Latest developments, 6.6.2006
Media game getting dirty
At this stage it seems likely that the news of a Pirate Party memberlist 'circulating in Internet', first
claimed by journalist Robert Triches in Aftonbladet, was a fabricated smear and scare effort by the journalist himself and his unknown background forces. The journalist never could deliver this 'list' to Pirate Party for verification; there were no signs of hacking on Party's computer, and despite some 100 or so of the finest pirates looking for this list from Internet they could not find a sign of it. Now if
these guys cannot find something from the Internet, it probably is not there!
Pirate Party leader: "Greens are cheating filesharers"
Alarmed by Pirate Party's sensational membership growth and facing a very real risk of dropping below the 4 % vote thresold and thereby having to leave the parliament, the Swedish Greens quickly jumped to the p2p bandwagon and included the legalization of 'downloading' into their official campaign items. In reality they are not promising anything beyond the corporate distribution model, says Pirate Party's Rickard Falkvinge. There are no p2p networks with downloaders only. It's all about downloading
and uploading, and only if you legalize both, you are really legalizing filesharing, he emphasizes.
95 % of pirates will have a vote in the election
Bernt Granbacke, one of the many volunteering Pirate Party field workers, gives some interesting statistics about party membership in an
interview for Norlänska Socialdemokraten. He tells that the party grows nationwide at a rate of 20-100 new members per day, and that 95 % of party members are in a legal voting age. Perhaps surprisingly the members are not predominantly young people but mostly from the age group 30-50 years. When asked about the position of the party in the traditional left-right axis, Granbacke answers with a question: "Where would you like to have us?"
Election specialist: "Filesharing will be one of the main election themes"
A nationally respected statistics professor and election specialist Peter Esaiasson has already gone on record saying that filesharing will be one of the main themes of these parliamentary elections. Greens have already responded to the signals and made their own p2p-friendly facelift, and there may be pressures in other parties to do something similar.