TechCrunch has a profile of the Pirate Party of the United States, “a legitimate political party whose goal is not to make it so that you can download the latest Lady Gaga release with impunity, but rather to effect change in the more general realm of copyright and governmental transparency.” The party “is looking to reform the way we think about copyright and trademark in this country, while simultaneously bringing some transparency back the government. That’s it. To that end, it wants to elect as many local, state, and national politicians as it can.”
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It’s working over here.
Their website appears to be down.
Society for Creative Anachronism
http://www.sca.org/
SCA?
I’m a pirate in the SCA…
I loves Pirates, arrgghhh!
Knapp, as a matter of fact, the Prohibition Party does have one elected office currently, that being Jim Hedges, Tax Assessor, Thompson Township, Fulton County, Pennsylvania.
The Pirate Party actually won a seat in the European Parliament from Sweden. I’m not usually one to defend third parties, but this one may actually get somewhere. Everyone has forgotten about the Somali pirates, so pirates are popular again.
For their platform, the PPUS should pirate the following language from the Free Earth Manifesto:
Expression. Every person has the right of free expression, without any regulation of how media or technology are used for expression, or are withheld by their owners from such use.
Copyright. Communities may recognize intellectual property in expression to prevent unauthorized reproduction in cases of a) competition that diverts commercial benefit from the owner to the competitor, b) attributed use with unattributed defamatory modification, or c) unattributed use that misleads about who the owner is.
Patents. Communities may for a limited fixed term grant exclusive rights in their jurisdiction to use of an invention in exchange for a fee to the community that is a fraction of the value of the invention assigned by its owner, with that fraction increasing to unity at the end of the term. Any person may buy the exclusivity rights from their owner with a payment to him greater than the value he assigns them. Exclusivity shall include a rebuttable presumption that any use of the invention after it is publicized is not independent and therefore an infringement.
I understand that they are quite successful in parts of Europe.
I actually voted for the Pirate Party in 2006, I believe the only ballot-qualified Congressional nominee they’ve ever had. And I’m not sure he was even a one-issue candidate. His website never mentioned copyright laws and in place on an issues page was a story about how he’d helped out a struggling single mother.
But I was at the peak of my hatred for the duopoly, the Democrat was a non-starter, the Republican pretty solid on economics but I wasn’t about to give Bush’s wars one more yea vote and there was no LP, CP, or even GP on the ballot, so what the heck.
Thomas,
I agree with you and your history. Short of the government attempting to tax the Internet or some other ridiculous thing, I don’t see people getting too riled up over intellectual property to elect a Pirate candidate like they did in the early 20th century over morality like prohibition.
But a group like this could play a role in pushing their agenda so other candidates and elected officials take it up.
Patrick,
One issue parties can force those other parties to give you “that issue PLUS other issues.”
The Prohibition Party did elect some of its candidates to office, including at least one governor (Florida, and I think maybe one or two others as well).
Their main impact, however, was in forcing “major party” candidates to declare for or against prohibition because some percentage of voters was going to demand an answer on it.
Its kind of a waste of time. These ‘one issue’ parties will never win a election.
They dont talk about how they’d handle a situation like war, economics, healthcare… Its things like this that just make it a great one issue party but you probably wont ever feel strongly enough about one thing to elect it to office when another party can give you that issue PLUS other issues.