01 Jul 2022
This weekend I had the great pleasure of meeting up with Ric Lim, our insanely hard working secretary; Andrew Paolucci, our dedicated IT director; and Patrick Fitzgerald, political council member and head of the project development committee. I am so proud to work along side each of them and the entire team that volunteers their time for the Pirate Party.
Canada Day is about celebrating our nations birthday, and while sometimes, due to the political system stacked against us, all the work we put into the party feels in vain. Today is a great day to remember that what we are doing is worth it, and not only that but the energy you as members and supporters give us is worth it. Canada is worth fighting for, and we will spend every day making sure we do what we can to promote equality, empowerment, and protect civil liberties.
I also had a chance to review all the letters and donations made to us from our signature drive. We have received over $1,200 in donations (all cheques should be processed tomorrow, for those wondering), and wonderful letters from you — telling us to keep fighting, and thanking the Pirate Party for it’s work. I was touched and have a renewed vigor (you refreshed my mana) to keep fighting for this party. This is such a wonderful movement and I am proud that you allowed me to be a part of it.
Happy Canada Day, enjoy the fireworks and festivities… please stay safe tonight and let’s keep making this party the best it can be.
Fair Winds,
Travis McCrea
15 Jun 2022
I have owned a few torrent websites in my life, and one thing I have learned from this venture was people will upload anything and everything and if we wanted to go through everything it would be physically impossible with a staff less than 100. It’s impossible to know who uploaded what content and who owns the rights to what so when we learned to day that the dotPH registry has suspended the kat.ph domain name we were upset at their technological ignorance.
For those of you who don’t know what a torrent site is and what a torrent file does, a torrent site is simply a website that keeps an index of many torrent files and allows users to comment and vote on the quality of these files. Many bands and organizations use torrent files, I download each new Ubuntu distro using a torrent since it is a much faster method than http.
A torrent file is basically a map, it contains no copyrighted material on it’s own and rather tells a torrent client what server it can connect to, so it can connect to other people with the same torrent file who are sharing the right file. It seriously would be no different than making map software available, a person could use it to create a map to a bank to rob but that does not make the software bad.
We can argue the benefits of “piracy” and show how a download doesn’t mean a lost sale but we can debate until we are blue in the face on that. The issue today is Kickass Torrents, and it’s sad that an ignorant society would make your life difficult. We wish them well and hope that it’s users are able to quickly find the new address (kickass.to).
KAT staff, if you need a .ca domain name which should be a little more stable – shoot us a message, if the party can’t register it for you (it should be able to) – I will do it myself.
17 May 2022
{.extern}There has been some buzz recently surrounding the Montreal corporation Canipre, an organization which claims to perform “Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement.” In light of the methods Canipre is using to attempt to enforce intellectual property rights, we thought it was time to renew our hunt to see if we could find copyright infringement in other parts of our government. Last year, the Pirate Party of Canada found evidence of copyright infringement from inside the House of Commons. Our targets this time? Industry Canada and the RCMP. Our tool: Scaneye – a similar tool used by Canipre to locate what they believe to be individuals guilty of copyright infringement. To help us get the best information possible we teamed up with the guys at TorrentFreak{.extern} to ensure we had credible verifiable information.
We used the IP ranges of Industry Canada:
Industry Canada (ASN: AS820 OrgID: INDUST-2)
192.197.183.0 – 192.197.183.255
161.187.0.0 – 161.187.255.255
142.53.0.0 – 142.53.255.255
And the RCMP:
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (orgID: RCMP-2-Z)
199.212.150.0 – 199.212.150.255
199.212.148.0 – 199.212.151.255
142.72.0.0 – 142.72.255.255
142.235.0.0 – 142.235.255.255
Our investigation has revealed that quite a lot of unlicensed material has been downloaded from within both the RCMP and Industry Canada. Movies that appear to have been downloaded via the IP addresses of these government entities include The Fast and the Furious, Skyfall, The Smurfs, and The Hunger Games. Episodes of PBS shows such as Nova and Masterpiece Theatre, and less educational shows such as The Office and Two and a Half Men, have also been downloaded. The hit HBO series Game of Thrones, which was the #1 most pirated show in 2012, appears on the list of infringing material as well.
{.extern}Fortunately for the RCMP, HBO has gone on the record saying they don’t really mind how rampant the piracy of their top show is. HBO’s programming chief, Michael Lombardo, said to NPR that his bigger concern wasn’t that people were downloading the show, but that by downloading they’d get an inferior product. One of the directors of Game of Thrones, David Petrarca, has also been quoted as saying, “No, it’s great. It really helps the show’s cultural buzz, and it does not impact the bottom line because HBO has more than enough money to keep making the show.”
There’s currently no reliable method of determining who is guilty of copyright infringement on an individual level, so copyright enforcement groups like Canipre tend to rely on the concept of identifying guilty IP addresses, and then targeting the people to whom those addresses belong. However, as we can see from the results of this investigation, multiple people can share IP addresses; this means that this method of enforcement is highly unreliable at determining who is responsible for copyright infringement at the individual level. While Scaneye does not appear to disclose their data collection methods; a 2008 study at the University of Washington: “Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks” found that similar data collection is vulnerable to manipulation. Such manipulation included the ability to generate false positives if the monitoring agents don’t actually sample the file being uploaded.
It is difficult to find statistics on exactly how much copyright infringement is going on, and how much revenue is lost because of it. This find demonstrates these issues; copyright infrigement is so easy and so commonplace that even people inside groups focused on stopping it can be caught doing it. Furthermore, every time corporations and government bodies are found to be guilty of copyright infringement, these incidents are explained away or ignored – yet the average citizen doesn’t get off so easy, and the services that allegedly enable them have faced harsh crackdowns as well. Copyright trolls target and extort thousands of dollars from largely defenseless – and often innocent – people and organizations.
Between the difficultly of targeting individual pirates, the double standard of targeting individuals more harshly than organizations, and the fact that many content creators don’t see piracy as detrimental to their business, it’s clear that something is wrong with the way intellectual property rights are current enforced. If the goal of copyright enforcers – and the creators they represent – is to increase profits and protect creator rights, shouldn’t there be a better way to accomplish this than by harassing individuals who may or may not bear any responsibility for copyright infringement happening on their IP address?
Our Press Release:
TORONTO – The Pirate Party of Canada has uncovered evidence that Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Industry Canada computers may have been used to download copyrighted material. Using the same methods as those used by “copyright enforcement” organization Canipre, the Pirate Party has uncovered that a variety of films, TV shows, and video games were downloaded via the networks of the RCMP and Industry Canada. Last year the Pirate Party found similar copyright infringement happening in the House of Commons{.extern}: .
“This discovery shows that copyrighted materials have, in fact, been downloaded via the RCMP and Industry Canada networks,” states Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea. “However, we cannot be sure who is responsible for downloading the material, or even if it was downloaded by employees, contractors, or a person who was using an open wireless connection. This is why this type of intellectual property enforcement doesn’t work – there is no method of reliably telling who actually engaged in the infringement of copyrighted materials.”
The movies that appear to have been downloaded by RCMP IP addresses include The Fast and the Furious, Skyfall, The Smurfs, and The Hunger Games. Episodes of PBS shows such as Nova and Masterpiece Theatre, and less educational shows such as The Office and Two and a Half Men, have also been downloaded. The hit HBO series Game of Thrones, which was the #1 most pirated show in 2012, appears on the list of infringing material as well. Fortunately for the RCMP, HBO doesn’t seem to mind{.extern}.
Only the first page of download data was collected for each organization, so there may have been even more infringing content downloaded by the RCMP and Industry Canada. It is interesting to note, however, that there were no pornographic torrents found on the list.
For more detailed information, please refer to our blog post on the Pirate Party of Canada website.
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The Pirate Party is a forward-thinking, federally registered party which focuses on civil liberties, intellectual property reform and evidence based policy making. Media requests can be sent to [email protected] or you can call (877) 978-2023 or (778) 800-2744 and dial option 2 for press.
15 May 2022
While I was going through our new policy points of the Pirate Party of Canada one by one. One policy in particular caught my eye and intrigued me. This was a policy that made so much sense that the only thing that does not make sense is why the government isnt already doing it! That policy that caught my eye was Mincome (a portmanteau of Minimum Income). Of course it goes by many other names Guarnteed Annual Income, Negative Income Tax, Basic Income, Basic Income Guarentee, but no matter what name it goes by the premise is simple. People are entitled, yes I used the word entitled, to a reasonable standard of living and in order to achieve a reasonable standard of living one needs to earn a certain minimum income.
The name Mincome comes from the social experiment done in rural Manitoba in the 1970’s. What they did was set about ensuring that everyone in two towns that this was tested in were given money up to a minimum amount if they did not make enough money to surpass that point for that month. Now people who are right-wing in their political affiliation may start going on about it being a commie ideology, how people will sit around and blow all their money on booze and smokes, etc… But the experiment showed that for the most part people continued to work hard and those who did drop out of the work force were usually mothers with young children and teenagers who continued their educational pursuits through highschool. Keeping in mind that in the 1970’s getting a high school diploma was a pretty big deal. Likewise, hard working farmers did not have to agonize over failed crops knowing there was a support structure in place that ensured that they would not lose the farm because of one bad seasons. There is one Conservative Senator Hugh Segal who actually advocates for the very same thing that we as a party hope to push forward and while his own reasonings may differ slightly from our own they all still make sense. There is a very good youtube video ( http://youtu.be/tI-LDQCmW5E{.extern} )
Now you might think that poor people are the only ones who benefit from Mincome. You would be wrong. Criminal activity as a whole went down under Mincome in these places. When people dont have to lie, cheat and steal to make ends meet criminal activity becomes less lucrative. As well during the study hospital visits were down 8-9% and hospitalizations for work accidents were also down. Just imagine how much money we as a community would save if we suddenly had like 10% less people going to hospital. The hospitalizations reduction was theorized to be a benefit from the reduced stress of having to worry about things.
Mincome is such a simple and elegant solution. Keeping in mind that I did my math that Mincome should be equal to full time minimum wage job and used the highest minimum wage value in the country (Ontario) for my calculations ($10.25 * 40 Hours * 52 Weeks = $21,320/yr or $1,752/mo or $410/wk)
Under a federal Mincome system you would not need to deal with provincial welfare systems. In ontario alone there are nearly 300,000-400,000 people on social assistance and Ontario spends $1.9 Billion a year (2012) on Ontario Works and eliminating the bureaucracy to dispense Ontario Works alone would free up enough money to pay 89,118 under Mincome. Health Care costs across the country were $192 Billion dollars in 2010. Now lets assume we would have a cost of 10% less under mincome (since hospital stays are more expensive than just visiting a doctor by quite a bit, this is an over simplification) that is $19 billion dollars saved right there. The savings there would account for enough to pay 890,000 people Mincome.
Also lets not forget the number of people who would open up businesses. Given a safety net the number of people who would engage in the creation of businesses and entrepeneurship would increase because the risk associated with it is diminished while rewards remain there for the taking.
In short the number of programs a Mincome system makes obsolete is amazing. We would not need Welfare and the bureaucracy associated with it with a national Mincome system. Likewise we may no longer need Employment Insurance (EI) because if you lose your job you would get the equivalent income to a minimum wage job automatically. You would not need a Canada Pension Plan (CPP) or Old Age Security (OAS) either because those are basically programs which combined implment a lesser form of Mincome.
Now you ask how would you handle this so that there is no huge sprawling bureaucracy with thousands of rules involved to decide who gets Mincome and who doesnt? The answer is simple. Everyone who files a tax return gets a mincome cheque whether they need it or not so the person who makes nothing and the person who makes millions a year both receive a mincome cheque. Money received from Mincome would be treated as untaxable income or alternatively it would be treated as taxable income with a tax rate of 0% up to the Mincome level. Either way when people acquire jobs there would not be any real clawbacks on mincome, which will improve their position and may make coping mechanisms like GST/HST Rebate Cheques obsolete as well leading to even more savings.
We can solve poverty. All it takes is treating people are human beings and not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
06 May 2022
Toronto – The Pirate Party of Canada is launching it’s first comprehensive policy, with topics ranging from defence to health, we want to better represent Canadians and give a clear picture as to what our party is about.
“The Pirate Party is a progressive movement, and it is time that our party step up and outline what it is that we stand for.” States party leader, Travis McCrea. “Mincome was effective before, and other basic income programs are showing success internationally; Drug patents are over burdening our provincial health providers; and we are fighting a senseless war on drugs. My party is ready to stand up for science and rational thought, something Canada desperately needs.”
When campaigning in election 41 in Vancouver-Centre, Travis McCrea had talked to many seniors who were unable to afford their medications. This was what inspired him to look into medications and drug patents, and what he found drove him to seek reform in the area.
The current tax system is too complicated, especially for web businesses. Who knows what is supposed to be taxed and what isn’t when you are just sharing your hobby on ebay or kijiji? Small businesses and startups should not have to hire an accountant, and so another major focus will be on making taxes simpler: especially for startups and online businesses.
The Pirate Party recognizes that with a First Past the Post voting system, it is important to outline a general policy for constituents to know exactly who they are voting for. While we don’t like the current electoral system (and indeed, it is a part of our new platform to fix it), we are going to work harder to appeal to a broader audience.
You can view our new online policy book at https://policy.pirateparty.ca
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The Pirate Party is a progressive civil liberties party which focuses on empowerment of all people. For more information about our policies, questions, comments, or concerns, please dial (778) 800-2744 or (877) 978-2023 and press option 2 for media.
