The Pirate Party is a group based in Sweden that wants to legalize file sharing.  After the founders of the torrent website The Pirate Bay were found guilty, the membership of The Pirate Party more than doubled.

“Sweden has 20 seats, but until the Lisbon treaty passes only 18 with voting rights. This means that the Pirate Party will have 2 seats,” wrote Ernesto on  TorrentFreak.  The Pirate Party was founded in 2006 and is led by Rickard Falkvinge.  The Pirate Party wants to see copyright and patent lawwws reformed.

[via Guardian]

A couple of days after The Pirate Bay team decided to appeal the verdict comes the news about the connection between the judge of the trial and copyright organizations.  On a Swedish radio station, the judge denied a “conflict of interest” when it was found out that he was a member of the main copyright association in the country.

The radio station is called Sveriges Radio and it is the equivalent of the BBC in Sweden.  Judge Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and is even on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.  That organization focuses on tougher copyright laws.

Last Friday the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement.  The judge denied his conflict of interest over what is considered the most high-profile trial revolving around filesharing in European history.  The four co-founders were asked to pay $3.6 million in damages and serve a one year sentence.

The defense lawyers for the four co-founders will be calling for a retrial.  “I will point that out in my appeal, then the court of appeal will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited,” stated Peter Althin, the lawyer for Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

Ever since the verdict was decided on Friday, the Swedish Pirate Party membership has more than doubled.  This may give the party a chance to win a seat in the European Parliament.  Over 22,000 members joined the party since the verdict.   Now there are over 37,000 total members.

The Pirate Party organization focuses on copyright law regulation and they keep a close eye on the government.  The party gained some attention last September when they found out the Bavarian and German governments were developing a trojan horse that would intercept calls made on Skype.

[via Guardian/Wired]

The Pirate Party is a political party that has been spreading across Europe.  The party works on reforming laws that revolve around invasion of privacy, intellectual property, copyright, and patent protection.  The Pirate Party leaked documents belonging to the government of Bavaria, Germany which revealed that they were attempting to contract out the development of a trojan in order intercept encrypted Internet communication.  This includes wiretapping Skype.

The Bavarian government was attempting to contract this software to a company called Digitask.  The first document was an inquiry about whether Digitask can put it together and a list of suggested monthly prices to pay them.  The second document that was leaked included an outline of how Digitask would deploy the solution.  The malware that Digitask would build was referred to as the “Skype Capture Unit.” 

The Skype Capture Unit would be in the form of an executable file delivered to a target machine according to Ars Technica.  This file would then transfer unencrypted conversations to a Skype Recording Server.  This server can record 10 Skype conversations at once and then send it to another party. 

Some VoIP software that is available on the market already has wiretapping built-in.  VoIP open source software generally makes it hard to tap conversations.  Currently Skype doesn’t have wiretapping built-in so your conversations on the software are safe for now.