Digitalwerks » party

Pirate Party enters EU parliament

kosmonaut — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:47:32 +0000

An update to my previous post about the Swedish Pirate Party growing after the Pirate Bay verdict.

The results from voting today has the Pirate Party winning roughly 7% of the votes in Sweden, which will allow them to gain 2 seats in the upcoming EU parliament. According to reports from Sweden, the party did quite well among the young, receiving around 19% of voters under 30. From a US perspective those numbers may not seem too significant but in a proportional representative system, it’s actually very, very good for an upstart party, although the usual caveats about the general disinterest in EU voting certainly applies. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that outrage among young Swedes over the Pirate Bay verdict did indeed cause a reaction. Whether or not the 2 Pirate Party representatives in Strassbourg can make a difference among the 725 other MEP’s remains to be seen, but if the copyright lobby expects to continue its crusade against file-trading without opposition, both legal and otherwise, they may be in for a rude awakening.

See Torrentfreak for more detailed coverage and discussion.

Pirate party is on

kosmonaut — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:13:04 +0000

Ernesto at Torrentfreak recently reported that membership in the Swedish Pirate Party is skyrocketing after the recent Pirate Bay trial that resulted in a guilty verdict for the Bay, but also uncovered a number of disturbing facts about the prosecution and the trial judge’s impartiality. In previous life, I used to study European party politics, so I had to comment, as this strikes me as somewhat silly but also not without some possible real ramifications. Despite the membership gains, the Swedish Pirate Party is unlikely to actually disrupt the party landscape in as mature a political system as Sweden, but the particular timing of the trial does really work in the Pirates’ favor. The next notable election for Sweden is for the EU parliament, something that many, many Europeans do not consider of much importance, at least in relation to local and national elections. Not surprisingly, EU voting has been used for protests in the past, to focus on specific interests rather than traditional party differences. If the Pirate Party can translate their current momentum into enough actual votes to get representatives into the EU parliament, it would do a lot to get the word out on precisely the kind of copy-left, filesharing, network neutrality that the Pirate Bay has promoted for years, and it would do so via far more mainstream avenues than in the past. Obviously the Pirate Party would not wield any tangible power, but it would be quite a propaganda coup, and would, just as with the trial, create another strong platform for the proponents of a vastly different copyright landscape than than supported by the MPA’s, BREIN’s and IFPI’s of the world.

New rumblings about Windows 7 codec support

kosmonaut — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:51:55 +0000

Following up on my previous report on integrated Windows 7 codec support, I saw today from Volker Zota at heise that some new developments in the Windows 7 betas have come to light. Â According to the investigative work of an ffdshow developer, as reported to Dan “BetaBoy” Marlin of CoreCodec, the latest beta of Windows 7 blocks the usage of third party video decoders from Windows Media Player and MCE.

As previously reported, Windows 7 differs from earlier versions of Windows in that it will ship with a number of popular video codecs already integrated, including most notably h.264. Â There are some very notable caveats to the information as it stands right now: this is after all just a beta and might not be in the final released version of Windows 7, there will likely be work arounds, especially for other player software applications (like VLC and Media Player Classic), and because Windows 7 will come with h.264 already installed, many users will never need third-party decoders anyway.

Nonetheless, this move by Microsoft is still somewhat disturbing for it seems to be a big step backwards from what appeared to be Redmond’s increasing openness to third party solutions in the video world. Â There remains a very active competitive landscape among codec developers and media software creators, outside of the (somewhat) closed garden that Microsoft would prefer Windows users to remain within, and such a move would definitely tilt things in the Microsft direction. Â This isn’t IE versus Netscape, but it does reflect that kind of outdated thinking we all hoped Microsoft was moving away from finally. Â I’m sure much more technical details will emerge in the next few days, but right now the blocking takes place at very deep levels of the OS.