UK Pirate Party registered as politcal party | Hacker News Reader

UK Pirate Party registered as politcal party

pirateparty.org.uk

26 pointstome29 comments

I personally sympathize with most - but not all - points that the pirate parties of Sweden and the UK make, but I can't help it that I think that the name they've chosen ('pirate') is one of the worst names they could have picked.

Traditionally politics is a game of words, if you enter the game with one leg tied to the other it is not going to help at all.

Being a 'vertical' (single issue) is hard enough, to add a voluntary stigmatization to that does not help.

Piracy is uniformly seen as negative, the 'opposition' (MPAA/RIAA) are the real pirates here, but they actually get the moral high ground for free this way.

I know what you mean. With that said I think that one of the reasons it is that way (a game of words) is because all the players use the same rule book.

I often wonder whether a party with a different approach would appeal to voters: I guess this is testing the waters a little :)

I think the party will get more votes with a name like "Pirate" because it's automatically assumed the party is not a full political party, but a single (or very few) issue pressure group. It will get free advertising in the form of media publicity this way.

The usual fate of a single issue party is that as soon as it starts to attract voters away from more mainstream parties they will update their programs to reflect the discontent felt by the voters, and like that the ideological element of the single issue party gets 'adopted' (some would say hijacked) by others. Then the voters will flock back, and hopefully some real change is enacted.

That would be pretty much ideal. If that happens, then the Pirate Party will have served its purpose.

I agree with your point, but consider the 'Hacker' in 'Hacker News', that has very negative connotations in mainstream language (thanks, media industry!), but the type of smart, gets-things-done people who use this site can see through the language at the values behind it.

Exactly the kind of smart, gets-things-done types who can make a difference in politics, I'd imagine.

Yes, I imagine that the people who will vote for a party with the policies the Pirate Party has will not be the ones who would be put off by "Pirate" in the name.

But that's the question, isn't it? Could they attract more "mainstream" voters if their rhetoric were not based upon preaching to the choir?

I doubt it. I think they just want to get enough votes to make the mainstream sit up and listen.

The story of 'hacker' is not quite the same as the story of 'pirate'. I think that 'hacker' first meant someone who can hack things up, then some people did some hacks to crack systems; to crack a system you had to be resourceful, you had to be a hacker to be a cracker. These crackers made so much of a name for themselves that most people use 'hacker' to refer only to this subset of hackers.

On the other hand, the original pirates were thieves. We are currently seeing a resurgance of the use of 'pirate' to refer to a thief on the sea. So the word always referred to something negative.

So 'hacker' was a positive (or at least neutral) term, and it got its negative reputation by being associated with people who did bad things. 'Pirate' was negative, and some people tried to give other people a negative reputation by calling them that.

In summary, 'hacker' got its negative connotations from bad people, but 'pirate' is a negative word that is used to give a negative reputation to people.

You are right. That's not a problem, though. Terms like `dike', `nigger' or `swiss' where entirely negative in the beginning, too. Now you can see some of them as self-designations.

swiss ???

Sorry, I can not find the exact source. The Eidgenossen (`comrades in oath') fought against the old German Empire. Schwyz was the name of one Kanton, but soon used by outsiders to describe the whole confedereation. The Eidgenossen did not like this at first, but eventually accepted the name defiantly. However their state's official name - even today - is confoederatio helvetica. (This is in neo-Latin mostly not to give official preference to one of the countries languages over another.)

Perhaps not nearly as bad as `nigger', but `swiss' was not meant as a compliment at first either.

I always assumed the 'Hacker' in Hacker News was there to gently stigmatise the site, to avoid it going to way of sites like Digg.

I've always seen it as them reclaiming the word "pirate", which has been misused as a slur for the last 300 years. Queer used to be a derogatory term too - now many will proudly identify themselves as queer. My dad called me the other day to tell me he'd finally given up and downloaded a song for my mum from Limewire after becoming exasperated at trying to buy it from the various legal channels. Due to some ridiculous licensing disputes between the recording companies involved, it was completely unavailable in his country on any album or compilation. "You're a proper pirate now, dad", I said. "Yes, I suppose I am", he replied... there was more than a hint of pride in his voice at having defeated the ridiculous.

You're actually nailing one of the major reasons why people start with filesharing here, they simply want some song, then can't find it anywhere. Other than from those pesky download sites... so they download their first mp3 or long-out-of-print movie.

And once the skill is learned it gets a lot easier to do it a second time.

Before long you realize that not only is the 'catalogue' a lot larger than in any for-pay store, the quality is usually better, there is no need to part with your personal information and so on. Convenience always was a great selling point.

Maybe it would be a good thing if everybody that ever downloaded a song would voluntarily report to their local jail to be locked up for a week or so. But all at the same day, just to show how ridiculous this is.

> Before long you realize that not only is the 'catalogue' a lot larger than in any for-pay store, the quality is usually better, there is no need to part with your personal information and so on. Convenience always was a great selling point.

And there's no shitty DRM.

> Maybe it would be a good thing if everybody that ever downloaded a song would voluntarily report to their local jail to be locked up for a week or so. But all at the same day, just to show how ridiculous this is.

LOL. We may try that as a stunt.

What are you talking about? Pirates are glorified in all entertainment media. Almost as popular as ninjas.

Yea, Jack Sparrow for example

Of course, "ninja" is a negative word itself. It means the people that have no honour and will disguise itself in woman clothes,hide in the night, attack when the victim can't defend herself, kill someone, and then run away.

They are the antithesis of "samurai" in Japan culture.

They represent with pirates a life free from remorse of doing whatever you want without restrictions. People fantasies with having sex with everybody, raping, stealing, traveling all world and killing their enemies, this doesn't mean they do.

> I think that the name they've chosen ('pirate') is one of the worst names they could have picked.

If we'd given ourselves a more boring name -- something like Copyright and Patent Law Reform Party -- no-one would pay us any attention. Not only that, we needed to use the Pirate name so we could piggyback off Piratpartiet's mindshare.

So realistically the choice of name was a no-brainer.

And it's a bit like the gay community reclaiming "queer".

For what it's worth, I signed up, and registered as a member (that costs £10). That's not only for the file-sharing aspects of things, but also some of their other declared aims:

• End the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people by Government and big businesses.

• Ensure that everyone has real freedom of speech and real freedom to enjoy and participate in our shared culture.

I whole-heartedly support those goals and am disgusted by the fact that the "mainstream" parties don't even pay them lip service.

It's worth reading Richard Stallman's piece about how the Pirate Party's position on copyright is damaging for the Free Software movement: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html

Since the Pirate Party's proposals are never going to be enacted in law (or at least not without allowing a great deal of time for various interest groups to comment) I don't see that this will be a practical issue.

It is interesting, though, to read Stallman reiterating that copyleft depends on strong copyright!

Maybe we should institute copyleft as a first-class right, instead of hacking the copyright system.