[pp.int.general] Peer-to-peer to support the French Pirate Party campaign

[Maxime Rouquet]

Dear fellow pirates,

The Pirate Party of France is asking for citizens to share the ballot
papers of some of its candidates to the upcoming June 10th Parliament
election.

Please, relay our call and share our ballot papers, to show that
peer-to-peer and sharing are great for good purposes !

Regards,

m


 * Original communicate in French :

http://legislatives.partipirate.org/2012/2012/06/06/p2p/


 * Translation :


Peer-to-peer to support the French Pirate Party campaign


Many of the 101 candidates of the French Pirate Party are asking their
electorate to print their voting ballots, after retrieving it from their
campaign websites. But the success of the French Pirate Party caused
repeatedly overloads on our server, which is vulnerable, as any
centralized system. As a result, we will this week-end distribute all of
the concerned voting ballots via peer-to-peer, and are asking to people
who can, and are willing to, to share them.


The French Pirate Party restricted resources prevent it from being able
to support its candidates campaigns, among whose several have made the
choice to lead a "zero Euro" campaign. Even if the scores will obviously
be low, even a symbolic success remains entirely possible thanks to the
French Pirate Party campaign on the Internet, which supplies a website
referencing the candidates and making it possible for people to download
their voting ballots in order to print them [1].

But the past few weeks have proven that *the centralization of data was
risky* : from the Alsace section's Twitter account being closed for a
few hours due to a misunderstanding [2], to the French Pirate Party
website who failed multiple times to support the visitors load
(especially right after the broadcasting of our televised messages) [3].
Even without thinking about an abusive procedure like the one our
colleagues from the PiratenPartei suffered [4], great are *the risks
that our electorate will not be able to access our server during this
week-end*, and as a consequence will not be able to vote for us.

As a result, the French Pirate Party puts today to good use the *best
technology for massive, decentralized and censor-proof distribution,
which is not subject to overloading issues in case of great popularity :
the peer-to-peer. By sharing today our candidates voting ballots via
BitTorrent, we ensure that every voter will be able to get his/her hands
on a pirate voting ballot, and support his/her candidate, no matter what
happens during the week-end : accidents or censoring attempts.

This is also a good way to remind everybody that the technology should
never be demonized as such, and that a lot of righteous and virtuous
uses of peer-to-peer should inspire our politicians at least as much as
its impact on the distribution of digital arts.

Our team has gathered and checked voting ballots from every one of our
candidates : we encourage people in our electorate who will be printing
their ballots to check them on Saturday. The file to share via
peer-to-peer is currently being released on every communication support
that we have, and we encourage every one willing to protect the
democratic speech to share it.

The torrent file can be downloaded here :
https://cap.partipirate.org/pubarch/2012-01-preparation_legislatives/bulletins/des_candidats/bulletins_de_vote_pirates.torrent

The direct magnet link is :
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:981c376dd0f103dd1d93bbe77546f89aafa224e6&dn=bulletins_diy_parti_pirate_legis2012.zip

[1] http://legislatives.partipirate.org/2012/vos-candidats/
[2] https://alsace.partipirate.org/spip.php?article54
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBP16ep6cuI
[4]
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/plusieurs-serveurs-du-parti-pirate-allemand-saisis-sur-demande-de-la-france-39760991.htm
[5] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P

The Pirate Party of France, June the 8th, 2012
Statement released under the conditions of the CC-BY license.