Pirate Party wins EU Parliament seat

[sputnik]

Pirate Party Wins EU Parliament Seat

• By David Kravets
• June 8, 2009 |

Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Union Parliament, swept in Sunday amid outrage over the earlier convictions of the four founders of The Pirate Bay.
The party, formed to protest copyright law, took 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden and one of that country’s 18 seats in the European Parliament. The party stands for radical reform of copyright legislation, abolition of the patent system and guaranteed online-privacy rights.
The party gained a renewed focus in Sweden after the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker, were convicted of copyright infringement and ordered jailed for a year and fined millions.
After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the five-year-old operation.
The verdict triggered a political backlash among Swedish youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size to 40,000-plus members, giving the anti-copyright party a genuine shot at landing a seat in the European Parliament.
In addition to one year of jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures.
The case was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants were charged with facilitating copyright infringement.
In the trial’s aftermath, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to crack down on torrent sites, and file sharing in Sweden has dropped. Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, has begun moving toward legitimacy.
The Pirate Bay, with more than 20 million users, keeps operating as usual, despite the convictions, which are on appeal. The four remain free, pending the outcome of the appeals.
The European Parliament consists of 785 members and is one of the governing bodies of the European Union.


Pirate Party Wins EU Parliament Seat | Threat Level | Wired.com

[coolios5o]

I don't think downloading should be made legal. There are people in the music industry who aren't yet "big stars" and they spend hours or even days to make one song and if downloading would be made legal, they wouldn't get anything from it. I mean, songs can be probably found already from the internet for free, but if it would be made legal, no one would pay for the songs. Everyone would just download them for free. How can people expect this to be made legal. This can be someones job and not all of the people in the industry make huge bucks. I know people who already have a bit of a name (not in the popular music industry) but who can't even support themselves with the money they make. They're not even close. And they always curse how they spend hours and hours to their songs and then their music can be found from the internet for free-downloads and they get only a few bucks to their pockets.

[sputnik]

^^
actually indie artists profit from downloading because they make virtually all of their money from touring. downloading gives them exposure, more people listen, ergo more people go to their shows.
and since i have no love for the shitty mainstream artists who are the ones who do lose money from illegal downloading, i really don't give a shit about their fate.
and when it comes to real talents, people will always buy records. look at what happened when radiohead released their latest album. they put it online for download, and people could pay whatever they wanted for it. and they still turned a profit...

[twitchy2.0]

Hey, if they didn't want me to download music, television shows and movies, they would have made them LEGALLY available in my county. Until then, meh. Also, like many people I know, I download, check something out to see if it's worth spending money on and then buy it. People who aren't big stars are already getting screwed. By the music companies. Avast. .

[sputnik]

^^
exactly.
i'm a huge music junkie. i download a lot. but i'm also a member of emusic.com (electronic music store specialised in indie artists) and if i listen to something and deem it worthy, i then download it and buy it on emusic.

as for tv shows, i agree with twitchy entirely. if they didn't take years to show something, and then dub it into another language, i wouldn't feel the need to dl...

[Quazar]

Based on the title, I had expected a totally different group of pirates.

[coolios5o]

^^
actually indie artists profit from downloading because they make virtually all of their money from touring. downloading gives them exposure, more people listen, ergo more people go to their shows.
and since i have no love for the shitty mainstream artists who are the ones who do lose money from illegal downloading, i really don't give a shit about their fate.
and when it comes to real talents, people will always buy records. look at what happened when radiohead released their latest album. they put it online for download, and people could pay whatever they wanted for it. and they still turned a profit...

But then again for example in electronical genre people mostly rely on digital releases. The whole CD business is pretty much dying in that industry and only a few (the few ones who are the most famous) release albums these days. Otherwise the focus is on digital release. There are also many artists who have a name in the production area but aren't "big enough" to get DJ gig's yet so the only profit they get is from the digital release sales. And since the focus is so much on the internet there is alot of piratism going on and legalizing it would only make it worse.

If you want people to download your songs for free you can always do that by putting up a website for that and people can then legally download them with your permission. Then again if you legalize downloading all-together other artist's will suffer.

I don't care about big mass-production labels either but by legalizing free downloading you would be hurting the smaller labels and artists who are trying to get their songs out there more than the big ones.

[L1049]

I don't think I've ever downloaded complete albums. If it's music I like, I'll go out and buy the CD.

I also don't think I've ever downloaded a movie that has yet to be released on DVD. The only movies I download are either out of print, not available on dvd, or extremely hard to find/expensive.

Instead of going after the individual suckers that end up downloading 101 Dalmatians for their kid, go after the idiots that download and mass-produce bootlegs. Save time and money.