No Safe Harbor, released January 24th 2012, is a collection of political essays, texts and discussions that help explain and educate about Pirate Party positions. While some have been published before, many others are original to the book.

Contributors range from first-time writers being published for the first time, leading academics, to Pirate Party officials, and even international organizations like the United Nations.

Adding color to the book are cartoons by artist and free culture activist Nina Paley, creator of the animated film Sita Sings the Blues.

Topics covered include notes on the 4th Amendment, the history of copyright, biopatents, and corporate personhood.

The book is released under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-SA) and sharing of it is strongly encouraged. To further that, the book is available in a number of DRM-free formats, free of charge. In addition a paperback edition can be purchased through Amazon.com for $9.99

"For anyone concerned with our rights today, but unsure where to start, this book is an invaluable guide," says Assistant Editor and contributor Andrew Norton. "Education on these very important topics, and their immense potential for harm, has been sadly overlooked in recent years. We felt it was time to correct that."

Further information, including the book and press resources can be downloaded from www.nosafeharbor.com

About the US Pirate Party
The US Pirate Party was founded in 2006. Its aim is to bring transparency and accountability to government, while restoring personal liberties and privacy that have been discarded in a panic since 2001. It also seeks to bring copyrights and patents back to their Constitutional mandated purpose of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.
The Pirate Party is currently recognized in Massachusetts and Florida.
Efforts to gain recognition in the entire country is underway.

Contact:
press [at] nosafeharbor.com
+1 352-658-3824
Twitter: @nosafeharbor

On January 19th, right after the international blackout strike followed the day before by more than 60.000 websites against the new anti-piracy laws proposed in the United States, the Department of Justice executed a court order through which they shut down the services of Megaupload and charged seven persons, five of which , including the founders and some employees, have already been arrested.

The Pirate Parties defend the free exchange of information, and considering the arguments exposed in the indictment and the press release submitted by the United States Department of Justice, we claim that the big majority of the accusations have no legal basis or are blatant U.S. government interference in other countries.

Though we may not agree completely with the practices of Megaupload in regard to the management of reported files, we believe that it has never been the responsability of an archive locker as Megaupload to ensure the correctness of the material that people upload, but to diligently respond as required by law to any complaint regarding the illegality of the content.

Furthermore, we are worried as we observe some of the statements in the warrant, like the one stating that the absence of a search engine would be reliable indication of criminal intent.

We also consider that the loses the cultural industries say they have endured because of the activity of Megaupload are unreal and biased, as shown by different studies by the Harvard and London Business Schools or the governments of Canada, The Netherlands and Switzerland.

Numerous studies have denied in recent years that a download equates to a lost sale. This has not prevented the cultural industries and the media, controlled up to 70% by only 7 multinationals, from promoting the creation of laws such as SOPA, PIPA or Sinde-Wert (Spain) by the constant pressure exerted and even writing the drafts of some of them.

This indictment has been carried out in collaboration with different authorities on four continents, showing that even without SOPA, PIPA and other anti-piracy laws there is no limit to the wants of the content industries. But they seek to further streamline procedures, even if they have to resort to violating privacy and hindering technological development on the internet.

In this particular case, there are thousands of affected citizens who have lost their own work and creations hosted on Megaupload. The number of people and data that have been affected by this closure is uncalculable: we just witnessed the indiscriminate dumping of a significant part of human knowledge by simple court order.

In short, with this proof has been delivered that whenever music and film producers strive to toughen antipiracy laws, they do so only because they desire to continue profiteering from the work of others (artists). Today we have seen that there is a no need for new legislation to close pages that contain copyrighted material. However, new laws proposed from the United States (SOPA, PIPA, Sinde-Wert) go one step further and allow the shutdown of websites that, be they in compliance with the law or not, are not to their liking.

On January 18, many websites went voluntarily on strike [1] to demonstrate against the threat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) bills, pending US legislation that would restrict freedom of speech, negatively impact economies, and degrade internet security. Among others Wikipedia [2], Reddit, Mozilla, and Free Software Foundation participated. Many organizations, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have expressed grave concerns over the bills [3].

Regardless of whether its purpose is legitimate or whether it will work; the legislation is not compatible with democratic values. It promotes censorship by giving the US Government and corporations the power to block access to - and take down - websites that they consider to be infringing on their copyright monopoly, including search engines or blogs which link to such sites. This would be done by ordering Internet Service Providers to censor access to the Internet and by cutting funds to the infringing websites by forcing the advertisers and payment services to cancel their accounts [4].

These laws would make social networks, search engines, and all websites providing space for discussion and information exchange impossible to run without massive surveillance of all users and the censorship of everything they publish. A link placed by a user in the comment section of an article in a regular Internet magazine could result in the magazine going bankrupt and the owners being charged with a crime. This would not only cripple innovation and entrepreneurship, it would be a flagrant violation of the fundamental human right to free speech. The bill's supporters refuse to acknowledge the anti-democratic aspects of the bill as a problem; instead pointing-out that the proposed filtering mechanisms have been proven to work in countries like China, Iran, and Syria [5] - nations infamous for their official suppression of free speech and expression.

Pirate Parties joined the protest and opposed these bills on the grounds that they will erode the rights of every internet user around the world. Pirate Parties object generally to any legislation that would toughen intellectual property law, but these acts go beyond file-sharing - they harm everyone's ability to participate and interact online, both personally and commercially.

Pirate Parties who went black out on the 18th:
Argentina
Australia
Belgium
Brazil
Catalonia
Czech Republic
Canada
France
Germany and Young Pirates Germany
Greece
Italy
Kazakhstan
Luxembourg
Massachusetts and Georgia
Morocco
Romania
Russia
Slovakia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
The Netherlands
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Pirate Parties International (you can see the strike screen here )

Links:
[1] Strike Against SOPA
[2] English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout
[3] List Of Those Expressing Concern With SOPA & PIPA
[4] PIPA/SOPA Breaks The Internet
[5] It Worked For China, Why Not The United States?

On the first of January 2012 many works will enter into the public domain in many jurisdictions; that means you can remix those works freely, usually even without citing the original author (although we think if you do appreciate their work, it's good sports to name them) without getting sued. Thus the first of January each year has been established not only as New Year's Eve, but also as Public Domain Day since some years.

If you are eager to remix some of these works, we suggest to lookup the copyright expiry date for works in your jurisdiction, e.g. at Wikipedia. As of today a lot of countries are basing the copyright term expiry date by the year the author died, you may then lookup who died in the respective year, e.g. 1941.

We all whish you a happy new year (given you are using the Gregorian calendar). The video embedded below has been created by the Pirate Party of Australia where all works by authors that died in 1941 will become public domain.

You must have an HTML5 capable browser to watch this video. If you can't see it, right-click here to download an ogv (17,75MiB) or here for an mp4 (14.69MiB, both with license CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 unported).

Details on the authors of the remixed works can be found on Vimeo.com where the video was originally published.

Update: Thanks to mauron from PP-FR for sending us an ogv and pointing out that the mp4 uses a patented non-free technology! We will try to prevent using such software-patented technology in future posts alltogether. We updated this article accordingly.

On the 24th of December russia will face another series of mass protests demanding fair (re)elections. The organizers of this movement concerns, that there might be some repressions from the authorities, who would try to obstruct the access to independent sources of information.
The Pirate Party of Russia asks for help, to ensure with technical means the uninterruptible access to the main information website http://24dec.org/

What's needed?

• Mirroring Servers (that would mirror over ssh/rsync the static HTML content)
• additional DNS Servers (c.a. 5 in different geographies), that would mirror the DNS zone.

If you are willing to help, or know someone who could, please get in contact with our technicians at mva [at] mva.name

Sincerely, Pirate Party of Russia

Many of you will know Minecraft. Various Pirate Parties have picked up Minecraft to use it as a tool of publicity, relaxation and teambuilding. Pirates around the world quickly jumped onto the train, and various Pirate Parties have been running MC servers for some time.

For you that don't know Minecraft, Minecraft is a sandbox retro game, where you have to mine resources, craft them into items, and use those items to build things. Various things have been built in Minecraft already, ranging from a Venator Star Destroyer in the PPNL Minecraft project, to a Stargate, and various other fantastic works of art. The biggest example is a person building a CPU in Minecraft, eventually causing him to get a job at a tech company.

Building such structures on Minecraft creates 2 things: It brings up a discussion whether building and improving replica's of famous "objects" this way is allowed under copymonopoly law. This is a very important discussion for Pirates around the world, and Minecraft is a great tool to encourage this discussion.

Secondly, building large structures often involves good teamwork, which might build good friendships. These friendships increase the coherence of a Pirate Party on a national and international scale. They also are the basis for better party collaboration later on. An example: If one pirate wants to build a scale model of the Battlestar Galactica he can't do this alone. Where does he get the resources and the time from? That's where he calls the help of another pirate on the server. Even while they hardly know each other, they start working together on the project. After some time, they've finished the project, and see that they've constructed something big. They feel happy about their achievement, and see that this person is nice to work together with. Pirates who get well along with eachother, are more likely to pick up something in pirate context away from keyboard or on something far more serious. This could help the Pirate Parties to construct many more things.

The Dutch Pirate Party has improved this concept over some time, and now hosts building contests, where players on the server are encouraged to work together. Also, the entire setup of the server actually makes people work together, since without working together they achieve way less. This is something the other Pirate Parties have been doing too in their MC projects. It can be very good for Pirate Parties to host MC Servers. But where do we have a centralized list of them?

This is where Hackbard from Piratenpartei Radio steps in. He has created a nifty little site where all Pirate Parties can list their servers in a central place. Other Pirates can then find Pirate Party Minecraft servers here in a convenient manner. The site is currently only available in German, but until translations to other languages are complete, there's always google translate or whatever other translation tool you like. If you'd like to make a translation, you can contact Hackbard at Hackbard23 [at] gmail.com or Roberto/Robske at roberto.moretti [at] piratenpartij.nl. All Pirate Parties are encouraged to list their servers on Hackbard's site.

If you'd wish to see a Minecraft server in action, go to Hackbard's site or connect to minecraft.piratenpartij.nl in Minecraft. The first contest of the Piratenpartij MC server will start at 27th of december. If you'd wish to join in, there's info in the contests room on the server. As last, here's a video to show the Piratenpartij MC server in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_5CUIJ7Vt0

As you may or may not be aware, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are on their way to pass in the US. This would imply terrible consequences on free speech while imposing tyrannical conditions for web site providers like Diaspora servers or YouTube. The only reason for all this is clearly heavy lobbying of the copy monopolists that want people to pay for nothing: making copies that everyone can make at home.

Although it's American legislation, we all know that the pressure of the copy monopolists to restrict human rights and fundamental freedoms for their own profit is worldwide. We all know that once this passes, it would be easier to push even further worldwide. That's why we decided to bring this matter to your attention.

Our allies in the US are trying to stop these dangerous acts for some time already. However, there's a good chance that the legislation will pass. Hence Senator Ron Wyden, a steadfast opponent, is ready to block it even by reading censorship opponents' names from the floor of the Senate, if it comes up for a vote.

Demand Progress launched a web site where you can ask Senator Wyden to read your name. Ask him and/or spread the message, if you find it appropriate. We do.

UPDATE: You might also want to sign a petition against PIPA and SOPA launched by Avaaz.

Today, 20th of November, is election day in Spain. The new Prime Minister will be decided and probably the right-wing candidate Mariano Rajoy (PP) will win by a landslide, ousting the party in power since 2004 (PSOE). However, these elections are also important for the International Pirate movement, since they are the first general elections in Spain with Pirate candidates for both Congress and Senate.

And they're not only Pirates, but very exceptional candidates as well. For instance, the head for Barcelona's constituency is no other than Josep Jover. He is a famous lawyer in Spain for many reasons, but most notably because he managed to overturn in Brussels the Spanish digital tax: an arbitrary charge on all digital equipment, collected to be paid as a compensation to Spanish artists, as for their hypothetical losses due to what they call "piracy".

However, the fight for this election has been tough. Let's not forget that the current parlimentary parties modified the Electoral Law to try to prevent small parties from competing with them. They did so by forcing them to obtain supporting signatures from 0.1% of the census, just to be allowed to run in the elections.

It would seem that the mainstream parties were worried that the #spanishrevolution movement would take away votes from their long-stablished bipartisan system. And they did have reasons to worry! PIRATA.CAT, the Catalan Pirate Party, created Joavalo.org, an online tool designed to speed up the collection of all these signatures and, to prove true to their convictions, released it freely so that all other small parties could use it as well. The result was that PIRATA.CAT obtained some media attention, and twice the necessary signatures.

It was not the first time the Catalan Pirate Party managed to surpass expectations. In their first elections, being only three months old and with no media presence, they obtained 1.000 more votes than one of the most media-sponsored novel parties in Spain, UPyD. In their second elections, nine months after that, they managed to obtain two City Hall councillors, still with no media presence whatsoever.

The reasons for their social support are no surprise: their use of internet-based tools and environments. PIRATA.CAT is very active in Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other forms of social media. Their weblog is constantly updated, and they have a full array of promotional videos (you can get a sample here ). In this field, they are no match for the other traditional parties.

In fact, this very week they managed to be Trending Topic in Spain with the hashtag #votopirata ("I vote Pirate"). This was a great opportunity to show to newcomers the Pirate ideology and to reach and inform some undecided voters. It proved to be a great success: visits to PIRATA.CAT's pages increased dramatically the day after, and kept increasing every day.

And this is why in this elections, for the first time, Spanish media has begun to show some interest, interviewing Pirate candidates, and discussing about Pirate ideas. In a time when a lot of Spaniards are asking for real democracy, the thought that Internet could provide it sounds appealing to many. And the media can no longer ignore it.

It has still to be seen what the results of this new tendency will be today. However, no one can deny that the Catalan Pirates are here to stay.

On November 9, 2011, President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev met with the Russian Internet community. The discussion included the entire Internet spectrum; bloggers, people involved in Internet projects, online media and movements, a number of celebrities and 3 Pirate Party representatives. Even though the President of Russia appears to be interested in gadgets, the change of copy law, Internet freedom, and Free Software implementation in schools and agencies, it was his first meeting with Internet activists to which the Pirate Party of Russia was invited.

Throughout the two hour meeting, the following Pirate topics were discussed:

Direct democracy & E-petitioning
Medvedev spoke of moving to direct democracy in 20–30 years. PP-RU thinks that it can be done much faster. The technical resources for it are already widely available, and society can adapt within 10 years. The first step in this direction is the plan to create an e-petition section on the Russian government website.

Copy monopoly
The internet activists at the meeting thanked Dmitry Medvedev for his message to the G20 leaders about the change of existing copy law on Internet. Ivan Zassoursky (www.webpublishers.ru) promised to give him the new proposals on how, in accordance with Russian law, the diplomas, dissertations, and other academic works could be made publicly available. In addition, proposals on how to ensure the transfer of Soviet Era works to the public domain, enriching the Russian historical record.

Transparency & Accountability
All the questions asked by Russian twitter users about open government data where to no avail. No response was given.

This meeting was a good sign for the Pirate Party of Russia because it showed that the Russian government and Dmitry Medvedev finally accept our existence, and are willing to collaborate and hold discussions on policy. Paul Rassudov, the leader of Pirate Party of Russia says: "On November 7th, the day of the October Revolution, we had an online demonstration dedicated to E-democracy. Two days later, on November 9th, the President expressed support for our ideas. It proves that our way of political fight—intellectual expansion—is a good choice!"

More than seven months passed away since the last PPI General Assembly (GA) had taken place in Friedrichshafen, Germany. The time has come to arrange the 2012 GA, therefore, we call and kindly request for offers of hosting the next annual PPI GA. As all previous PPI conferences had been held within Europe, we strongly encourage especially the non-European Pirate Parties to send their offers. A list of requirements and more information on the conference can be found in wiki.

The submitting date for your offers is the 4th of December 2011, at 23:59 UTC. The PPI conference will take place in March or April 2012. For further information, feel free to contact the PPI board <board@pp-international.net>.

The following text is a press release of no patents on seeds.

Munich, 26.10.2011. Three hundred people representing a broad range of environmental activists, farmers and development organisations held a protest against patents on seeds and animals outside the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. With six meter long flying vegetables, a stall with patented broccoli and agricultural machinery, the focus of the protest was the sell-out of resources needed for daily living. After the EPO announced that the patent on the broccoli (EP 1069819) would not be revoked, speakers from various organisations are now looking for political action. Speakers at the demonstration included representatives from organisations such as Friends of the Earth, the German Family Farmers Organisation, the international coalition of “No Patents On Seeds” and others.

Speakers urged politicians to take legal action against the patent. After the patent is finally granted at the EPO, it can still be challenged in the national courts of its Member states. “We demand that European Governments as well as the German Minister for Agriculture and European colleagues prepare for legal action against the patent. Granting patents on plant varieties or on conventional breeding is prohibited within Europe. This patent is in conflict with both prohibitions. If the existing patent law is so inadequately worded that any legal challenge is bound to fail then it has to be changed. This is the only way to protect the interests of consumers, farmers and breeders,” says Christoph Then, patent expert for Greenpeace and one of the speakers of the coalition of “No Patents On Seeds.”

Speakers from development organisations are also warning against the consequences for less developed countries that are already suffering from speculation with agricultural resources and soaring food prices. "In making these decisions the European Patent Office is playing an irresponsible game. Breeders as well as farmers can only assume their responsibility for world food security if they have free access to seeds. The ongoing rise in food prices must not be further fueled by patent monopolies," says Francois Meienberg from Berne Declaration (Switzerland).

Recent research carried out by Ruth Tippe from the initiative “No Patents on Life!” found that further patents with claims on bread, flour and noodles (EP1331845) and cucumber (EP1433378) are due to be granted. “The EPO is about to grant further patents very soon. For example, on 2 November a patent will be granted to Bayer claiming cucumber derived from conventional breeding. If this development is not stopped, there will soon be patents on air, light and love.”

Contacts:
Francois Meienberg 0041 797967612,
Christoph Then 0049 15154638040,
Ruth Tippe 0049 1728963858.

Further information: www.no-patents-on-seeds.org.