Pirate Party

Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties in different countries. Pirate parties support civil rights, direct democracy and participation in government, reform of copyright and patent law, free sharing of knowledge (open content), information privacy, transparency, freedom of information, anti-corruption and network neutrality.

History

The first Pirate Party to be established was the Pirate Party of Sweden (Swedish: Piratpartiet), whose website was launched on 1 January 2006 by Rickard Falkvinge. Falkvinge was inspired to found the party after he found that Swedish politicians were generally unresponsive to Sweden's debate over changes to copyright law in 2005.

The United States Pirate Party was founded on 6 June 2006 by University of Georgia graduate student Brent Allison. The party's concerns were abolishing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, reducing the length of copyrights from 95 years after publication or 70 years after the author's death to 14 years, and the expiry of patents that do not result in significant progress after four years, as opposed to 20 years. However, Allison stepped down as leader three days after founding the party.

Pirate Party of Finland

The Pirate Party of Finland (Finnish: Piraattipuolue, Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a registered political party in Finland. The group currently has around 3,800 members. The chairman of the party is Tapani Karvinen. The party is a member of Pirate Parties International.

History

In January 2008, Matti Hiltunen registered the domain piraattipuolue.fi and set up a BBS on the site. In May 2008, about 50 founding members of the party held the founding assembly in Tampere. In September 2008 the party started to collect the 5,000 supporter cards needed to officially register the party. The party's goal was to take part in the 2009 European Parliamentary election. The supporter cards were collected by 1 June 2009, too late for the elections. The party was officially registered on 13 August 2009.

In October 2009 the Pirate Party took part in the special municipal election of Loviisa with 1 candidate, but did not win a seat. The party's first major election was the Finnish parliamentary election in 2011 with 127 candidates in 11 constituencies, gathering 0.5% of votes and becoming the largest party with no Parliament seats. In the 2014 European Parliament election it gathered 12,378 votes (0.7 %). In the Finnish parliamentary election in 2015 the party got 25,105 or 0,8% of total votes, and was left without seats in the parliament. Consequently, Ministry of Justice decided to take off Pirate Party and 5 others from its list of political parties due to lack of confidence in parliamentary voting for two elections.

Pirate Party of Canada

The Pirate Party of Canada (French: Parti Pirate du Canada, abbreviated as the PPCA), is a minor party in federal Canadian politics. Founded in 2009, the party offically registered with Elections Canada in 2010. The PPCA is modelled on the Swedish Pirate Party and advocates intellectual property reform, privacy protection, network neutrality and greater government openness. No member of the party has been elected to Parliament.

Name

The Pirate Party drew its inspiration from the Piratpartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party. In 2001, the copyright industry established the Antipiratbyrån — The Anti-Piracy Bureau. In 2003, to combat this legislation, a group of artists, musicians, and cultural workers founded a think-tank called the Piratbyrån — the Piracy Bureau. In selecting that name, the Bureau was signalling that they were the progressive, while the antis were the regressive. In 2005, when copyright laws were harshened again in Sweden, the Bureau established itself as a political party becoming the Pirate Party. Because of past successes of the Bureau, the name immediately conveyed all the political ideas the party stood for. Under that banner, the Pirate Party came 5th in the 2009 European Parliament elections with 7.13% of the vote and 1 MEP, later increasing to 2 after ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, Christian Engström became the first MEP for the party, and Amelia Andersdotter took the second seat on December 1, 2009.