It does a bit, since every party will be represented in the European council based on the number of votes they have. It's not an election where the winner takes all.

I think the pirates had one or two representatives in the council, which is enough to start debates and make proposals. They obviously can't push anything through by themselves.

Yes. In most European countries even small parties can get seats. In my country there are 8 parties in parliament, for example, and 2 of them didn't use to be there 2 election cycles ago (they were too small/new 8 years ago but eventually grew in popularity and got enough votes for representation).

Of course if they only have 1 or 2 members in parliament they typcily tend to form coalitions with other like-minded parties so they can get more voting power.

Sure, but it is still better than doing nothing.

C'mon it's at least worth a shot. To me at least.

It's not even a question of being "owned by corporations". Judges don't care about petitions. They're not politicians, their job is to adjudicate the law.

Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and ^nearly^ all they do.

In principal I love their "covid-19 emergency library" or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I'm terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.

They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.

Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the "free digital library" thing without jeapordizing themselves.

• Have some volunteers "misuse resources": load an SSD up with the book files, "borrow" some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook "dumping" groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
• Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic "While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws."

You summed it up exactly. As one politician put it, the Internet Archive does not decide copyright. They have became to big for there own shoes.

They did not ignore copyright. The judge brazenly and incorrectly dismissed all their arguments for fair use. They had no way to foresee they would meet a judge that would go that far.