Pirate Party supports two-party breakup

Talks politics, spoofs anti-piracy campaign.

Pirate Party Australia has backed the break-up of the two-party "strangehold" on Australian politics following last month's Federal Election.

Activist and spokesman Simon Frew told iTnews that the current political situation was "forcing the major parties to take into account a wider range of opinions, particularly those of the independents and forces them to look seriously at real parliamentary reform."

Frew also indicated that the Pirate Party supported Andrew Wilkie's push for whistleblower protection legislation.

Wilkie was a defence intelligence analyst who turned whistleblower on the Iraq war in 2003.

The Pirate Party's statement of support for the current political situation - likely a minority government with the Greens holding the balance of power in the Senate - came as the party made another political statement, this time on copyright.

The party launched deliberatepirate.net, a spoof of the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation's (IPAF) Accidental Pirate advertisements that started airing last week.

The spoof was a "machinima" - an animated video created with a video game engine. It was created over two days by Frew and a group of friends.

"Their [IPAF's] campaign had admittedly set the bar quite low in terms of production values, which is what made it so ripe for parody," Frew told iTnews.

"I filmed the clips in various locations around Second Life over a few hours using the cheesiest freebie gestures available and capturing the footage with CamStudio, an open source screen capture program."

Frew labelled Accidental Pirate as the "usual tract from the tired hacks of the copyright lobby."

He said the response to Deliberate Pirate had been "a bit mixed".

"The Accidental Pirate campaign seems to have largely flopped so some people didn't understand that the video was a parody," Frew said.

"Those that have seen the original campaign, however, think it's great."

IPAF launched the Accidental Pirate website and advertisements last week "to help people understand the connection between their day-to-day actions and beliefs" on internet and content piracy.

The foundation was forced to defend its use of an online quiz to determine if internet users were "accidental pirates" and to re-assure users that it would not refer people it suspected of illicitly copying TV shows and movies to internal investigators or police.

It also changed terms and conditions that allowed it to pass information gleaned from the site to any third party.