Pirate Parties: Here is useful footage and photos from the Pirate Party’s election win in North Rhine-Westphalia. Free for any use.

All media here is public domain / CC-zero: any and all remix, cutting, republication and broadcast is not just permitted but explicitly encouraged. The whole point of supplying the world with this media is to make it easier to create stories about the Pirate Party, after all.

Photos and video were taken on Sunday May 13, at or around 18:00, at Zakk on Fichtelstrasse 40 in Düsseldorf.

First, here is some useful video footage of when the exit polls are presented. There are several good shots here – the countdown at 00:17, the exit poll results at 00:52, and some onward cheering later afterwards. This video is beautiful in full 1080p HD.

Some of the photos in the photoset from the party afterwards are just too good:

Check the full photoset at Flickr – both people cheering and general atmosphere photos. Free for any use, misuse, abuse, reuse or refuse.

Also check Christian Engström’s collection of more photos, also CC0 / public domain, which are likewise free for any use, reuse and misuse.

Germany: Today, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany went to the polls. This election is always closely watched in Germany, as it is the country’s most populous state. As expected, the Pirate Party won seats and entry into parliament – again – making this the Piratenpartei‘s fourth consecutive win.

After Berlin (8.9%), Saarland (7.4%), and Schleswig-Holstein (8.2%), the time had come to Nordrhein-Westfalen. As the exit polls were just presented, it is clear that the German Pirate Party has achieved its goal and secured seats in a fourth parliament: the exit polls indicate 7.5%, well clearing the five-percent hurdle for entry, and predicting 18 new Pirate Members of Parliament.

As the night progresses, and the actual votes are counted, this number will adjust somewhat. But the exit polls are always precise enough to give the end result with at most one percent unit of deviation in either direction.

This has a number of interesting ramifications. The immediate question is whether the expected weakening of the FDP, Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner, will cause Germany’s government to collapse prematurely. That’s still too early to say – and with them staying in both the Schleswig-Holstein and Nordrhein-Westfalen parliaments (exit polls indicate 8.5% here), the risk of a premature collapse has lessened somewhat.

So we’re realistically looking at one more state election – Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) – before Germany, Europe’s most populous country, goes to elect its parliament in late summer of 2013.

(Germany is a federation of 16 states, each approximately the size of a more normal European country or a typical American state. The state voting today, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is the most populous of them with about 18 million people.)

This leads us to the interesting question – why did Germany of all countries have such breakthrough success with their Pirate Party? I can see five reasons.

The first reason is that the German Piratenpartei was long-term from the get-go. Where most pirate parties are started like any internet project – “we’re going to change the world come next weekend” – the Germans knew they would be around for a long time, and invested early in the organizational foundation for that.

The second reason is timing and ripples on the water. When the Swedish Piratpartiet had its breakthrough in the European Parliament, and was in media all over the world, the German Piratenpartei was able to exploit that momentum when a local minister named Ursula wanted to create a net censorship to fight CP. T-shirts with the name “Zensursula” were common, zensur being German for censorship. The goverment did not win the narrative on that one, and the idea of censorship was abandoned while the Piratenpartei raked in new members. I’d say that this was the breakthrough in activist critical mass.

The third reason is Germany’s federal party support. Having won 1% in the European elections and 2% in the federal elections in 2009 entitled the Piratenpartei to considerable governmental funding, which is paid out to all parties that beat the half-percent mark in elections. This has allowed the Piratenpartei to buy themselves the appearance of an established party out in the streets – their posters and banners are everywhere on paid billboards, as well as on streetlights and more activist-associated locations. But all of it looks professional, yet with a new message. It looks electable, which is key.

The fourth reason is the Piratenpartei‘s early broadening of the party platform. In Sweden, we learned the hard way in 2010 that not enough people will vote a party with a narrow platform to the general parliament. The European parliament was fine, but not the Swedish one. While we were busy running an election campaign, the German pirate party were busy discussing if – and if so, how – their program should be broadened. This was rewarded with 15 seats in the Berlin parliament, which leads me to…

The fifth reason is Berlin and the breakthrough there. In hindsight, Berlin was the perfect breakthrough location. With its characteristics of a melting pot between the government-suspicious East Europe and the progressive West Europe, mixed with a dash of political forward-thinking in the city culture itself, it would have been an obvious election to bet on for a breakthrough. But when it happened last September, it changed the game – and the media spotlight was taken so well care of, that the Piratenpartei managed to convert the progressive Berlin votes to enough votes in the industrial and traditional Saarland to enter into that parliament too. The Berlin victory of 8.9% was the definite breakthrough into mainstream awareness, and here we are.

Comments? Anything obvious I’m missing from the analysis?

Corruption: Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently (something Techdirt calls Censorship Crazy), appears to have quite a bit of dirt in his baggage.

This morning, @Kanarieman pointed me to an article of my own from 2010: just under two years ago, another very strange case went down in the Netherlands. The same judge, Chris Hensen, ordered that talking about file names was legally the same thing as distributing the actual files so named, and ordered the discussion forum FTD shut down. Yes, a discussion forum distributing no files was ordered to be shut down.

At its time, this case was decried as a blatant violation of free speech (but, alas, actually confirms that you can’t have the copyright monopoly and free speech at the same time).

However, something odd appeared in the aftermath. A brochure was discovered, where the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case.

Let me take that once more, for this is truly mind-boggling: not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case. Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter together with the plaintiff. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt.

(UPDATE: @LeHoax explains, “It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.” This is relevant to the context, of course, and mitigates the situation somewhat, but doesn’t detract from the fact that plaintiff and judge were together in a commercial venture on the direct subject matter – the plaintiff’s side, piraterijbestrijding (fighting piracy), is clearly readable in the brochure.)

This judge, this corrupt judge Chris Hensen, is the exact same judge Chris Hensen that has now banned links to the Pirate Bay from a political party, another equally crazy whackdown on fundamental freedoms of speech. But seeing this background, things fall better into place: the judge Chris Hensen was corrupted to begin with, and has been since at least 2010.

I can’t help feeling that this is getting ridiculous. From the IPRED champion in the European Parliament who was married to the Vivendi chairman, to the lead police investigator in The Pirate Bay case who got a job with Warner Brothers (a plaintiff) immediately on finishing the investigation, to the judge in the Pirate Bay case who was a member of the plaintiff’s pro-copyright organization, and now this – can’t the copyright industry fight for the monopoly ideas on their own merits, without needing biased, prejudiced, and corrupted officials?

UPDATE 2: There are several more interesting references, links, and facts surrounding this story over at the discussion thread on Hacker News. Also, here is a Dutch source that confirms the factual circumstances regarding the business relationship between plaintiff and judge in the FTD case.

(Footnote: before somebody points out that this would be libel or slander against the corrupt judge Chris Hensen, I am a licensed journalist in the Kingdom of Sweden, making this site run under constitutional Freedom-of-Press laws (Swedish: utgivningsbevis). This kind of whistleblowing against corrupt officials is what those laws were made for.)

Repression: Reality sometimes does exceed fiction. Three days ahead of the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the Piratenpartei‘s website has been discovered to be censored in schools. These state-run institutions do not allow people – voters – to read what policies the challenger party stands for.

Specifically, it is the election program of the German Pirate Party that is being actively censored in schools, under the category “illegal drugs”. It is no secret that the German Pirate Party wants to change the law to regulate, rather than prohibit, cannabis. Apparently, expressing a desire to change the law is seen as just as dangerous as breaking the law – just questioning the current policy: enough to suppress freedom of speech in the state-run schools.

It should be noted that the Piratenpartei is currently polling at levels that would give the party 8-10% of the seats in the state parliament, so the challenge is real and the challenger is expected to win seats in the elections this Sunday. It is far from a nonsense minority party; rather, it currently has a lot of the media spotlight.

The censorship was first discovered by Kai Schmalenbach, who posted a “website censored” screenshot when trying to access the election program in a school in the city of Soest.

The censorship being used in schools is called Schulfilter Plus (“School Filter Plus”), who, according to Netzpolitik, washes their hands and say that they just use another censorship list from IBM, which they claim “has a good reputation”. Assuming this censorship is revoked immediately, which we don’t know, officials claim it may take as much as 24 hours before voters may again see what the challenger party stands for. At such a point in time, it would be less than 48 hours before the election stations open on Sunday morning.

If this is not a demonstration of the utter rejectability of censorship and why it should never be allowed under any circumstance, as events like this will happen, I don’t know what would be the necessary demonstration.

The Swedish Pirate Party had a similar episode in the run-up to the 2006 elections, when the Swedish Pirate Party’s website was censored on August 23 from all public offices in Västra Götaland, one of Sweden’s largest regions. (The election was held on September 17.) After a media outcry, and the responsible IT people essentially saying “we have delegated this censorship to corporations in the United States, so we cannot be held responsible”, the censorship was lifted.

Via Netzpolitik (in German).

Pirate Parties: While the Germans voted their Piratenpartei into Parliament in Schleswig-Holstein last Sunday, the Greeks also went to the polling stations. The Greek Pirate Party did an amazing first election.

The Greek Pirate Party, Κόμμα Πειρατών Ελλάδας, was founded on January 14 this year. To get 32,487 votes less than four months later – just over half a percent of the Greek votes – is nothing short of phenomenal. Even breaking through to mainstream awareness in four months is phenomenal.

It should be noted that the distance between nothing and 0.5 per cent is much larger than the distance between 0.5 and 5 — once you start hitting 2-3 per cent, you get your own bar in the polls, and become “electable”. You have a shot at parliament, so you’re not a wasted vote anymore.

The Greek PP has posted a letter thanking all 32,487 citizens for the confidence. Well done, and classy.

I had the privilege of meeting some of the activists in the Greek PP while I was in Prague last month, at the Pirate Parties International meeting. On that meeting, our Greek brothers and sisters were also taken up in the community.

I think this signifies the depth and breadth of the Pirate Party community and the strength of the underbrush that we come from. Greece is quite diverse from Sweden, where the movement started six years ago, and yet the same political movement can make quite rapid advances in Greece, too. It’s like the difference between Germany’s Berlin and Saarland elections, which were also different and day as night, and still, the Pirate Party prevailed.

I’m really looking forward to the next five years. In the meantime, Συγχαρητήρια, Ελλάδα.

Freedom of Speech – Andrew Lee: As outdated as a broken record, the UK is once again considering a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor adult content online.

With the recent censorship of The Pirate Bay being forced onto UK ISPs, and Virgin Media’s quick follow through thereof, it is evident that the captain of the ship is steering it into an iceberg. It is universally agreed that Albert Einstein was a genius, and he defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting different results.” So why, exactly, does the UK Government and David Cameron expect the results to be any different when heading down this path than that of North Korea, who censors everything?

The Opt-In Plan
The new plan to censor adult content involves allowing ISP customers to check a box which indicates that they are willing to, or desire to, view adult material online. Just like SOPA and PIPA, the move is touted as a way to protect children online, since children are not exposed to sexually explicit material in Lady Gaga’s music videos. However, without a need for an explanation, this is an invasion of privacy on so many levels.

Casting a Shadow over the internet is Shady.
The opt-in plan is corrupt. To begin, as many journalists have already pointed out, whoever governs the lists and boundaries of censored content will essentially have control over the internet comparable to the current media conglomerates. Secondly, it should be up to parents to protect their children from provocative online content. A plethora of tools already exists that can censor racy content online, such as Net Nanny amongst others.

Additionally, if the UK Government really wants to run companies like Net Nanny out of business, and parents would like to protect their children, then the opt-in program should be an opt-in to censorship instead of an opt-in to un-censorship. This would protect the privacy of many without taking away the freedoms of access to content. However, this would weaken the government’s totalitarian control over censorship.

Have the Government’s Prohibitions Worked in History?
Myself, journalists, and readers of this article, of course, will never be able to make perfect decisions and predict the future. However, what we as a society have evolved to be able to do is analyze mistakes in history and make sure to never repeat them again. When is the last time prohibition has worked out? Did it work on alcohol? Did it work on drugs? While this is not an essay on prohibition, it is a proven fact in history that prohibition leads to organized crime while not really helping to prohibit that which is prohibited in the least. It simply drives it underground and completely out of the control of the government. Just ask El Chapo! Tor will definitely earn itself a grand world tour.

A Battle of Control
To make a long story short, with every little “win” the government makes with new legislations on censorships, surveillance and the overall removal of our privacy, each generation grows up in a different setting where this new environment is the “norm.” In other words, it is the slow and steady desensitization of society to accept full and complete subordination to the totalitarian rulers who are making their come back. It is quite evident that the world of rulers and peasants is coming back, just ask the 1%. As new laws continue to be made in favor of rulers, all of society outside of the ruling class will lose the opportunity to live life and fulfill their dreams.

Opt-in is not an option.

Metaposts: Over the past months, Falkvinge on Infopolicy has slowly become multilingual – observant readers have seen the “English” drop-down in the top left corner and discovered that there are several languages to choose from. Now, it is time to go all-out with the first wave of languages.

If you’d like to see this site in your local language to make the ideas available to more people, you’re more than welcome to help make it happen. FoI (this site) currently exists in German, Russian, Hungarian, and Swedish, in addition to English – and right now, I’m looking for translators into the BRIC countries: Brazilian (Portuguese), Russian, Indian (Hindi), and Chinese (Simplified Han writing). I’m also looking for more translators into German and Swedish, as well as translators into French, Spanish, and Italian (teams of three or more).

Interested in translating articles you like into your language? Check this page of translators’ notes and see if it could be anything for you. You would commit to absolutely nothing, but become part of the crew running FoI and can translate articles as you see something interesting. You would get a mail whenever there is a new article ready for translation into your language.

If you’d like to help spread the ideas of a sensible information policy by helping them cross your language barrier and translate, contact me! Of course, feel free to forward this invitation to people or teams who may be interested, too.

Pirate Parties: I just came back from the victory party in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state. The German Piratenpartei has done it again, and entered its third state parliament.

With 8.2% of the votes, the pirates take six out of the 69 seats. This causes problems for the existing coalition in Schleswig-Holstein, as a new constellation is needed.

(Germany consists of 16 states, each roughly equivalent in size to a smaller country in Europe.)

But more interesting is the German Pirate Party’s now-demonstrated ability to deliver again and again and again. People are starting to expect that the pirate platform is a permanent part of policymaking in Germany. That is certainly a huge change from just six months ago, from before the entry into the Berlin state parliament.

It is only one week to go before elections in Germany’s largest state, Northrhine-Westphalia. A lot of media spotlights and politicial analysts are tuning their antennae to the outcome of that election, on May 13. Recent polls place the pirates at 8-10 percent there, well above the five-per-cent hurdle needed to enter that parliament too.

Next year, there are going to be elections to the Bundestag – Germany’s country-wide parliament. That’s when real change starts to happen.

In the meantime, the community of worldwide pirate parties (over 50 of them) learn from these successes and do what we do best: we observe, we copy, we remix, we reuse.

Congratulations, Piratenpartei. See you at the Düsseldorf victory party in a week.

UPDATE – here’s the magic moment on video, when the exit polls arrive:

Privacy: All too often, I hear the word “Facebook” being used as justifications for why people with the connected lifestyle don’t deserve any privacy.

The argument goes along the line of “They publish everything about themselves anyway, there is no way in hell they can mind being wiretapped for the rest.” This is, of course, a complete and dishonest fallacy – and yet I hear it much too often.

People enjoying the connected lifestyle have a very strong sense of privacy – it just happens to be different from those that don’t live their lives online. The sense of the privacy onion – with layers closer to your heart only being shown to your closest group of trusted friends – has varied across the generations, and there’s nothing odd about that. Today, for instance, having a different sexuality than monogamous heterosexuality is no big deal at all that you’d happily publish and even have on your Wikipedia page; one generation ago, however, you kept it close to your heart.

The fallacy is the quite offensive inability to distinguish between voluntarily doing something and being forced to do it. It is the difference between consent and non-consent. Whether somebody thinks there ought to be consent based on his or her frame of reference is completely beside the point.

If I publish information, I do so voluntarily, even if it is information or images that would never have been published a generation ago. If information is taken from me, I get violated, my privacy gets violated.

Too frequently, you hear politicians argue in media that because of how people behave on Facebook, those politicians somehow have a moral right to wiretap everybody to at least the equivalent degree of what some people post voluntarily. This shows a complete lack of understanding not only of the concept of privacy, but also of the concept of consent.

A blogger in Sweden published a rather striking parallel (now offline); “Why do these people not understand the difference between having sex and being raped?”.

Pirate Parties: The German Pirate Party’s General Assembly is in progress, with 2800 people gathered in Neumünster – the largest party assembly in Germany’s democratic history, and I’m told the largest in the world, too. I was given the honor and privilege of addressing the assembly, and would like to share my words with the rest of the world here:

Dear colleagues, dear friends, dear pirates,

I am Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party.

As you gather here, you are more than a party. You are the heroes of a generation. For the world has changed.

With the net, the previously unsung heroes have begun to tell their stories. Every day, something I see on the net moves me to tears. From joy, from laughter, from happiness.

So when the previous politicians tell us that this or that group is good, is evil, or wants something – when those politicians make themselves into unwanted spokespeople for others, we no longer need to believe them blindly: we can talk to the concerned people directly.

This creates a problem for the old politicians, who have lost the ability to lie to the world. That makes them confused. When it comes to the net and online liberties, those old politicians are behaving like drunken, blindfolded elephants trumpeting about in a porcelain factory.

But for the rest of the world, we are richer than ever before. In this world, a schoolgirl in South America who has just got her first laptop has just as strong a voice as me, a white middle-aged male in the privileged parts of Europe. I think that’s absolutely wonderful, and something worth defending, even if – no, especially if it means that old politicians can’t lie to us anymore.

The net is the greatest equalizer that humankind has ever invented. In fighting for its potential, we are already better at equality than any other party. Not just in Sweden, not just in Germany, but in the world.

Those who call themselves left-wing say you should share with people who are poor when they are in need. We don’t think like that – for we share with everybody, all the time. We don’t share out of pity with the poor – we share because it is who we are, and because we feel it creates a better world.

When people’s voices are threatened by war, censorship, or dictatorships, activists in our ranks make sure that those silenced can still reach out to the world to tell their stories – under our banner or under that of an activist group we’re proud to call our sisters and brothers on the barricades.

So we are better at solidarity, than those who would call themselves left-wing. And we are also better at equality. Not because of how we reason, but because of who we are.

Yet other politicians try to pitch groups of people against each other. Not just the extreme right – this happens all the time. But where old politicians portray differences between groups as a problem, we see people. We see different people, and we celebrate their diversity every single day. Diversity is something positive that should never be allowed to be made into a set of problems between fabricated groups. Once you remove this silly need to sort people into normal and abnormal, you also get rid of the pathological need for invasive surveillance to find the abnormal.

In this, we are an international community fighting for liberty in over 50 countries. Our numbers are growing by the day. Just as Sweden was the starter engine for the movement, the German Piratenpartei is now the shining beacon of our community.

For what we fight for is not rocket science. We demand that the civil liberties that our parents enjoyed in their offline world should carry over to our children in their online world – even if it means that some corporations can’t make money anymore and that some old politicians can’t lie to us anymore.

Because of this very simple demand, we are already better at liberty than those who would call themselves right-wing or liberal, before we have even started talking about all the additional wonderful liberties that the net brings with the connected lifestyle.

Paradoxically, we are also better at conservative ideals than those who call themselves conservative. For where they have sold the ideals of democracy to the highest corporate bidder, we carry the torch of the Enlightenment ideals and its thinkers with respect to those who once gave their lives for our liberty, and demand that this liberty applies on the net too, applies equally to all the people in the world.

In all election stress, it is easy to focus on the here and now. Paperwork, candidacies, recent polls, flyer supplies. But take a minute and listen to the world – using no matter what source – and you will hear the people whispering about us, all over the world, in countries where we are strong and in countries where we are needed.

We are giving people hope -  for they see that they need no longer sit down and accept things as they are. We are showing people that they have the power in their own hands to change things. 250 million Europeans who share culture with the world are not a problem; they are a power base of 250 million voters. If they are being painted as a problem, we are showing that they can and should vote the real problem – the old politicians – out of a job.

We are giving people faith – for they see that in the twilight of democracy, where our children’s liberties are being sold to the highest corporate bidder, the system still works and can rescue and repair itself from within.

And perhaps most importantly, we are giving people respect. There is nothing shameful about the connected lifestyle that the net generation lives by, and if the old politicians feel threatened by it and the transparency it demands, people do not need to accept the bad attitude from those politicians. The net generation has every right to demand respect for themselves as citizens, even if it means that the old politicians lose control. That’s part of our gift to the world – of what we share with the world.

So fair winds, my friends. I am honored to call myself your colleague. I am overjoyed at the opportunity to be part of this journey to change the world for the better. I am proud to be a pirate.