FTA:
According to TorrentFreak, the Pirate Party’s 7.1 percent share (as of right now – more votes are being counted) entitles them to at least one, if not two seats in the 18-seat Swedish delegation to the European Parliament. Once the tally is finalized, the Pirate Party will have received around 200,000 votes in its triumph, compared to the 34,918 votes they gained in the 2006 elections.
Check out the info here:
http://mashable.com/2009/06/07/pirate-party-wins/
Face it people. This entire band of corporations from across the world is trying to fight tooth and nail to preserve an ancient, dying business model.
Rather than adapt to the new trends and innovate their products, they choose to let product lines stagnate and discourage natural innovation as well as competition in general. The amount of capital these companies have invested in legal counsel, trial, R&D technologies to monitor / prosecute individuals, as well as the infiltration softwares they implemented (a large number of them questionable and some (such as rootkit technology) – but been ruled illegal.
Free Markets are not markets where you *control* and *suppress* consumer demands or try to channel them down a certain stream by using a strategy of irrelevant qualifying for variations iterations of a product which are completely impractical and mostly superficial in nature. Being fitted with product *choices* which rarely fit the bill of demand (but there are no better alternatives).
I wonder if these companies had spent this money on internal R&D in their respective markets or cross markets, if they could have found ways to innovate their respective product(s) or service(s), provided additional benefit for their customers (at a FAIR price), as well as edged out competition.
I also wonder how many cool types of products we would see standardized by now as well. Flying cars (a flying car infrastructure) or even just cars which use 4-5 different ways to generate power and have insane efficiency, or even portable high capacity storage devices with Wireless On Demand technology to allow secure transfer of data to and from the device over a Wifi or bluetooth protocol – maybe even having this type of device as a subcomponent of say a smart phone and automatically synced up to your home network, which is networked to an Internet Cloud for data storage (redundancy and recollection / redistribution to approved devices).
Imagine the Smart Phones could use a 100-160 mbit (up and down) fiber connection and when away from Wired /Wireless networks, utilize standard broadband speeds (via 3G, 4G technogies). All of these speeds are achievable currently)
The advancements in general home entertainment would be profound. Look at what even a technology (service) that is impeded constantly (with all this copyright crap) such as Netflix can accomplish at present. Sans copyright and Internet Bandwith whoring (IE: Japanese people get 160 mbit down AND UP for around 60-80 US dollars / month). They also have SATELLITE broadband capabilities which embarrass the infrastructure of the US completely. Hey guys – the Japanese have WIRELESS broadband that is faster than your standard WIRED pipe.
Think of the social MEDIA (videos (HD quality), high resolution images, video clips, music, music videos etc.) you could share along with the information, fun, games, etc. Hell, at those speeds you could probably even share fully downloadable games for your current gen console.
Not a single one out of all these big giant companies cannot engineer a system to respond to this demand that keeps everyone happy? They cannot even even tackle the problem on their own? They have to form an alliance between others? Amazing.
They fight this because they truly believe that in the future, they would be cutting themselves out of millions / billions / trillions / gagillions of dollars that they excessively milk out of their respective market(s) now.
Who in their right mind would join the Pirate Party, the name is sweet!