14 DAY TRIAL // The Pirate Party is starting to pick up Steam all over the world with several regional organizations on their way to follow the party's success in its country of origin, Sweden. Standing for a copyright and patent law overhaul and better privacy rights, the Pirate Party has also managed to get a good following in Canada where it is expected to get federal approval as early as next week. But what's interesting is that the people behind it there have decided to do more than just argue over the ideological principles and actually do something practical by setting up their own bittorrent tracker for artists releasing their works under a Creative Commons license.
“We’re starting a BitTorrent tracker to show artists how to properly use P2P technology in order to gain access to a cheap and efficient marketing and distribution network,” Pirate Party spokesman Jake Daynes told TorrentFreak. “In addition we hope to show the public that P2P is not only for ‘illegal’ activity, and that it can be used to allow aspiring artists access to the global stage. A tracker is the epitome of filesharing, and one of our platform ‘planks’ as it were, is about the promotion of filesharing.”
The idea is that by using peer to peer technology for legitimate and beneficial purposes, the party will show nay-sayers that bittorrent isn't synonymous with illegal pirated content as many media companies and even some ISPs trying to justify their throttling measures would have you believe. But not only that, it could also serve as an example of how making your music or other works available for free through these channels could actually be beneficial and financially rewarding to the artists.
The tracker will feature works from artists releasing them with a CC license but for now there are only a small number of them available. The creators are optimistic that more content will become available in the coming weeks and are encouraging artists who want to add their material to contact them.