In 2006, for the first time in history, Pirates entered world politics in a big way. With the success of the Bit-torrent tracker The Pirate Bay.org, also based in Sweden, the Pirate Party became an official party in Swedish politics. Since then, the party’s idea’s have spread over several countries and begun to make an impact in their homeland.

The Pirate Party’s main platforms call for copyright and intellectual property reforms. Their official stance is:

“All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. 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.”

They also want to abolish patents:

“Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They hamper possibly 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.”

And increase privacy for citizens:

“Following 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.”

Now, the Pirate Party has made it to the US. However, while the US version of the Pirate Party believes in increased protection of privacy and net neutrality, they differ greatly from Sweden’s Party in their views on copyrights. The US Pirate Party, while wanting to reform copyright laws, does not believe in breaking those laws through the act of internet piracy as it states on their web page: “We do not support nor condone any unlawful distribution of copyrighted works.”

How can a party, calling themselves the Pirates Party, be against the the very act of internet pirating? Who else but file-sharers is going to be compelled to join their party? It’s called appealing to your base, and I don’t see how far they’re going to get without doing so.

I’ll stick with the Swedish Pirate Party who stands by what they believe in and doesn’t bow to societal pressure. Arrr!