Today, in spectacular fashion, the secretly negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was voted down in the European Parliament by a landslide 478 – 39.

Rodney Serkowski, founder of Pirate Party Australia and active campaigner against ACTA said, “The crushing defeat of this secretly negotiated and undemocratic agreement is a stunning victory for civil liberties and their primacy in the intellectual property rights debate. It is fitting that on July 4, Independence Day, the EU has declared its ‘independence’ from American special interests.”[1]

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Pirate Party Australia cautiously welcomes the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties’ (JSCOT) report on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which recommends delaying ratification of the secretive Agreement until certain criteria are met[1].

The report makes many recommendations based on concerns Pirate Party Australia and others raised in submissions to JSCOT, particularly the necessity to define certain terms which have made the Agreement highly ambiguous and subject to varied interpretations. One such concern was the lack of methodology to differentiate between non-commercial and commercial rights infringements.

The Pirate Party is pleased with the report, which also draws attention to the current lack of support for the Agreement within the European Union, where five different European Parliamentary Committees have all recommended ACTA be rejected. These committees found that the Agreement was not economically or legally appropriate, nor did it conform to human rights obligations.

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Pirate Party Australia’s ACT branch aims to run a candidate in the October election. The Pirate Party requires 100 members who are registered to vote within the ACT before Thursday 28 June midnight on Saturday, 30 June, in order to register the Party within the ACT. However, if they do not achieve the necessary numbers by Thursday, they plan to still field independent candidates.

The Pirate Party stands for individual privacy, and feels that constant surveillance is a violation of the presumption of innocence. The Party believes that only those suspected of criminal activity should be monitored, and only for a limited time.

“While we consider individual privacy to be extremely important, we also push for greater transparency of Government,” said Stuart Biggs, co-ordinator of Pirate Party ACT. “Our representatives need to be accountable, and hiding behind exceptions to the Freedom of Information Act is an inappropriate method of governing.”

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Pirate Party Australia is outraged at Telstra’s underhanded scheme of tracking the websites accessed by their customers.[1] It was recently revealed by the telecommunications company that they track and store web addresses visited by their NextG subscribers on systems in Chicago, out of reach of Australian law.

“This raises a series of very serious issues. They are logging user behaviour without consent and the data is stored in the United States where our Privacy Act does not apply, but where the Patriot Act does apply. I find the claims that the non-consensual use of the data will be used to build an Internet filtering database for their ‘Smart Controls’ product to be troubling,” said Brendan Molloy, Party Secretary.

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In an attempt to get a real response for once, this letter has been sent to each person listed below via snail mail. We truly look forward to their response.


To:
The Honourable Julia Gillard, MP, Prime Minister of Australia,
Senator The Honourable Bob Carr, Minister for Foreign Affairs,
The Honourable Nicola Roxon, MP, Attorney-General of Australia,
The Honourable Kevin Rudd, MP, Former Minister for Foreign Affairs,

I am writing to you today on behalf of Pirate Party Australia to express our disgust at this Government’s continued abject failure to act regarding the political safety of one of our citizens, Mr Julian Assange.

We are extremely disappointed that Mr Assange has had to seek asylum with a foreign government, and would like to know why there has been no intervention on his behalf. We understand that the UK police have a warrant for his arrest on the grounds that Mr Assange has broken his bail conditions by seeking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. We also understand that he is merely wanted for questioning in Sweden, and has offered numerous times to comply with investigations, both while in Stockholm, and via video link from the United Kingdom.

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