Press release FAQ

This is the F.A.Q. section for the PPI press release exchange ("PRE").

What is the PRE?

The PRE is an RSS feed aggregator that shows the press releases of the Pirate Parties that agreed to share their press releases with other Pirate Parties.

How can the PRE help me?

You can use everything that is published on the PPI PRE for your own Pirate Party. You want to write a press release or blog article about a topic but don't have the time or the resources to do so? Search our press release archive and use what you find without having to credit the author or respect any other licensing condition.

But my press releases are released under Creative Commons license anyway!

Yes, but! Creative Commons licenses allow sharing or editing of content but often only under certain conditions, like naming the initial author or sharing under the same conditions. Not so with our PRE: the Pirate Parties that participate in the PPI PRE have explicitly waived any condition to the use of their content by every member of the PPI! The only exception are the releases of the Czech Pirate Party which are published under a CC-BY-SA license.

I thought that our press releases are being sent out in the wild, this is the point of PR!

Yes, of cause you are right! This is only shows how the current copyright laws do not much the everyday life and the needs of the content creators. There were court rulings for example in Germany, that had prohibited to use a press release text without citing the author. In your country this may or may not apply, but since we are international organization we need to take care of such nuisances.

How can I participate in the PRE?

All we need is for the board of your Pirate Party (can be regional or local) to accept this authorization and sent it to board@pp-international.net:

"The board of the Pirate Party of [$COUNTRY] hereby waives any conditions for the use of any press release published under it's name to the benefit of any member of Pirate Parties International. This authorization can be withdrawn at any time by informing the board of the PPI and/or the individual Pirate Party it affects."

What is "AutoTranslations" (autotrans.)?

Under "AutoTranslations" you find all the press releases translated to english. These are automatic translations so we recommend you to use the original messages for your press releases. The feeds entitled "Orig." are the original releases.
To provide the "Autotranslations" we use two services. The first one is FeedTranslate which works with the Google Translation API. It should be able to work with all languages that are supportet by that API. The other service is Systran which has its own translation engine but supports only few languages. Since they are an additional service between the original content and the Parrot, they sometimes have hiccups or delays. If you see that more than one article in the feed from one country are not translated please report it to parrot[at]pp-international.net

What is the Twitter account for?

The Twitter account "PP_Parrot" automatically posts all the new messages from our press release exchange. The links in the Tweet point to the original article if the Tweet starts with "Orig. ...". If it starts with "Autotrans. ..." it comes from the automated translations and the link is http://bit.ly/PP_Pat which points to the Autotranslation section in the PRE.

Where to point my questions regarding the PRE / I want to report a problem.

Please write an email to parrot[at]pp-international.net and tell us how we can help you.

Where do I find the original feeds?

Depending on what category you selected last in the navigation on the right, you can see all feeds in that category underneath the navigation. To jump to the original website click on "Orig. ..."/"Autotrans. ...". To jump to the RSS feed click on File:Feed.png. To get a RSS feed of a whole category, simply click on above the navigation.

Why are there soup.io feeds?

The moonmoon software cannot handle https-rss-feeds or feeds with faulty encodings. We use soup.io as a proxy that turns those feeds into valid ones the software can handle.