Founding of European Pirates. Conference of the Young Pirates. 370 people that came to Brussels, journalists, good speakers and interesting debates. These were the major features of the last weekend.

One might say that all of this cannot be achieved in only Saturday and Sunday. Indeed it's not – and that is why this weekend was unique. It started actually on Thursday evening already. That was a great moment – opening and keynote speeches by Amelia, by Julia Reda and Rick Falkvinge.

The Conference. Venue: European Parliament

We spent many weeks by preparations so we could be sure that all we do will run smoothly. And so did the Young Pirates, who gathered right after us on Saturday and Sunday in the very nice BYRRH abandoned factory/cultural center/community space in northwestern Brussels.

Yeah, we wanted to do the foundation of Pirate Party Europe. But not only that. Shortly after the official celebration, after the historical moment (and after lunch) we had a huge conference full of panels with specialists, NGOs, evangelists, activists... simply all the people that one can imagine when speaking about Internet Governance.

Many people have probably noticed I take issue with the Commission's proposal for a Connected Continent. Choosing the strictest tool available to the Union harmonization endeavours, a regulation, the Commission proposes a wide range of wild proposals which completely over-turn most telecommunications decisions made by the European Parliament in the 7th legislature up until this point, and fails to protect net neutrality by calling for something which can only be interpreted as a Return of the Minitel. We just closed down the last terminals in France two years ago, why reconstruct this entity now?

Put forward last year (2013) in September, the large and over-turning proposal came right before the election campaign. Commissioner Kroes had ensured that roaming was part of the proposal, in order to make members of parliament scared to run into bad press in the election campaigns. To prepare the proposal she had done what appears to be "not much".

So I made the following request for access to documents on February 21st 2014:

UPDATE, 11117 contributions!!! :

 

The deadline for sending in responses to the copyright consultation is passed. Now comes the road towards reform!

The Pirate Party was founded in 2006 as a reaction to the Swedish implementation of the Infosoc-directive. It criminalized downloading in Sweden, link-sharing in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, and made it unlawful to circumvent digital rights management in all EU countries. In Sweden it also killed small copy-shops, in Germany newspapers can't publish photos of art on the internet to accompany news stories and in the UK you can now only view webpages if you have an appropriate license agreement with the website proprietor.

At a time when copyright needed more flexibility, more permissions and less centralization, the Infosoc-directive accomplished exactly the opposite. To have the European Commission open up for the possibility that there could be problems arising from that strategy after more than 10 years of ignoring the problem was quite grand.

There are many political formations in the European Parliament, similar to those that we can see in numerous national houses of deputees. We have the European People's Party – major right wing player, the Social Democrats – major alliance of many European socialist parties. We have the liberals,the greens and many more. But where are the Pirates?

The Pirates are a member of the Greens/European Free Alliance. There is no European Pirate Party right now. So.. shouldn't we found it? Or … perhaps better … do we need it? Do we want it? Absolutely!

As I've posted before, there were numerous general elections in many European countries last year. (Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Luxembourg...) In all these respective countries the Pirate movement was present and in all of them the Pirate candidates were showed to the general public.

Just a short example - the visual stuff: In France, Pirate Party uses purple/green as their colors. In Belgium its purple, in Germany orange, in Sweden its purple with black and in the Czech Republic even four colors are used. In all of these countries right before the elections a huge discussion about the visual identity and the design of the campaign materials was present. In all of the countries everyone worked on preparations of these materials.