Pirate Booth Banned

[Snailface]

Awwww.

​

Organizers at the Gamex Expo in Sweden were pressured by large gaming companies such as EA and Activision into canceling a booth appearance by a Swedish political organization known as "Piratpartiet" or The Pirate Party. Interestingly enough, the expo's organizers themselves had been courting The Pirate Party for several weeks prior.

Seriously, how on earth did the Gamex officials think this wasn't going to be a problem? Please to discuss.

Source

 

[s4mid4re]

The pirate leader was informed by the show manager that Gamex wasn't a venue for political agitation and that the pirates' presence by itself was a political statement, as their aims and activities "could be perceived as illegal." Piratpartiet countered that they only want to change laws concerning copyright protection, but the fuck-offstood.

In Sweden's largest game expo. This is hilarious.

Thank you for making my day, Snailface.

 

[Thrust]

I...what? politics =/= GAME EXPO like the concept is interesting but really did you think you could push politics someplace like that?

 

[Necron]

This... who planned that?
Did they offered to play DS with flashcards and PS3 with CFW?

 

[AceWarhead]

This... who planned that?
Did they offered to play DS with flashcards and PS3 with CFW?

They were showing off a hacked 3DS.

 

[Clydefrosch]

as a rather new and young party, i kinda dont see why they would not be there... after all, the demographic of gamers is, after all, pretty important for them. and part of their political concept do fit too,
if they paid for the space, there shouldnt be anything forbidding them to be there, right?

 

[Necron]

as a rather new and young party, i kinda dont see why they would not be there... after all, the demographic of gamers is, after all, pretty important for them. and part of their political concept do fit too,
if they paid for the space, there shouldnt be anything forbidding them to be there, right?

If they paid for the space, but they are ofering weapons and bombs, should they ban them?

 

[Snailface]

Interesting trivia: The Pirate Party actually occupied 2/3 of Sweden's European Parliament seats in 2009.

I'm just shocked that not only something like this exists, it actually had majority political control over an entire country!

as a rather new and young party, i kinda dont see why they would not be there... after all, the demographic of gamers is, after all, pretty important for them. and part of their political concept do fit too,
if they paid for the space, there shouldnt be anything forbidding them to be there, right?

Lack of money. If the game companies boycotted the event, they probably couldn't pull the thing off at all. So the organizers had to say "go home" to the Pirate Party or suffer themselves by having to cancel their event.

I do agree with the "they should get what they paid for" stance you take. There's no mention if the Party got their money back or not.

 

[Domination]

I find this offensive to my religion. We pastafarians believe that the FSM, using his noodly appendages, created us in the likeness of pirates. How dare they so insensitively ban pirates from the convention? They shall face the FSM's wrath!

But it's really quite stupid for them to set up a booth there advocating piracy, I'm all for piracy, but do they think the big gaming corporates are just gonna think "Hey, there's a booth encouraging people to pirate our games, lets go have a look later! I think it's gonna be great!"

Political parties are never more powerful than corporates.

 

[Gahars]

Maybe they hoped that everyone would put their torches together to create a big bonfire before singing "Why Can't We Be Friends?" in unison?

 

[Issac]

Interesting trivia: The Pirate Party actually occupied 2/3 of Sweden's European Parliament seats in 2009.

I'm just shocked that not only something like this exists, it actually had majority political control over an entire country!

as a rather new and young party, i kinda dont see why they would not be there... after all, the demographic of gamers is, after all, pretty important for them. and part of their political concept do fit too,
if they paid for the space, there shouldnt be anything forbidding them to be there, right?

Lack of money. If the game companies boycotted the event, they probably couldn't pull the thing off at all. So the organizers had to say "go home" to the Pirate Party or suffer themselves by having to cancel their event.

I do agree with the "they should get what they paid for" stance you take. There's no mention if the Party got their money back or not.

I find that statement very hard to believe... I don't know the facts about the seats in the European Parliament in 2009, but now in 2011 The pirate party have 2 of 18 seats (not 2 of 3). Nor do they have any majority of any kind... they're super small. They have a whopping 0 out of 349 seats in the Swedish parliament, (they got 0,65% votes)...
They have 0 out of 1662 seats in the county councils... They also have 0 out of 12 978 seats in the Municipality coucils... So yeah, they're small.

The only guys supporting them, are in my eyes fools who doesn't respect the work of others.

They went out in the media a few years ago saying that Music, Movies, Games, etc. is information, and information should be free and legal. information shouldn't be something only for the rich. And one spokesperson even said "Downloading Music / Movies should be free! They can make money on other stuff!"... Now, I do download stuff, as many of the users here. But I NEVER would try to debate it and state that it's my RIGHT to do. I have no right what so ever to download anything copyrighted.

 

[ThePowerOutage]

The Pirate Party is actually backed Notch and a few other indie devs.
Whilst the idea see ridiculous at first, what they actually want to accomplish isn't as barmy as it seems.

 

[Ace]

They went out in the media a few years ago saying that Music, Movies, Games, etc. is information, and information should be free and legal. information shouldn't be something only for the rich.

This conflict was sparked by the inclusion of IPRED laws in Sweden, which was hysterically controversial here. Coupled with The Peanut Butter (HINT: Read the first letter of each of those words... yeah) trials, The Pirate Party picked up a whole lot of momentum.

This isn't to say that they're a small international party: do Google about their statistics in German elections, and you'll surely be surprised