI took a big step towards this goal when it was granted observer status for the upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Bali.

The WTO Secretariat approved the application of the international Pirate organization, which means that it can participate in WTO conferences and related meetings. Observer status also allows PPI to submit papers to be circulated among WTO members.

Previously PPI was denied observing member status at the World intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) after several member states, including the United States, objected to its application.

Gregory Engels, Co-Chairman of PPI, says they have already sent a new application to WIPO, and he hopes that the recent developments will help the group to get accepted there as well.

“One of WIPO’s points of critique was that they were not aware of any existing cooperations between UN bodies and international political organizations. By being admitted to the WTO meeting we have created such a precedent. This is definitely a door opener for us,” Engels tells TorrentFreak.

In addition to WTO and WIPO, Pirate Parties International hopes to join various other UN organizations to raise their profile. The status as WTO observer is definitely a breakthrough, but also just the beginning.

“Overall I think that we need more connections with other international global players – NGOs and academia. By being admitted to Bali we have the chance to deepen those relationships and gain visibility,” Engels says.

“I consider the WTO conference an accolade for us in the field of international lobbying, and a door opener to more international participation,” he concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The membership application, which had the apparent backing of the WIPO Secretary General, was deferred until next year due to concern by some member-countries.

A report from Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) director Jamie Love has stated that the membership application was put off until 2013, apparently at the request of the French, American and Swiss members.

This morning, under agenda item 6, the WIPO General Assemblies decided to defer a decision until 2013 on the application for accreditation by Pirate Parties International. I was told that the US, Switzerland the France raised objections in the informal consultations, and that some other European countries wanted to raise objections, but found it awkward given the recent success of domestic Pirate Parties in national elections. The USA said it asked for a hold on the decision until WIPO could decide if it wanted to accept political parties as WIPO observers. One delegate said European countries were concerned that the Pirate Parties would take “political action” back home when they disagreed with positions taken by the official delegates at the WIPO meetings.

What makes this unusual is the fact that PPI is not itself a political party. It’s an association of parties, but is registered as a Belgian NGO like many other WIPO observer-members.

Thus the American concerns seem to be based on misinformation (but many would say ‘what’s new‘ when it comes to WIPO). Meanwhile the other concerns seem to be equally curious. Many WIPO members have taken political action in response to WIPO proceedings, including leaks of ACTA documents.

The PPI was unaware of the proceedings when TorrentFreak contacted them regarding the KEI notes this morning.

“Unfortunately we didn’t get any notification from WIPO,” Denis Simonet (PPI Board member and the lead on the membership application) told TorrentFreak.

“So we don’t know more than what everyone can read over the Internet. This is surprising because we fulfill all the requirements and the secretary general even recommended acceptance of our application, we’re working on getting more information from WIPO,” he added.

Meanwhile KEI is using the decision for their own political action, highlighting the revolving door between the WIPO and corporate interests, as the US delegate proposed a means to ease access to WIPO delegates and officers for Corporate CEOs; something not planned for public interest or consumer groups.

It is just as well KEI had their membership approved before they too were seen as a significant political threat with their political action really, else we’d never know about things (Like ACTA).

The fear of the pirate movement is clearly growing among entrenched bureaucrats, so while they may not always succeed at the polls, they’ve got some people scared.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As observer members they’ll be able to participate in meetings, but not vote (that is reserved for member countries). Currently, the list of observer members (some 250+) mostly focuses on artist and ‘industry’ groups, with only a few public-interest groups, such as the EFF, IP Justice, and Union for the Public Domain in there.

“The Pirate Party movement is spreading rapidly around the globe with parties now in over 60 countries,” PPI Co-chairman Gregory Engels told TorrentFreak.

“I am glad that WIPO is interested in the dialog with this part of civil society that thinks that the time for a massive reform of the copyright systems has come.”

The vote will reportedly take place on the morning of October 6^th. Check back then for the results.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All of a sudden, the Pirate parties are making it possible to vote for the defense and enrichment of the connected lifestyle, which is relevant to the core for the net generation. Thus, because you can vote for it, by definition, it becomes politics – which it wasn’t before.

I guess that’s why it took a long time for me to reconciliate with the fact that i’m a politician. I grew up knowing that politicians are boring, pretentious and infighting. It is only with the expanded use of the word that it makes sense that fighting for civil liberties is, in fact, policymaking. And those of us who fight for net liberty have become politicians, as people can vote for us to… fix things.

Politicians have been de-pedestalized. And that’s good every part of the way.

I’ve understood that a lot of US readers misread me when I say that 9% in an election is a sensation. That’s because the United States and Europe have completely different election systems: in the United States, if you take 9% of the votes, you are crushed, down and out. In (most of) Europe, when you take 9% of the votes, you get 9% of the seats.

That’s why it is fantastic that the German Piratenpartei is polling at 13% and that several more are on the verge of breaking through.

I was struck at the meeting by how many new Pirate parties are on the rapid rise: Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia, the list goes on.

When I was at last year’s PPI meeting, I confided in some people that I thought we could approach 15% long-term. If somebody had told me we’d be there in 12 months, I would not have believed them. Would Not. Things are progressing much faster than I have anticipated.

As I held the closing keynote, I noted that two countries are currently polling at parliamentary levels – Germany and Austria – and made a bold prediction: one year from today, between two and five more countries’ Pirates will be polling at parliamentary levels, meaning they’d enter their parliaments if elections were held.

Czech media was everywhere during the international meeting. The Greek Pirates are polling at one percent, just three months after founding. PP Luxembourg is showing clear signs of making the next election.

And as I flipped open my Android netbook to write the summary of the meeting, I learned that the Austrian Pirate Party had just taken its first parliamentary seat, in the local election of Innsbruck.

This journey is great to be part of.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

One of the main drawbacks of using P2P software such as Limewire, is that the content on the network (Gnutella) is unmoderated – anyone is free to put up whatever they like, be it music, movies or TV shows. Of course, others use this lack of moderation as a green light to upload viruses, spyware and other malicious software. Equally, one of the great strengths of BitTorrent (at least from a harm-reduction point of view), is that .torrent files are uploaded to torrent sites where staff work hard to filter out as much of the malicious software as they can, making BitTorrent relatively malware-free.

Of course, this great system falls apart if you can’t trust the people running the site. People expect anti-pirates like MiiVi to be ‘the enemy within’, but who needs those when you have ‘friends’ like the guys at new torrent site, TrafficLoader.com.

TrafficLoader.com (and its forum, pdls.info) hasn’t been setup for the benefit of BitTorrent users, it will be used by spammers, scammers and virus peddlers to spread their malicious software among the community (and make money off it). One of the admins called ‘Satty’ says that no registration is needed to upload torrents to the site and none will ever be removed. The site does have a notice – ‘Viruses, spyware, affiliate links and everything related is strictly prohibited’ but don’t believe it – Satty says these rules don’t apply to his friends in the PPI (Pay Per Install) community.

A few days ago the site was pretty bare with relatively few torrents and it was clear that most of them contained malware. It was suggested to Satty that it might be a good idea to have some genuine torrents too, to help disguise the bad torrents. Now things are starting to ‘improve’ on the site with many more torrents added recently which don’t immediately appear to be malware.

In the last few days, TrafficLoader cosmetically ‘cleaned up’ the site to remove porn adverts in order to appear more genuine but unfortunately, someone as well as TorrentFreak noticed that they made a big mistake:

“Why would you [Satty, admin] put a forum for ppi on a publicly scraped site, a.k.a here?? Do you just want ppl to find out shit is full of malware?”

Just in case they did want people to find out, hopefully this post will help them get the word out.

For those that want advice on how to avoid bad torrents in the future, try one of our guides.

Update: The site was taken offline a few hours after this article was posted, that’s our good deed for the weekend.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.