Australian Pirate Party sets sail

Re: AC 12.42

"Very Stupid People's Party"

I though there were already several such parties?

@Sandman

As a lifelong member of the Sex Pirate Green Party I'd just like to say that we hate the Green Pirate Sex Party. Bloody splitters!

Err...

"...decriminalisation of non-commercial file-sharing..." Soo, this would actually not cover The Pirate Bay - they are commercial as they make money from Advertising and the facillitate the sharing of copyright files. (They host the tracker - they aren't just a search engine.)

@Fred 1 - "Where's the Australlian Pirate Party?"

"He's over there"

"SPLITTER!"

@Fraser

And a tracker is illegal how?

In fact how is it any different than, say, a DDNS service provider?

@The Original Steve

A tracker per se isn't illigal, a tracker that facillitates the downloading of copyright material, when the company who runs that tracker have been informed of this is clearly illigal. Especially if that company then makes a profit from offering this service.

I'm not sure how you could liken a tracker to a DDNS service, please enlighten me.

Always good for a laugh

The Pirate Party is always good for a laugh. Maybe they should get real jobs?

My guess is

at some point someone's going to get pissed and start filing a ton of lawsuits (akin to grabbing the football and saying screw you hippies, I'm going home!)

@Andrew Norton

Ok, so I should have said that commercial is making or attempting to make a profit, clearly a charity, a non-profit making entity is not a company.

It has been fairly well discussed on the reg and elsewhere that TPB are attempting and presumably suceeding in making a profit., however I don't have their accounts. It costs money to run any enterprise, be it legal or not costs are incurred, so I'm not sure where you were going with that particular argument. It doesn't make it alright if they only make a small amount rather than a large amount, hell it doesn't matter if they make a loss, come to that.

As for comments about copyright harm, this is trotted out all the time with no proof whatsoever. Why would someone download something if they didn't want it? And music sales may well be up, they may have been up even more if it weren't for TPB et al. You've not seen the suffering of small bands who can't make ends meet where a few extra sales would be very welcome indeed, I presume?

It's a crime???

"the decriminalisation of non-commercial file-sharing."

Ouch! I didn't realise non-commercial file-sharing was a crime in Oz.

Maybe we're not so bad off in the UK where non-commercial file-sharing isn't a criminal offence.

Not all or nothing...

"The danger, within the Australian system, is that there are now three very distinct parties with overlapping agendas, all likely to be competing for the same core anti-establishment vote: the Green Party, the Sex Party and the Pirate Party."

Australia has a wacky preferences voting system, you get to specify a 1-2-3- etc choice of who gets your vote. If your number 1 mob don't get enough votes they look at who you put for number 2, and give it to them, and so on until someone's got over the 50% mark. Hence a vote for the Pirate Party can end up getting a member of the Greens into power, and the parties get to see all the preferences, hence they can see what the electorate like. While it's ridiculously confusing it does allow you to send a message to the pollies (e.g. when your local Labor MP gets voted in he knows 30% of his/her electorate voted for the Sex Party at #1, and thus getting all cosy with the Christian right might not be such a good career move...)

young, idealistic, enthusiastic...

and have no idea of the real world.

If you look at all the profiles, you would see that they are all under 30, involved somehow in IT and mostly male. Many of them are still at uni and have some interesting descriptions of themselves. Even if I agreed with their entire programme, I would no vote for them based upon their descriptions.

There are also very few candidates, which probably indicates a very small number of people willing to sign up.This may be a problem because to be registered as a political party in Australia, there needs to be at least 500 electors registered with the party. So I doubt if we will hear too much of them.

@Fraser

"You've not seen the suffering of small bands who can't make ends meet where a few extra sales would be very welcome indeed, I presume?"

Maybe they should try making music people would wana buy then?

@fraser

yes I've seen small bands, I've seen big ones. I used to be a copyright enforcer for a music label, so I know the REAL facts.

i also know where the figures come from that claim TPB is making millions - The figure came from the price an advertising reseller had a spot on their site up for. The claim of millions was extrapolated by this by multiplying that figure by the amount of adverts on the site, and saying that's tpb's profit. No reference to how much the advertising broker paid tpb, or that it might have been a typo (because we've never seen THEM on advertised prices have we) or the costs of running a few dozen servers, or the bandwidth the site+tracker uses. Or that other adverts would have brought in less. It was as horribly flawed as every antip2p organisations claims of loss.

I like Steak. I went to a restaurant yesterday and didn't have steak. Why? Because the price was higher than I was willing to pay. Now, if it was available cheaper, I would have it. It it's on a buffet I would have some, but generally, I don't buy steak in restaurants. the cost for that product, much as I may like it, is greater than I'm willing to pay. At the price they are offering, I will not buy at all. By the logic of antip2p stats, if I went and had steak elsewhere, maybe at a friends where I got it for free, I've cost that restaurant a sale! That's how the stats work. They've been made up for years.

I remember reading the minutes from a BPI meeting 7-8 years ago, and back then, they were wondering how to fudge numbers to make these losses 'appear' then. You ask 'how many would they have sold without it' - maybe more, maybe less. How many would they have sold if the law required every person to buy 2 copies? What if the law required homeowners to sell their children into slavery before defaulting on their mortgage, and that everyone should have to have an unauthorised overdraft once a month - Northern Rock wouldn't have had any problems. Every failed business can have a 'what if' and a 'we planned this, but it didn't happen'. That's business. If people aren't buying your products, work out why and fix it, don't try and force people to buy it regardless, that's never worked and never will.