Rick Falkvinge, pirate

Countries report since last meeting

Finnish Piraattipuolue – Anton Tamminen

The Finnish pirate movement had activism at various degrees for a number of years; the most critical developments for creating a movement was in 2005 or 2006 when IPRED was implemented in Finland with a lot of resistance.

Swedish successes inspired Finnish student Matti Hiltunen to found pp.fi and set up a web page. There had been movements on specific issues up until then, but not a united pirate movement.

Internet Censorship law (child porn websites) – mass demonstrations in Helsinki.

Finnish PP isn’t a year old, but is reaching some important milestones

Piraattipuolue has 3,500 signatures out of 5,000 needed to register the party. Not sure if they will reach the deadline in time for the EP election.

The major political issue in Finland right now is Lex Nokia: a law that allows corporations and other network owners to wiretap their own users.

Good experience with IRC; open board meetings inspire more people to get active

Dutch PP – Reinier Bakels

Had a few meetings with a few people; most of them went to Freedom Not Fear. Still in the process of being established. It’s fairly easy in Netherlands to start a party.

Dutch have not have had turmoil around specific pirate issues; particularly, there has not been any attention in the mainstream press.

They ”only have a handful of people”.

Spanish PP – Carlos Ayala

Since last year, they have not grown in members; they have less than 100 members.

Political issue, example: the manager of a Spanish collecting society admitted they were collecting royalties for music in the public domain.

Working with Green Party and some civil liberties groups about the Telecom Package, but with little success. Worried that the Telecoms Package in conjunction with Lisbon Treaty will trump European Convention on Human Rights.

Trying to get funding, supporters, members, etc.

PP.es is on the verge on not being able to participate in European Elections. They need 15,000 signatures; they are using the signature collection process as a test of their own organization to see if they are able to run for EP. (45 million ppl in Spain)

Even if they manage to gather 14,000 signatures during February, they don’t have enough candidates, as the candidate list must have a gender distribution within 40-60%, and pp.es don’t have enough female members to reach this quota.

There is no barrier threshold to European Parliament in Spain. Spain has 54 seats in the EP, and so needs about 2% of the national vote to take seats in the EP. This translates to 350,000 votes in a 45-million country.

Aiming to gather the various pirate-related civil liberties groups under the pirate party banner.

Germany – Jens Seipenbusch

There are some tendencies of fractioning in pp.de; there is a fraction at the national level that desires a full platform, whereas the majority wants to stay close to the core.

PP.de needed to re-convene nationally as their national convention was held two weeks too early for bureaucratic reasons.

PP.de has a 5% barrier to entry in the European elections. Germany has about 80 seats in the EP.

Hessen had a re-election; PP.de doubled their absolute vote count and reached 0.6% in the regional election.

National election in Germany this year, in September. They need to collect signatures in every state they want to run to Parliament from; they can still run if they don’t get the signature count in one state, just not from that state.

Data Retention is still in the German Constitutional Court; interim decisions have stated that police, secret service, etc., may not use such data – not striking down data retention per se, just forbidding the use of the data

Some issues about internet filtering; issues about a BKA law which introduces ”FBI stuff” giving more powers to police. It has already been challenged to the Constitutional Court.

There have been some major data leaks in German telco, with some similar leaks from banks.

The Greens are picking up on the pirate issues.

The German govt wants to introduce a personal identification number. They’re not allowed to do so by constitution, so they’re trying to introduce it as a tax law.

The rest

More countries will report after lunch.