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Digital
Swedish Pirate Party sets up ISP
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 22 July 2010
The Swedish Pirate Party has announced it is launching its own internet service provider company which will offer low cost net access, guaranteed privacy and, presumably, by implication at least, an assurance that its customers won’t be targeted by any copyright infringement action however much illegal content they download (ie they will never reveal a user’s identity to a litigious content owner). Whether they’ll be able to make good on that last promise if and when the copyright owners take them to court we don’t know. Called PirateISP, the new service will initially launch in the city of Lund in the south of Sweden.
The Swedish Pirate Party’s announcement follows a prediction by the UK version of the anti-copyright organisation that there will be a gap in the market for smaller ‘pirate-friendly’ ISPs in the UK because the three-strike obligations being placed on net firms by the Digital Economy Act will not initially apply to smaller internet providers. Current proposals say that ISPs with less than 400,000 users will initially be exempt from the three-strikes system.
The party’s Andrew Robinson told eWEEK Europe: “If this strange arbitrary limit does come into effect, we expect existing ISPs will react by splitting and regrouping to take advantage of the cost savings and customer benefits of being smaller, so we can look forward to having a wide range of Pirate ISPs in this country, without the party having to set one up!”
