The Pirate Party

An update of a post from earlier in the summer on the Swedish Pirate Party getting into the EU.

It looks like Pirate Parties have been springing up all over Europe, and in some cases politicians are defecting from other parties to it. The emergence of the Pirate Party in the UK has gotten a lot of news this week following its founding in July.

To state the obvious, Pirate Parties are critical of copyright laws and the monopolistic control of information by corporations. That is not to say that they want everything to be ‘free’. Rather, they want intellectual property to belong to artists as well as the people (or commons). For many Pirate Party adherents, this includes the entire overhaul of the IP laws including ending excessively long copyright protections.

The Pirate Party UK states its 3 core principals as:

• Reform copyright and patent law. We want to legalise non-commercial file sharing and reduce the excessive length of copyright protection, while ensuring that when creative works are sold, it’s the artists who benefit, not monopoly rights holders. We want a patent system that doesn’t stifle innovation or make life saving drugs so expensive that patients die.

• End the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people by Government and big businesses.

• Ensure that everyone has real freedom of speech and real freedom to enjoy and participate in our shared culture.

What I think is most interesting about the Pirate Party is that they are targeting more than just software. They are going after all IP, including pharmaceutical patents, surveillance, and freedom of speech.

I think all of this raises some thought provoking questions. Is this the first major international leftist political movement since socialism? If put to a vote, would people vote for or against copyright? If this is successful, how would it change the nature of contemporary capitalism, or at least how its been organized for the past 30 years or so?

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