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The following letter is a message we received via email from Stefan Meretz who expresses great concern both regarding Peter Sunde's (The Pirate Bay spokesperson) imprisonment and the way Avaaz is handling the petition to pardon him. Stefan calls for our solidarity as commoners.

Dear Commoners,Peter Sunde has to go to prison. As you may know, Peter was thespokesperson for The Pirate Bay (TPB). He was convicted for someridiculous charges, because a copyright infringement did not happenwith the Pirate Bay (they shared torrent files, not copyrightedmaterial). But the copyright industry was and is very angry aboutthat. There are strong actions going on against TPB. The strategy isthe same as with Wikileaks: They pick out some single persons and tryto make an example.Now, Peter wrote a plea for pardon. Rick Falkvinge (founder of theswedish pirate party) translated the plea to english, worth reading:http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/06/aftermath-of-the-pirate-bay-trial-peter-sundes-plea-in-his-own-words/Peter: http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/10/wow-update-on-all-the-support/http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/13/sweden-is-a-small-pond-with-a-few-big-fish/A supporter of Peter Sunde launched a community petition on Avaaz:http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Grant_Peter_Sundes_of_The_Pirate_Bay_plea_for_pardonCommunity petitions are made bottom-up, not from Avaaz itself. Aftergetting support from The Pirate Bay (they put it on the frontpage:http://thepiratebay.se/) over 100.000 signers have been reached withinthree days.However, there are weird things going on behind the scenes, becauseAvaaz asked their network, whether the petition should be removed,since Avaaz "will only support petitions that our community agrees arenot offensive, inflammatory or otherwise objectionable". Huh? Belowthe articlehttp://www.s-info.se/region/show_news.asp?id=120&news=16919 there is avoting, but the votes are handled completely intransparent. Avaaz isfiltering out all incoming signatures for Peter from their communitypetition start page: http://www.avaaz.org/en/

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler.[1] It describes a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization.

Yochai Benkler contrasts commons-based peer production with firm production (in which tasks are delegated based on a central decision-making process) and market-based production (in which tagging different prices to different tasks serves as an incentive to anyone interested in performing a task).

The term was first introduced and described in Yochai Benkler's seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm".[2] Yochai Benkler's 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks, expands significantly on these ideas.