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 The Pirate Parties are the political parties of the digital age that represent the changes demanded by technology that governments and industries are resisting with all their might. We aim to ensure that citizens' rights to privacy and free speech are respected, to reform copyright law to be fit for purpose, to diminish the patent system, and to establish transparency in governments and corporations. With these foundations we are making a bid for representation in parliaments everywhere. The sentiments that led to the formation of the first Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe and the rest of the world.  Please support your local pirates! For a list of Pirate Parties around the world visit [link] (PP Int) or [link] (Wikipedia). Join this suport group to raise awareness within the community and spread the word. (Requests are auto-approved.) Read the feeds below for the latest events. Reform of copyright lawThe 'official' aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The internet could become the greatest public library ever created. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after they are dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. Non-commercial use should be free from day one. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict citizen's legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws. A diminished patent systemPharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They also hamper potentially life saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents. The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries). Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents in these areas outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow. Respect for the right to privacyFollowing the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has allowed itself to be swept along in a panic reaction to try to end all evil by increasing the level of surveillance and control over the entire population. We Europeans should know better. It is not twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are plenty of other horrific examples of surveillance-gone-wrong in Europe's modern history. The arguments for each step on the road to the surveillance state may sound ever so convincing. But we Europeans know from experience where that road leads, and it is not somewhere we want to go. We must pull the emergency brake on the runaway train towards a society we do not want. Terrorists may attack the open society, but only governments can abolish it. The Pirate Party wants to prevent that from happening. Reference of text: piratpartiet.se |
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I wold like to join your group 
