Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 44

Austrian Pirate Party Wins First Seat, Makes Frontpage News

Pirate Parties: In the local election of Innsbruck, the Austrian Pirate Party has sent shockwaves by taking its first Austrian seat, finishing at 3.8% in the election.

This caused frontpage news in Austria – the tweeter @Exiledsurfer was kind enough to tweet the pictured frontpage. Taking one seat in the city parliament of Innsbruck in a local election may not seem like much – but it’s large enough to make the front page story, heralding a strong trend all over Europe – you can almost read the strong headline (“Pirates Get Their First Seat”) as though it read “It Begins!”. It is also noteworthy that their election budget was a mere three thousand euros.

This is a common recurring theme across Europe right now. South America is coming along well too, but appears to have trickier party registration rules – in any case, the PPs of Brazil and Argentina have been frequently seen in the community. The United States is boosting its presence state by state as well, although they have a different political system and will have to work with a slightly different modus operandi.

As I just wrote on TorrentFreak, it’s important to understand that when you take 5% of the votes in Europe, you get 5% of the seats. Thus, the political system in most countries of Europe is open to shifting its policy once you have the support of some quarter-million people. (The United Kingdom and France are exceptions, except for their elections to the European Parliament.)

I predict we will see more news of this sort in the very near future. In the meantime, congratulations to Piratenpartei Austria (PPAT) are certainly in order.

Liveblogging from Pirate Parties International

Pirate Parties: The Pirate Parties International 2012 General Assembly is in progress. These are notes that I take as the meeting goes – just personal reflections.

(This page updates as new entries appear – no need to refresh.)

15:32 - Ok, live updates (refreshless) seem to work again. It was really a very simple error.

15:30 - (Yes, I’m still testing.)

15:30 - Except perhaps Game of Thrones.

15:29 - Indeed it was. And that concludes the postmortem of this session. Nothing more to see here.

15:28 - Testing again. Looks like it was a simple case of PEBKAC.

15:09 - Ok, liveblogging appears broken. Sorry about that (it does not auto-refresh). I will have to troubleshoot that later.

15:02 - Testing CloudFlare interference.

15:01 - Testing meteor.

14:52 - Ping meteor server.

14:52 - My server died right after the last note. I still have no idea why – a cold reboot (power cycling) was needed to bring it back online, the hardwire reset button was not enough. Sorry about that.

16:04 - Doctorow: “If all the Napster users in the US had voted for a particular president, that person would have been president.”

16:02 - Now: Cory Doctorow!

16:01 - I’m not sure if the live updates work on all browsers.

15:57 - Meeting with many of the people who were at the first 2007 meeting in Vienna. It’s kind of funny how we share this feeling of being veterans, and explaining how things were “back then” – meaning five years ago – to new pirates.

15:43 - Pulled back from the crowd for a few minutes just to breathe, hanging out in the openspace area where people are discussing various projects. Doctorow on soon.

15:35 - Met Fabio Reinhardt, one of the people elected into the Berlin Parliament. He’s giving a keynote tomorrow, shortly before I give the closing keynote. Another guy I’m looking forward to hearing. The purposely chaotic arrangement of this conference really shows its strengths, letting each and every participant get the most from it.

15:28 - The social parts of the PPI general assembly is starting to show its merits. Everybody is hanging out and getting to know one another, rather than necessarily listening to everything going on in the main session. People getting to know one another across country borders is what causes the organization to learn across those same country borders.

14:41 - Cory Doctorow has arrived, hanging out at the bar with a really large coffee. Apparently, he just flew in from the States.

14:40 - Several new pirate parties are being voted in as new members of the Pirate Parties International. Applause follows after every vote.

14:29 - Back after lunch. I could hardly get through the door before being grabbed by reporters and have done three more interviews. This liveblog is getting a very boring message, me doing what I do. One observation, though, is that the (MANY!) reporters here have definitely done their homework. They know about minute details of the movement and ask about plans, about trends, about leadership. Cory Doctorow is coming up for a keynote shortly – I’m really looking forward to that.

13:06 - Lunch break. My entire morning was spent before TV cameras, so I missed much of the in-session action, but on the other hand, I did things as well as I could in order to spread the ideas, the messages, and the message about the parties’ impact. Sessions resume… when people get back from lunch.

11:38 - Another five interviews later, I need some air. Currently outside, chatting to a couple of Slovenian reps that I last met in Ljubljana.

11:07 - Three TV interviews later. Interest remains high.

10:43 - The room is full and out of seats, as I can tell. People are standing in the back – I can’t tell if media or participants. We are still in the meeting opening formalities. One of the organizers just asked me to go to the press room, so small pause in liveblogging.

10:36 - What strikes me at the 2012 PPI meeting is how many new countries are here, and how successful they are already. Greece founded three months ago, and are already polling at 1%. Moldavia is here, as is Romania. I’ve met with reps from pretty much every country in Europe already. Oh, Portugal was another nice surprise.

10:34 - The meeting as such has just started. media is EVERYWHERE. Gefion_UK tweeted succinctly, “wherever there is @Falkvinge, there is Camera”. The PPCZ has arranged this beautifully, especially given the unexpetedly large interest at the last minute.