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    The movement: Initiatives with links to the Pirate Party

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    The anti-copyright organization Piratbyran (the Bureau of Piracy) is explicitly political and can best be described as a lobbying organization regarding copyright issues. The internet itself is obviously an important channel for the bureau's political work, but it does also have offline activities (meetings with net activists from other countries, lectures held for students in different universities in Sweden, conferences, campaigns, events, demonstrations, and so on). To put it briefly, Piratbyran is a significant and active voice in the ongoing debate on file sharing, immaterial rights and copyright laws. By the end of 2003, Piratbyran launched the website The Pirate Bay. However The Pirate Bay is since October 2004 run separately from Piratbyran, one must not forget its close relation to this organization. Both work in different ways to achieve the same political goal: the free and unrestricted ability to supply and share music, film, texts, computer software and other digital material on the internet.
     

             

    The Pirate Bay is basically a file-sharing site which by now is the world's largest bittorent-tracker. Its primary purpose is to supply torrent files, and does so in 27 languages. Even though most of the actual political debates on file sharing issues is the responsibility of either Piratbyran or the Pirate Party, also The Pirate Bay takes active part in the legal and political debate on file sharing and copyright questions, especially via its forum where the members can discuss political and juridical issues of file sharing, copyright laws and related topics, and via the blog-section where these issues are discussed by the people behind the website. A common topic discussed is the various legal trials that The Pirate Bay is involved in. To sum up, The Pirate Bay together with Piratbyran and the Pirate Party has created a strong and influential anti-copyright movement, engaging especially young people who consider these issues of high democratic and political importance.

     

     

    Pirate Parties International

         

    Pirate Parties International (PPI) is the umbrella organisation providing a common platform to establish international collaboration and communication between Pirate Parties around the world. The organisation (NGO), formally founded in 2010 during the PPI conference held in Brussels, exists to help establish, to support and promote, and to maintain communication and co-operation between pirate parties around the world. Its main goals are to raise awareness and widen the spread of the pirate movement, and to strengthen its bonds internally and externally.

     

           

    Following the « cablegate » scandal, Wikileaks came to be under heavy attack with governments and corporations trying to silence and shut down the organisation. As Wikileaks' core beliefs are very much in line with those of the Pirate Party, the Pirate movement immediately mobilized by providing the means to resume the Wikileaks website’s presence and organizing a global website mirroring action. This countered the unacceptable silencing of Wikileaks. Within hours the site was back online and with legal guarantees it not to be disconnected again. As stated on their site, WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Their goal is to bring important news and information to the public. They provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to their journalists (their electronic drop box). One of their most important activities is to publish original source material alongside their news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. The broader principles on which their work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of their common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history. Wikileaks has broken government and corporations stories about war, killings, torture and detention, government, trade and corporate transparency, suppression of free speech and a free press, diplomacy, spying and (counter-)intelligence, ecology, climate, nature and sciences, corruption, finance, taxes, trading, censorship technology and internet filtering, cults and other religious organizations, abuse, violence and violation.

     

         

     Even if the Pirate movement isn’t linked in any way to the Anonymous movement, both organisations acting independently, there exists a strong sympathy between them and both organizations share the same core beliefs. Anonymous organizes grassroots activism where the Pirate Party organizes political action and presence around the same principles and ideas. Their vision is based on the conviction that successful grassroots campaigns are founded on access to information and a venue to publish it. Accordingly, they are creating a stable platform wherein grassroots movements and proponents of humanitarian causes can discuss legal methods of protest and information dissemination. They also advance their fundamental mission to develop and provide an environment that encourages collaboration and responsible action. They envision that through shared participation within the WhyWeProtest activism platform, individuals and groups with overlapping and even divergent positions will be empowered to look beyond their differences and to engage in fruitful dialogue and collaboration. Ultimately, WhyWeProtest intends to help fill the resulting void and build a world in which all voices can be heard through the conduit of new technologies. In such a world, previously disempowered groups will possess both the means and the necessary information to make themselves be heard by their governments and corporations. Online communities centered around diverse interests will enable ordinary people to rapidly coordinate demonstrations and protests, exchange ideas and create better and more effective forms of activism.

     

     

    Tor Servers

    Tor Servers provides technical means enabling censorship circumvention. As such the services are actively used by Wikileaks, Openleaks, Anonymous, Telecomix, the Pirate Parties and everyone concerned by the privacy, censorship en free speech issues. The Pirate movement contributes to the Tor Servers network as free speech and the protection of it is paramount to a free, open and transparent society. The goal of the Tor project is to provide a censorship-resistant & safer access to the Internet. It is the most widely used free & open source anonymization technique in existence. It also makes it possible to host services like websites in a secure and anonymous fashion ("hidden services"). Tor is based on the concept of Onion Routing. Onion routing relays the traffic in an encrypted fashion through a number of other machines that voluntarily participate in the network. People using it rely on these volunteers to share their own bandwidth with them. Hundred thousands of people from China, Iran, Russia, Syria and numerous other authoritarian regimes use Tor every day to access free media, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers needing additional protection too. Tor provides anonymization and encryption for everyone - for free.

     

    Telecomix News Agency

                  

     Issues that cannot make it to the general news agenda are now be promoted by the public itself. The old rules no longer apply. Users can find each other and start talking. In countries where correspondents are no longer allowed to report, citizens can themselves reach out for global support, and find ways to bypass the digital roadblocks built by their oppressors. Telecomix agents are constantly monitoring the European Union for information and changes in laws that could limit free speech, damage the internet or affect civil liberties. Telecomix has been both a source of information for activists, as well as a common ground where activism can be organized. There are no leaders in Telecomix, agents cooperate with projects and execute them without authorities. Because of this, there can never be any clear goal. In the spirit of helping the free flow of information their cluster sends out news that it finds interesting through the Telecomix News Agency. As they say : « We no longer need to be confined to what is "newsworthy" - we can write our own news. We are writing our own history as we speak. That is the full impact of the internets. » Telecomix is also researching ciphers and darknets as a means for avoiding surveillance.

     

     

    WeRebuild EU

    WeRebuild EU is a project for hacking the systems of laws and control of the European Union as well as all its member nations. The We Rebuild initiative promotes and participates in building the Internet to be accessible for everyone everywhere, enabling true freedom of speech. This is something which can not be guaranteed by states or corporations, but requires the polyvocal voice of the Internet. As such We Rebuild is a decentralized cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free Internet without intrusive surveillance. These issues span over many subjects and areas, which are reflected in a breadth of competences and opinions. There are no leaders, nor members. We Rebuild is simply an international chaotic event, and their actions can not be predicted in detail. To make communication easy they build their own tools using open source software and open protocols. Many of them actively participate in projects to support free communication, e.g. setting up anonymous proxies for people living in oppressive regimes. Their knowledge and code is shared with anyone. We Rebuild wants to be copied. The movement is also involved in spawning different types of enquiries concerning legislative phenomena as well as concepts such as net neutrality and censorship. The We Rebuild Wiki is the centerpoint of their activity. The wiki system is completely open for anyone to add, edit or delete info – and through their collaborative work they are trying to produce a broad base of facts and information, useful for everyone.

    Reading the content of all of the above mentioned sites being the best way to understand the ideas, principles and beliefs of the movement we provide the links to all sites below :

    The Pirate Bureau: http://piratbyran.org/
    The Pirate Bay: http://thepiratebay.org/
    Pirate Parties International: Read more & http://www.pp-international.net/
    Wikileaks: http://www.wikileaks.ch/
    Anonymous: http://www.whyweprotest.net/
    Tor Servers: http://www.torservers.net/
    Telecomix: http://www.telecomix.org/ & http://werebuild.eu/

     

    *based on an analysis by F. MIEGEL and T. OLSSON