5 ms·

Berlin's new Pirate Party might be here to stay

55 points by NonEUCitizen 15y ago

gst 15y ago
Unfortunately the German "pirates" managed to kill the whole idea even before they were voted into parliament. As far as I know, the original idea by the Pirate Parties was to have an opinion in the areas that unite their members (online privacy, copyright, etc.) and to leave the rest to the other parties. Unfortunately the German Pirate Party now also tries to deal with all kinds of topics such as economics, education, gender politics, etc. Maybe they've managed to get some additional voters that way, who don't care about the original topics that much. But at they same time they've made theirself unelectable for their original target group, as I guess that there are many people who don't agree with their opinions.
- rb2k_ 15y ago
  They are also about transparency of the whole political process and just being an alternative to the lobby-ridden decision making. Especially the German pirate party also has a strong position on privacy. I think they are still doing a good job on those things, especially when looking at the other parties.
iwwr 15y ago
It's quite interesting to see a successful political movement not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.
- muuh-gnu 15y ago
  This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effectively shielded it from public access. Elections were won with other topics like taxes, economy, etc, and IP policy was strictly kept quiet about, smuggled under the public radar, then finally arranged with the content industry behind closed doors (remember ACTA being declared a "threat level national security" issue to shield it from public scrutiny). Effectively, IP was handled as something "too important to let the public vote on it". The problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers. > not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it. And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI
- davidw 15y ago
  Hopefully if they actually stay in power for any length of time they'll figure out that there's a baby in the bathwater.
  - davidw 15y ago
    If the downvoters needed it spelled out, IP should be a compromise, a middle ground between producers and consumers. These days, it's tilted too far towards producers, in my opinion, but with no IP, it would mean that people could not make money creating digital goods that are easily copied. Or they would, but in ways we might find distasteful. For instance, a movie might show a lot of people quenching their thirst with delicious, satisfying COCA COLA products, much more than they do already. Or perhaps things like writing and movies would be the preserve of the independently wealthy. This would mean fewer books, movies, programs, etc... etc... which would ultimately leave the consumer worse off due to the lack of these goods. Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob... Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.
    - toyg 15y ago
      When your adversary is successfully framing the debate in radical and irrational terms ("You wouldn't steal a car, so you shouldn't steal a movie"), the only answer is to escalate your own radical rhetoric until a fair compromise can be reached; you create an incentive for your adversary to not be completely obliterated if/when you'll achieve total victory. If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win. At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome. (Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)
      - 15y ago
flarg 15y ago
You guys know about this right? http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ [humour]
leon_ 15y ago
I honestly don't know what to think about the PP. I want them to be more than a one-hit wonder but they seem to not have much of a political agenda other than "legalize warez" and "don't censor the net". I hope their success stirs up the other parties a little.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I think PP shows how badly prepared are current democratic systems to handle a wider diversity of opinions. Politics got less ideological and more pragmatic, and that leads to a wider diversity of opinions, which the current systems aren't prepared to handle. The concept of all encompassing parties doesn't scale; we need a way for people to show their support for very targeted movements like PP without feeling they're wasting their vote away.
  - m_st 15y ago
    Very true indeed. Personally I could never join one of the many parties as they all have some opinions I just can't agree with. This really makes voting quite hard. In Switzerland we now have http://smartvote.ch/?lang=en_GB http://smartvote.ch/?lang=en_GB were you fill out a questionnaire and then get some politicians matching your profile. While certainly not perfect, it is already a good start.
    - FrojoS 15y ago
      Something like this exists in Germany, too for parties: www.wahl-o-mat.de A possible solution, to the problem you describe might be Liquid Democracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
  - skeptical 15y ago
    huh... doesn't it shows the opposite of that? I mean, if the pirate party was able to achieve a remarkable success doesn't that mean that the political system works? At least in the german case. Most of the characters involved in the politics game are not doing their job, I guess that's what you mean?
Tichy 15y ago
"Many saw the idea of blocking such sites as censorship of the internet" Annoying inaccuracy! Of course pirates are not in favor of child pornography, nor of not blocking such sites. The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system that enables them to block any site, without even being required to give reasons and no possibility of appeal against it. Naturally even now if illegal content is discovered on a German server, the government/police can make the hoster remove it. No magic switch needs to be given to the police.
- muuh-gnu 15y ago
  > The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system The Christian-led goverment party didn't even pretend that hard what the envisioned "Zensurinfrastruktur" will be later mainly used for and on several occasions mentioned "child pornography, copyright infringement and other crimes" in one and the same sentence. This was exactly how the copyright lobby envisioned the strategy, linking child porn and copying. ”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”. * http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/ http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-chil... > No magic switch needs to be given to the police. But it is absolutely necessary to be able to block "outsourced" overseas torrent sites.
  - mhd 15y ago
    For an international audience who might not be that familiar with German party politics, "Christian-led" might be a bit misleading… Also, you're mixing the German and the Swedish cases here a bit. I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence on Von Der Leyen's side. But however it started, the fact that this "protection" can easily be extended certainly was a big reason for its support. I remember that in the beginning it was all about "due to the rise of child pornography on the internet", but when an official inquiry was made (by the FDP, if I remember correctly), they had to admit that they had no such data.
m_st 15y ago
I never liked the choice of the word 'Pirate' for a political party even if I support some of their motives. Though 'pirates' means freedom (doing whatever you want) it also means killing, robbing and taking hostages (Somalia, Indonesia).
mrich 15y ago
I am loving this wake-up call to the established parties of Germany, whose elected representatives are bailing out countries and banks left and right against the will of their electorate. The only parties which seem to represent the will of the voters (on the surface) in this regard are the left and the extreme right. But for historical reasons, many Germans will never vote for them. So the pirate party fills a real void (mainly for youths): as a protest party for disgruntled voters, and as a party which gets the internet and the importance of free/cheap access to knowledge and education.

55 points by NonEUCitizen 15y ago

gst 15y ago

Unfortunately the German "pirates" managed to kill the whole idea even before they were voted into parliament. As far as I know, the original idea by the Pirate Parties was to have an opinion in the areas that unite their members (online privacy, copyright, etc.) and to leave the rest to the other parties. Unfortunately the German Pirate Party now also tries to deal with all kinds of topics such as economics, education, gender politics, etc. Maybe they've managed to get some additional voters that way, who don't care about the original topics that much. But at they same time they've made theirself unelectable for their original target group, as I guess that there are many people who don't agree with their opinions.

rb2k_ 15y ago
They are also about transparency of the whole political process and just being an alternative to the lobby-ridden decision making. Especially the German pirate party also has a strong position on privacy. I think they are still doing a good job on those things, especially when looking at the other parties.

iwwr 15y ago

It's quite interesting to see a successful political movement not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.

muuh-gnu 15y ago
This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effectively shielded it from public access. Elections were won with other topics like taxes, economy, etc, and IP policy was strictly kept quiet about, smuggled under the public radar, then finally arranged with the content industry behind closed doors (remember ACTA being declared a "threat level national security" issue to shield it from public scrutiny). Effectively, IP was handled as something "too important to let the public vote on it". The problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers. > not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it. And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI
davidw 15y ago
Hopefully if they actually stay in power for any length of time they'll figure out that there's a baby in the bathwater.
- davidw 15y ago
  If the downvoters needed it spelled out, IP should be a compromise, a middle ground between producers and consumers. These days, it's tilted too far towards producers, in my opinion, but with no IP, it would mean that people could not make money creating digital goods that are easily copied. Or they would, but in ways we might find distasteful. For instance, a movie might show a lot of people quenching their thirst with delicious, satisfying COCA COLA products, much more than they do already. Or perhaps things like writing and movies would be the preserve of the independently wealthy. This would mean fewer books, movies, programs, etc... etc... which would ultimately leave the consumer worse off due to the lack of these goods. Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob... Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.
  - toyg 15y ago
    When your adversary is successfully framing the debate in radical and irrational terms ("You wouldn't steal a car, so you shouldn't steal a movie"), the only answer is to escalate your own radical rhetoric until a fair compromise can be reached; you create an incentive for your adversary to not be completely obliterated if/when you'll achieve total victory. If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win. At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome. (Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)
    - 15y ago

flarg 15y ago

You guys know about this right? http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ [humour]

leon_ 15y ago

I honestly don't know what to think about the PP. I want them to be more than a one-hit wonder but they seem to not have much of a political agenda other than "legalize warez" and "don't censor the net". I hope their success stirs up the other parties a little.

icebraining 15y ago
I think PP shows how badly prepared are current democratic systems to handle a wider diversity of opinions. Politics got less ideological and more pragmatic, and that leads to a wider diversity of opinions, which the current systems aren't prepared to handle. The concept of all encompassing parties doesn't scale; we need a way for people to show their support for very targeted movements like PP without feeling they're wasting their vote away.
- m_st 15y ago
  Very true indeed. Personally I could never join one of the many parties as they all have some opinions I just can't agree with. This really makes voting quite hard. In Switzerland we now have http://smartvote.ch/?lang=en_GB http://smartvote.ch/?lang=en_GB were you fill out a questionnaire and then get some politicians matching your profile. While certainly not perfect, it is already a good start.
  - FrojoS 15y ago
    Something like this exists in Germany, too for parties: www.wahl-o-mat.de A possible solution, to the problem you describe might be Liquid Democracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
- skeptical 15y ago
  huh... doesn't it shows the opposite of that? I mean, if the pirate party was able to achieve a remarkable success doesn't that mean that the political system works? At least in the german case. Most of the characters involved in the politics game are not doing their job, I guess that's what you mean?

Tichy 15y ago

"Many saw the idea of blocking such sites as censorship of the internet" Annoying inaccuracy! Of course pirates are not in favor of child pornography, nor of not blocking such sites. The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system that enables them to block any site, without even being required to give reasons and no possibility of appeal against it. Naturally even now if illegal content is discovered on a German server, the government/police can make the hoster remove it. No magic switch needs to be given to the police.

muuh-gnu 15y ago
> The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system The Christian-led goverment party didn't even pretend that hard what the envisioned "Zensurinfrastruktur" will be later mainly used for and on several occasions mentioned "child pornography, copyright infringement and other crimes" in one and the same sentence. This was exactly how the copyright lobby envisioned the strategy, linking child porn and copying. ”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”. * http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/ http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-chil... > No magic switch needs to be given to the police. But it is absolutely necessary to be able to block "outsourced" overseas torrent sites.
- mhd 15y ago
  For an international audience who might not be that familiar with German party politics, "Christian-led" might be a bit misleading… Also, you're mixing the German and the Swedish cases here a bit. I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence on Von Der Leyen's side. But however it started, the fact that this "protection" can easily be extended certainly was a big reason for its support. I remember that in the beginning it was all about "due to the rise of child pornography on the internet", but when an official inquiry was made (by the FDP, if I remember correctly), they had to admit that they had no such data.

m_st 15y ago

I never liked the choice of the word 'Pirate' for a political party even if I support some of their motives. Though 'pirates' means freedom (doing whatever you want) it also means killing, robbing and taking hostages (Somalia, Indonesia).

mrich 15y ago

I am loving this wake-up call to the established parties of Germany, whose elected representatives are bailing out countries and banks left and right against the will of their electorate. The only parties which seem to represent the will of the voters (on the surface) in this regard are the left and the extreme right. But for historical reasons, many Germans will never vote for them. So the pirate party fills a real void (mainly for youths): as a protest party for disgruntled voters, and as a party which gets the internet and the importance of free/cheap access to knowledge and education.