Pirate Party now also in U.S.!
 

The political pirate movement has spread from Sweden to the country where it might count most in the long run: United States - the heartland of the international media cartels. Led by Brent Allison, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Georgia, it intends to do much the same what the Swedish pirates have managed to do: to make filesharers a political force to reckon with.

From the U.S. Pirate Party homepage:


What is the Pirate Party?

The Pirate Party of the United States is this country's version of the Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party that wants to "fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected." As a fraternal party, the PPUS shares similar goals while working within the political context of U.S. to achieve them.

For far too long, Big Media copyright cartels like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have held back technological progress and individual freedom. They have done so through cutthroat litigation against ordinary Americans, interfering with peer-to-peer networks by flooding them with bogus files, and corrupting the political system with unscrupulous lobbying and political donations.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical firms of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have, through the power of their medicine patents, denied lifesaving medical treatment to the world's poorest people suffering on a horrific scale just to raise their profit margins. Doctors and scientists are beholden to Big Pharma's grant money, extorted through patents, to devote research efforts on what makes the most money, not always on what saves the most lives or reduces suffering. The New England Journal of Medicine can no longer find unbiased reviewers of medical studies because of Big Pharma's long patent-granted reach.

Preceding and following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has had a longstanding antipathy towards protecting the privacy of ordinary Americans when it conflicts with their interests in state control. The NSA's phone-tapping, the FBI's Carnivore email spying program, and Congress's two so-called "PATRIOT Acts" are symptoms of a rampant disregard in law enforcement and the legislative branch for the private lives of U.S. citizens.

No matter what excuses or rationalizations Big Businesses and Big Government offer, it all comes down to cold, hard corporate greed and state control at the expense of your freedom and well-being. Most Americans have wished that one of the major parties would have the courage to stand up to these undemocratic conglomerates and policies and win back control of the cultural, scientific, and personal spheres for artists, critics, scientists, patients, and citizens from all walks of life. Both the Republicans and Democrats have instead, as a whole, enthusiastically rolled over for Big Media's and Big Pharma's campaign dollars.

While fine groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Creative Commons, and Doctor's Without Borders have been fighting these battles for a long time with us, no political party in United States has made the reform of intellectual property and privacy laws their top priority.

Until now.


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down with corporate dictatorship

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If you want to have a peek at the private side of the guy who started the US Pirate Party, here is his blog, which reveals that he has already been in phone contact with Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, and received some 300 e-mails from interested people. These are of course very early days for the US party, but the Swedish sister party started also very informally, and it took only 6 months for it to become a political power in Sweden.