Torrent News: Pirate Party and EU Parliament Elections, Streaming TV with StreamTorrent

On 25 May 2009

If Mininova’s upcoming court appearance (trial date has been rescheduled for early June), then we have some good news and further good news from the file sharing, torrent sites world. The first piece of good news is that the Pirate Party (the Swedish and the German one) is confident about the upcoming European Union (EU) Parliament elections; the second piece of good news is that you can watch streaming TV and video via torrent al song as you have the proper software app, something like StreamTorrent.

Starting with the Pirate Party, some of you might remember that following the court’s verdict in The Pirate Bay trial, one of the direct results was that the popularity of the Pirate Party increased considerably – this was the case for the Swedish Pirate Party, as well as the German Pirate Party. In Sweden for example, the party ranks amongst the top 3 parties in the country with more than 46,000 members (20,000+ members in the youth league). What this means is that the Pirate Party will certainly take a number of seats in Brussels, following the EU Parliament elections – if people go out and vote, that is.

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“The establishment and the politicians have declared war against our entire generation. Our politicians are digital illiterates. We need politicians that will not let themselves be bullied by foreign powers. To vote in the EU elections is more important than ever before,” commented the Pirate Party’s leader, Rick Falkvinge.

The German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei), which saw its members' number increase as well following the trial verdict (just that not as much as its Swedish counterpart) is also confident about the upcoming elections and is taking a stand. According to its lead candidate, Andreas Popp, the main issue in this campaign is related to civil rights.

“Currently the most important issue in EU (but also national) politics are the civil rights. This includes the fight against the censorship of the Internet as well as against the transformation of our western societies into police states. IT, especially the Internet, plays a very important role in these topics. The politicians who are in power right now fear the Internet and are doing everything to get control over it, just like the content industry does. What makes these topics so important is the immediate danger we are facing. If we do not fight for our civil liberties now, we might just find ourselves in a new form of dictatorship,” said Popp in an interview for TorrentFreak.

The German Pirate Party, which currently has about 1,000 memebers, would need about 5% of the total votes to get into the Parliame. According to Andreas Popp, this percentage amounts to about 1.5 million votes. Even if Piratenpartei does not get 5% of all votes (and thus gets no seats in the EU Parliament), getting 0.5% would suffice as this would grant it public party funding – and that is a “big step” for the Pirate Party as it will triple its current funds, says Andreas Popp.

Moving on to the software presentation part of this article, here are the bits and pieces you need to be made aware of regarding StreamTorrent:
- It comes free of charge.
- Works with Windows-powered machines.
- Lets the user watch and stream TV and videos.
- You have access to hundreds of popular TV stations.
- You can download it here.