German Social Democrat Turns into a Pirate Party Representative

In 2008 British censors were harshly criticized for blacklisting Wikipedia. A few months back Australia’s ACMA put on their blacklist some legal websites and threatened to fine those who would link to outlawed websites including URLs found on Wikileaks $11,000 per day. Lately, Finnish and German internets have massively protested against their authorities using child pornography as a pretext to impose censorship and a political weapon. Where is all that leading to?

You can become a gold pirate by donating money to the party on a monthly basis

The German Pirate Party is back on the track again. Besides having a member (who will soon be joined by another one) in the European Parliament, now they have added a member in the German Reischtag. There’s a post on the Pirate Party website talking about this achievement.

A German Social Democrat, Jörg Taussig, whose patience towards the German censorship debates has run out, decided to give up his membership as a Social Democrat to become the first sitting German Pirate Party representative, Zeropaid reports.

“We welcome the fact that more can see that the fight for free communication in an open society is the way forward, and not censorship, blocking and monitoring,” commented Rick Falk Vinge, party leader for the Swedish Piratpartiet (via Google translation), “It is particularly gratifying to an existing MP sees this.”

Recently, German protesters took the streets expressing their disagreement with the proposed censorship laws. The march was ‘accompanied’ by a petition that has over 130,000 signatures disapproving the proposed laws.

Stay tuned.