Wednesday, August 02, 2006

The Pirate Party

I don't normally write about politics here. God knows there are enough political rant blogs out there. But I would like to commend to all red-blooded sailors a new political movement, the Pirate Party. The website of the US Pirate Party sums up their aims very simply. "The basic idea of the Pirate Party is simple - the government should encourage, rather than smother, creativity and freedom." Now who could argue with that?

There are also branches in various European countries.

Don't delay. Join up. Be a pirate.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Boy! I could write a thousand words on this!

This all stems from a website called thepiratebay, a swedish piracy site that has grown to be one of the biggest bittorrent trackers in the world (bittorrent is a P2P program).

Legally they are breaking no laws in their country, but have been growing and growing, making it one of the biggest sites in the world.

About a month ago the government raided them. The MPAA in America came out and dceclared it one of their greatest victories, and from their it pretty much went downhill for everyone. Within 3 days the site was back, hosted in 5 different european countries. The site struggled under the strain of a huge influx of users led by the large amount of popularity the publicity had gave them.

Letters were leaked showing the US government had been making trade threats if something wasn't done, and the raid was bungled with dozens of severs seized unrelated to the pirate bay. One of the other group to have their servers seized was The Pirate Party, making legal implications for the government even worse now they had taken down the website of a legit political party. About this time the parties started to spring up all over the world.

Whilst these events may be unknown to most sailing bloggers, they've been huge to most tech bloggers :P

More about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_Bay
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70358-0.html?tw=wn_technology_1

(Yeah I know I turned it away from the US political party... but I wanted to give it all some background :P)

Anonymous said...

Arrrggghhhh, I nominate Edward as the first Presidential Candidate. He has the whole pirate thing down pat!

Åsa said...

And here I thought it was all about partying. Even though you wrote "politics" I didn't understand that's what it was until I followed the link. I got all excited over the thought about having a world wide costume party where everybody where dressed as pirates! Oh well.

Anonymous said...

See what I have to deal with!!!

We can all be Pirates, but Johnsee will forever be a nerd.

;)

Anonymous said...

I'd have to thank T-man for the head's up... I'm joining the pirate party. :D

Tillerman said...

Fly the flag Dan, fly the flag.

Carol Anne said...

asa, the holiay you're looking for is "Talk Like a Pirate Day," and it's September 19. There will be a big celebration in Prague, and probably a smaller one somewhere in New Mexico.

Katinka said...

LOL! I'm definitely going to have to link to this! :)

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