Loz Kaye — Pirate Party UK Leader:

By supporting the baseless US extradition case against Richard O'Dwyer today at Westminster Magistrates Court the judge Judge Quentin Purdy has failed to inject the much needed shot of rationality into the insanity of the UK-US extradition arrangements we had all hoped for. The Sheffield student is accused of infringing copyright by setting up the popular UK-based website TV Shack.

TV shack provided a catalogue of links to other sites, with no illegal material available from it at any time. As the server was based in the UK, Richard's lawyer has pointed out that there is simply no valid reason to send a young British citizen to face a court in the US.

[...]

This outcome is a failure on the part of our British justice system to act in a sensible and reasonable way. This case is the perfect example of what enforcing copyright is; excessive, overblown and aimed at easy targets innocent or not whilst ignoring the human.

So, this is what protecting your copyright has come to mean. Accepting unacceptable human collateral like Richard O'Dwyer."
http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/ofabu/tv_shack_creators_extradition_hearing_is/

People seem to expect parties, groups and movements to come out of nowhere and storm to the top, in the UK that simply isn't doable, it takes time and effort. In 2010 the best result in the national election was 0.6% in Gorton, Manchester (with a candidate who had a manifesto and people knocking on doors..), in the local elections in Bury the party managed 3.6% of the vote - obviously a smaller area and different issues, but again, with people out talking to residents and putting forward positions. It's a progression, it won't go on forever, it may fail but it's worth doing. As to political power, the party has very little, where it has any influence at all it is through those people that have managed to raise their own profiles and end up on TV and radio presenting the other side, the party position. That helps a bit, but it certainly isn't the end game. The party needs to raise awareness of the issues it thinks are important and either threaten other partys in marginal seats/wards or find other ways of having other partys take similar positions to them. At present there isn't another party in the UK with similar positions on copyright reform, in fact I can't think of one that is going in the same direction...

>The bottom line is that the PP is not going anywhere as a political party until it has an opinion on day care. It is questionable whether it has it in itself of getting that, and if not it should stay out of election That is exactly that the party is doing now. The party has been through a number of elections and the people who involved themselves in those elections, the people from the party who were out on the ground either knew this already or learned rather quickly, it is also why the party is pushing on policy and anything it can do to have it's positions heard in one forum or another. As to vulgarizing the debate, I might have agreed a year ago (before I was a party member), indeed looking at some of the press stuff from the early days, the discussions etc.. it rings true to a certain degree, I would hope that this will change over the next few years as the party matures and learns, indeed that's what I am aiming for.

The problem really is two edged. If the party doesn't approach other issues, the ones everyone feels is important, no-one would vote for the party. This is the largest criticism the party see's, 'how can we vote for you, even if we support your ideas on copyright, civil liberties etc.. if you don't have any policies on education/health/the economy'. So it's time to see if we can find policies that makes sense given the ideals and principles that inform our positions on copyright. Our candidates have theoretically had their own platforms in previous elections (with mixed success) but they haven't been well communicated or terribly well formed in all cases, broadening where there is consensus will help with this, more to the point, candidates can still do what they want to do in terms of policy, as long as they are clear to the party and the public, what they are standing on.

The issue that the party has is that it's small, has a limited number of activists and was scrambling somewhat in terms of political direction and understanding the process up until a few months ago. The way the party has been fixing that is by sorting the admin (new leadership team came in and fixed it..), getting some structure in place (candidate selection, policy process, even thins like web infrastrucutre and dev..) and building the people who can talk to the press to do so. The party didn't have a press office 6 months ago (it had a collection of people who would issue press releases ad hoc) it didn't have a central phone number, a development web server, amongst other things... There are massively more things that the party wants to do regionally, nationally and locally, but it will take us time with the members we have now, we could do more with more active members and supporters... One of the problems I see in the UK is that many people discussing politics, especially those sympathetic to the Pirate Party, are only interested in fully formed parties that can 'win' immediately, whereas realistically it takes time to build an organisation and have an impact (if you can even do it...).