Press release archive for March 2010

This statement can be downloaded here.

The government has released details of their alternative to the controversial Clause 18 of the Digital Economy Bill, which allows injunctions to be brought against websites that infringe copyright or even merely link to other websites that do.

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The Pirate Party UK condemns the government's draconian and damaging proposals, and calls for the Digital Economy Bill to be dropped, pending a review of copyright law.

This statement can be downloaded here

The Pirate Party UK is excited to announce our line-up of parliamentary candidates for this year's General Election. The party intends to put forward a total of ten candidates across England and Scotland...

The party still needs to raise a considerable amount of money to fund their campaigns...

Today, the Pirate Party UK is pleased to announce its 2010 General Election Manifesto.

The full manifesto, containing more detail of our policies and the reasoning behind them, can be read online, or downloaded in PDF format (both in colour and in black and white).

This statement can be downloaded here

The Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP) today released a study on the supposed effects piracy has and will have on the EU's Creative Industries. The Pirate Party has criticised the report for containing dubious facts, inconsistencies and sloppy methodology.

The report vastly overestimated the size of the creative industries in Europe by including manufacturers of TVs, photocopiers, paper, transport and even the postal system, all of which are unlikely to be affected at all by piracy.

Andrew Robinson, Pirate Party UK leader, said

This is just the latest round in an industry-sponsored campaign of scaremongering that began with the infamous 'home taping is killing music' hyperbole in the 1970s and 80s. Their grossly inflated figures are achieved by including anything even tangentially related to creativity as an 'interdependent industry.' We are expected to believe that piracy damages paper pulp producers ...

This statement can be downloaded here

The Pirate Party UK has come out as highly critical of the BBC's recent Panorama programme for its disappointing coverage of the Digital Economy Bill.

Although Panorama attempted to give a fair hearing to both sides of the controversy surrounding the bill, it was ultimately considered inadequate. In particular, the BBC was criticised for its failure to get informed commentary from organisations opposed to the bill, such as the Open Rights Group, Coadec and the Pirate Party, meaning that the arguments both for and against the Digital Economy Bill were incomplete, largely misrepresented and often factually inaccurate.

Even the title of the episode was misleading. This bill does not create any "Net Police" but is a private law, allowing companies to take action without being held to standards anywhere near as high as the police. The punishments the bill proposes are to be ...

This was first posted on 3rd March

During another intense session in the House of Lords this afternoon a vote was finally held on the controversial Clause 17 of the UK's Digital Economy Bill. This clause would have allowed the Secretary of State to amend the UK's copyright law with a lot less oversight from parliament than usual. The government did not hide the fact that this provision would be used to clamp down on unlicensed file-sharers in various ways as the industry demanded. However, there was a bright side; the clause would have permitted Lord Mandelson (or more likely his successor) to do as he promised back in October and relax the UK's copyright law by bringing in the 'fair use' exemptions it so desperately needs.

Strong Opposition

However, as most people are aware, both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties (and many from within the ...

This was originally posted on 11th March.

Tomorrow (12th March) Reporters Without Borders will be celebrating World Day Against Cyber Censorship. While the UK is not on Reporters Without Borders' list of "Enemies of the Internet," we should not be complacent.

Internet censorship affects over 95% of UK Internet users with most of us unaware of it. Nearly all of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) filter all their web traffic using the Internet Watch Foundation's (IWF) blacklist without notification or consent. The IWF is a non-government, non-regulated body whose remit is to block access to sites allegedly containing child abuse images or racist material. Whilst this is a noble goal, it is far from a perfect system.

More recently, the Internet - which has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize - has come under threat in the UK from the Digital Economy Bill. While the the original ...

Yet more data has come to light supporting the Pirate Party's opposition of the Digital Economy Bill (DEB). Not only will it fail to reduce piracy, but it will drive pirates to even more sophisticated and harder-to-monitor technologies.

The most recent nail in the coffin of this misguided legislation has been supplied by UK ISP TalkTalk. A survey of their customers revealed that 80% of 18-34 year olds would simply seek out new - and as yet undetectable - ways to download, and felt that they would be more likely to commit online piracy if the Bill were to become law.

Pirate Party UK leader Andrew Robinson said, "The choices being made by parliament will not stop future generations downloading music, they will simply decide if future generation consider the law and the political process to be their enemy or not. One-sided laws written by record companies will simply strengthen people ...

Today marks a change in tide for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), as MEPs once again aligned with Pirate ideals to vote in favour of fully transparent negotiations. In a landslide 663-13 decision, the European Parliament threatened the Commission with legal action if MEPs continued to be kept in the dark.

EU negotiators will now be forced to go cap-in-hand to the ACTA negotiating table to obtain other delegations' agreement on full transparency. The United States have a well-documented stance against transparency in the treaty's negotiations, and as a result may very well end up stalling ACTA indefinitely.

This is not the first time that MEPs have called for openness in these proceedings -- having voted not once, but twice against the secretive nature of the talks -- but these resolutions have, up until now, been ignored by the EU's negotiating team. Now however, it seems that the Commission will ...