Christian Engström, a Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament, blogs about copyright reform, surveillance, censorship and transparency in the EU.
HN commenters link it for the Pirate Party's positions on copyright reform, pharmaceutical patents and file sharing studies.
> The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system
The Christian-led goverment party didn't even pretend that hard what the envisioned "Zensurinfrastruktur" will be later mainly used for and on several occasions mentioned "child pornography, copyright infringement and other crimes" in one and the same sentence.
This was exactly how the copyright lobby envisioned the strategy, linking child porn and copying.
”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.
* http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/
> No magic switch needs to be given to the police.
But it is absolutely necessary to be able to block "outsourced" overseas torrent sites.
There's more than a semantic difference between moral and material interests. In fact most "internet hippies" I know wants strong moral protection for authors [0][1]. It's a fairly central concept in the copyright debate, not least since it's part of the universal declaration of human rights.
[0] http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/the-pirate-party-on-copyright-reform/
[1] http://the1709blog.blogspot.se/2012/05/pirate-party-plans-for-copyright-reform.html
[2] http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G06/400/60/PDF/G0640060.pdf
I believe in reform. 1 year exclusive copyright / patent at most and author always holds the copyright. Its ironic that the movie with the biggest budget is a pirate movie ;)
https://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/the-pirate-party-on-copyright-reform/
About pharma patents, I think many have been misled, as this explanation from the Pirate Party seems very credible:
http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/an-alternative-to-pharmaceutical-patents/
I'm not sure it's a good thing to do. Because this can happen: https://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/european-parliament-blocks-emails-containing-the-word-gender-on-internationa-womens-day/
Here's an English translation on MEP Christian Engström's blog: http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/the-swedish-pirate-party-delivers-bandwidth-to-the-pirate-bay/