[pp.int.general] Fwd: International Pirate Party meeting

[Juxi Leitner | Piratenpartei Österreich]

Some news from France!

--Juxi

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: parti-pirate at no-log.org <parti-pirate at no-log.org>
Date: May 22, 2007 10:55 AM
Subject: International Pirate Party meeting
To: juxi.leitner at ppoe.or.at


Hi Juxi,

things were a bit messy lastly (we switched our server to Debian Etch and
the SQL export/import was awfully done). Besides, neither Floyd_Le_Barbare
or myself won't be able to join you guys; though I really *did* want to
come on Friday june 8th, I've just been offered a job for this very day,
so PP meeting it's not an option anymore... :(
This is why I sent you this rather long mail; this way, if anyone asks
you, wants to know about us or anything, you'll just have to read this
message, with our apologies to all for not being here among you, where we
definitely belong.

That said. The French Pirate Party is still here, still very much alive
(even if its history is quite complicated, "full of sound and fury"). We
have about half a dozen new registred users per day -that is, *real* users
and not spam bots; each day I find, on this very mailbox, mails from
people who share our ideals, our fight, and want to know more about us.
Pedagogy is our watchword, we try to inform people among and around us. To
let them know about their disappearing civil freedoms, know the truth
about the biaised propaganda official medias use to present as
"information", let them discover alternate, Libre solutions, finally, let
them make their own mind.

We still lack a decent website (the current homepage/forum are to remove
when it's ready), and that's a pity (by the way, I *love* what you guys
did with DrupalCMS; the tags cloud at the bottom of the main page is a
terrific idea - oh, and I just stole your favicon; hope you won't mind...
:) ).
We have chosen to base our portal on the Puntal CMS, which is rather new
and still actively developed. The tricky part we're working on is the
seamless integration of the Wiki/Blogs/Forum/E-Zines and so on (as far as
I can see, you have decided to simply skip this part, and maybe it was
relevant).

Had I to define any specificity of the French Party, maybe this is where I
would start: our proximity with the OpenSource movement (which is very,
very active here in France; RM Stallman comes visit us twice a week, we
have very-dumb-but-very-efficient opensource lobbyists, who managed to
make the whole Parliamanent go Ubuntu and to make all French
administrations adopt OpenDocument format!).

During the last six months, we've been working and discussing with the
developers of many opensource projects: among others, Scol, Puntal,
Torpark (I have to mention here the Hacktivismo group, which we were the
first PP to contact, and which welcomed us very kindly --special
dedication to Steve Topletz, who's become a good friend of mine). We're
actively supporting the Jamendo torrent network (free-licensed music), and
we do whatever we can to promote Open-minded artists (besides, there are,
as you know, some musicians and some opensource ayatollahs among us --in
my case, both ;).

I'm not trying to say here that OpenSource Attitude (TM) is a property of
the French PP, let's make it clear. What I want to say, what I feel, is
that this direction may be more vital for us here in in France, due to the
French context. Moreover, this is the only way we could manage to avoid
legal and juridical issues so far (the bunch of BusinessEurope's poodles
who call themselves French Government are growling quite a bit these
times).

A few words, at last, about French PP press coverage. The guy who founded
our movement in France about a year ago (codename HPK), wanted to make it
quick and dirty, guerilla-style and shoot-first attitude. That brought us
a HUGE media buzz, TV interviews, articles, servers constantly down dut to
massive affluence, one thousand new members a day, etc. This was *way*
cool. But let me tell : deal with the subsequent hangover wasn't that
easy... Most of the opensource and human rights activists considered us as
professionnal teenage troublemakers, and it's been a hell of a work to
make them change -when possible, that is- their minds...

But I'd like to say the government poodles have done an excellent job
here, by making more and more citizens unhappy and by demonstrating the
absence of criticism in official media. I'd like to make an official
statement here: thank you guys, we did appreciate you efforts to make us
feel right. Just keep going, you're doing fine. :D

When I talked about situation in France with one of our Pirates who
happened to live in China, he told me that things might be even worse in
France than outthere, due to the fact that citizens here actually *do*
believe they are in a democracy... That was my joke of the day.

Back to business. We've recently learned that a student in journalism who
interviewed a couple of us IRL had been awarded by a conservative press
group for his interview. Funny, but we're eager to see how they'll publish
it (they could very well put us between a paper about New Cyber-Terrorism
and an article on Anonymous Paedophilia on Internet, which would be rather
uncool)...

We've got tons of projects; some of them are totally geeky (create a web
radio, video clips, or a pirate MMORPG...), others are not (maintain our
wiki -- that isn't more realistic by the way...). There's one project that
might interest you guys: a young publisher has recently proposed us to
elaborate the 'Pirate Manifesto', in which we could explain our history,
the ideas we stand up for, our concrete existence and actions worldwide,
and the political stakes involved.

This is an awesome idea; we have, here in France, some writers and *real*
journalists (freescape.eu.org, if anyone of you can read French) who could
help us, and maybe preface it, but I thought other Pirate Parties might be
interested in getting involved as well (particularly our Swedish fellows,
who are way, way, waaay better than us and whose Declaration is a
Masterpiece).
Finally, the reference to the Communist Party isn't mandatory here (there
are tons of other Manifestos outthere), though I'd definitely like the
first sentence to be:

   'A spectre is haunting the World -- the spectre of Piracy'...

That was my line :)

Cheers (and enjoy this fabulous week-end).

in the name of the French Pirates,
Valentin Villenave, aka Pers.




-- 
"We need dreamers 'cuz in our dreams we see not what is but what can be!"