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THE PIRATE PARTY
http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2009/06/01/the-euro-elections-forget-ukip-vote-pirate/
The Euro Elections: Vote Pirate / 01 Jun 09
In Sweden, a force known as the Pirate party had (at the time of
writing) grown to become the country’s third largest political
organisation by membership. Its inspiration? The successful
prosecution of file-sharing site Pirate Bay, for the illegal
distribution of millions of films, albums and television programmes.
With 45,000 members and counting, the Pirate party are campaigning on
a simple platform: “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of
the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are
respected.”
They seem likely to win at least one seat in the European parliament—
provided, Pirate party leader Rick Falkvinge notes, “we get our ballot
papers out.” As a non-established political force, they must supply
all 7,000 polling stations in Sweden with their own ballots by hand.
POST-VERDICT MEMBERSHIP BOOM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8012549.stm
Pirate Party plans election raid / 22 April 2009
Sweden’s Pirate Party says it has had a surge in membership, giving
its leaders hope that anti-corporate feeling will translate into
electoral success. The party is campaigning in the June European
elections, fielding 20 candidates. It wants sweeping reform of
copyright law and an end to patents. The membership boost followed the
jailing last week of four founders of a file-sharing website, The
Pirate Bay. The party says membership soared from 14,711 to 36,624 in
just a few days.
Party leader Rick Falkvinge told BBC News that “in terms of membership
it is now the fourth largest party in Sweden. If everybody who is
angry about the Pirate Bay verdict votes then we’ll get at least one
MEP,” he said, referring to the elections for the European Parliament.
Landmark case
Hundreds of supporters of Pirate Bay demonstrated in the Swedish
capital Stockholm on Saturday, some of them waving Jolly Roger flags.
In the verdict against the world’s most high-profile file-sharing
website, the Stockholm district court found Frederik Neij, Gottfrid
Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde guilty of breaking
copyright law and sentenced them to a year in jail. They were also
ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages. Record companies welcomed the
verdict, but the men plan to appeal.
Mr Falkvinge said support for the Pirate Party was not only coming
from young people, but also “a considerably older crowd saying ‘enough
is enough’. They see how these laws break civil liberties in an
unacceptable way,” he said. He said the party membership was split
about 50-50 between people aged under 25 and over. But its youth
section is “by far the largest” among Swedish political parties, he
added.
The party says it has only three issues on its agenda: “to
fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system and
ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected”. Mr Falkvinge
said it was funded entirely by private donations, typically of 100
kronor (£8; $12).
The Pirate Bay, with an estimated 22 million users, is reckoned to be
the most popular of the many file-sharing sites on the internet. Its
success angered executives and artists in the music, TV and film
industries, who saw the Swedish case as an important step in stamping
out the illegal sharing of copyrighted media.
TRIAL CORRUPTED
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/pirateconflict/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/pirate-bay-defendants-add-new-bias-charges/
Pirate Bay Bias Charge: ‘Random’ Judge Assignment Wasn’t
BY David Kravets and Kerstin Sjoden / May 15, 2009
New allegations questioning the legitimacy of The Pirate Bay trial
surfaced Friday when lawyers for the four file-sharing defendants
accused the Swedish courts of secretly steering the case to a hostile
judge. The latest ethics charges in the aftermath of the April
conviction of the four founders of the world’s most notorious
BitTorrent tracker alleged that the judge who presided over the trial
wasn’t chosen at random, as is required under Swedish law.
The allegations came weeks after it was revealed that the same judge,
Tomas Norström, is a member of pro-copyright enforcement groups.
“We’ve found some things, particularly about the random selection. It
doesn’t seem to have been random,” Per Samuelson, one of the
defendant’s lawyers, told Swedish television station SVT. Samuelson,
who is demanding a retrial, declined to elaborate on the latest
misconduct allegations. Norström declined comment.
Cecilia Klerbo, the chief magistrate of the district court in
Stockholm, where the case was tried, said the presiding judge was
chosen at random. “The procedure was carried out as usual,” she told
SVT.
After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay
administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde
were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was
convicted of funding the five-year-old operation.
In addition to one year of jail time, the defendants were ordered to
pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of
entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner
Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures.
The case was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in
what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants
were charged with facilitating copyright infringement.
In the trial’s aftermath, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe
have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to
crack down on torrent sites, and file sharing in Sweden has dropped.
Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, has begun
moving toward legitimacy.
But the verdict also triggered a political backlash among Swedish
youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size, giving
the copyright-reform party a genuine shot a landing a seat in the
European Parliment. The Pirate Bay, with more than 20 million users,
keeps operating as usual, despite the contested convictions.
The first ethics violations lobbed against the court centered on Judge
Norstrom’s membership in organizations that lobby for stricter
copyright legislation. Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright
Association and is a board member of the Swedish Association for the
Protection of Industrial Property.
Some legal experts said the appearance of bias by the judge is enough
for a retrial. “The confidence in the legal system demands that the
appeals court regards this is as a conflict of interest, and that
means that the appeals court must order a retrial in the district
court,” said Eric Bylander, a Gothenburg University legal scholar,
told The Local, an English-language news site in Sweden.
SWEDISH ISPs REVOLT
http://www.thelocal.se/19114/20090428/
http://www.thelocal.se/18882/20090416/
http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/danish-isp-may-fight-order-fence-in-pirate-bay-162
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/03/pirate-party-rejects-swedish-plan-to-snitch-on-filesharers.ars
3rd LARGEST PARTY IN SWEDEN
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-3rd-largest-political-party-in-sweden-090506/
Pirate Party 3rd Largest Political Party in Sweden
BY Ernesto / May 06, 2009
Support for the Swedish Pirate Party surged following the Pirate Bay
verdict and today it became the third largest political party in the
country. When they are elected for the European Parliament next month,
the party hopes to end the abuse of copyright by multi-billion dollar
corporations.
The explosive growth rate displayed after the Pirate Bay verdict has
skyrocketed the Pirate Party’s member count and today they’ve
surpassed that of the Center Party. Of all the established parties
only the Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party have more
members.
The Pirate Party has tripled its ranks in only three weeks up to
44,000 members, and it’s on course to become the second largest
political part in the country. TorrentFreak caught up with party
leader Rick Falkvinge to congratulate him on this unprecedented
achievement, and we used the opportunity to find out more about his
future plans. First off, we asked him if the recent surge in members
can be solely attributed to the outcome of the Pirate Bay trial.
“The Pirate Bay verdict was not a single event, but the final straw in
a long series of events,” Falkvinge replied. “We tripled our member
count in a week, and have kept growing at an accelerated pace. With
just one month till the European elections, the timing of these
horrible events arguably work as a catalyst for change.”
Falkvinge is looking forward to the upcoming European Parliament
elections on June 6 this year. “I’m extremely optimistic,” he told
TorrentFreak. “It’s not a question of ‘a’ seat any more. If everybody
who is angry with the Pirate Bay verdict goes to vote, we will get at
least one seat, and probably more.” Although things are looking good,
the road to Brussels is not guaranteed yet. There are two hurdles
left.
“One is to get our ballot papers out — contender parties are not
served by the Election Authority, but have to distribute their ballot
papers to all 7,000 polling stations by hand. That’s a logistical
nightmare, but with 13,000 activists, we should be able to fix that.
We had 1,600 activists in the last election, and covered 93%. The
other hurdle is getting our folks to actually vote, but I believe
they’re still angry enough.”
A question that has been under reported is what the party actually
plans to achieve when they arrive in Brussels. One of the questions we
asked is how torrent sites and trackers such as the Pirate Bay should
be handled. “The Pirate Bay is infrastructure,” Falkvinge told us.
“The messenger immunity, that the messenger is never responsible for
the contents of a message, is crucial to how our society works. The
Lobby is trying to gut that immunity, along with boneheaded
politicians who see a chance to look tough on crime.”
“First of all, copyright needs to be reduced to cover commercial
activities only. That would get copyright out of ordinary honest
peoples’ bedrooms, which is badly needed. That would also make
everything that happens over The Pirate Bay legal overnight, and so,
there would be no copyright infringement that TPB could potentially
facilitate. At that point, since they can’t be facilitating, aiding or
abetting anything illegal [anymore] in any interpretation, this would
also mean that they can be as commercial as they like.”
Falkvinge further told us that he’s toying with the idea of writing
“Nothing that happens at The Pirate Bay violates copyright law”
directly into Sweden’s copyright law. In 2010 the Pirate Party hopes
to enter the Swedish parliament, and they want to make it absolutely
clear that The Pirate Bay four will be acquitted on appeal.
“But that’s not enough,” Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “The issues at
stake are more important than that. The Lobby is constantly nagging on
the gray area, making inroads, establishing new precedents, and acting
very aggressively. They can do this without any risk at all, and that
needs to stop. The Lobby is damaging the open society and our economy
at a level that I think should be criminal, especially since they’re
doing it as a commercial operation.”
So, the Pirate Party wants to reduce the abuse of power and copyright
by the entertainment industry, and make that illegal instead. With the
current level of support and indications by recent polls there is no
doubt that they will get a seat in the European Parliament, and we
hope they will be able to be heard there.
PIRATE MOVEMENT
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/rick-falkvinge-is-the-face.ars
Political pirates: A history of Sweden’s Piratpartiet
BY Nate Anderson / February 25, 2009
The leader of Sweden’s Pirate Party is thinking big: seats in the
European Parliament, seats in the Swedish parliament, and a string of
Pirate Parties on six continents. He just needs more votes to make it
happen. Ars explores the birth, growth, and awkward adolescence of
political pirates.
Rick Falkvinge is the face and voice of the Swedish Pirate Party, the
party that he founded in 2006, but being a pirate isn’t all gold
doubloons and chests of booty. Falkvinge is a principled pirate—and
that means working for the sake of the cause even when the pay is low,
or nonexistent. He currently takes no salary for his work, but he gets
along by finding supporters willing to donate toward the costs of his
food and rent.
Limited resources don’t mean he’s thinking small, though. Indeed, he
wants to (democratically) take over the world, and he has a plan.
A pirate’s life for me
What catapults someone into such a lifestyle? For Falkvinge, it was
Sweden’s 2005 debate over changes to copyright law. In his view, the
issue received tremendous media coverage and generated obvious
interest among the public, but politicians basically failed to notice
the entire debate. He wondered how to get their attention, and he
concluded it probably couldn’t be done. So Falkvinge decided that the
only way to make change happen was to “bypass the politicians entirely
and aim for their power base.”
That meant a new political party, the Pirate Party—”Piratpartiet” in
Swedish. Falkvinge registered the domain in December 2005 and threw up
a website that “looked like shit.” But looks weren’t the point; the
site’s manifesto was something he hoped would find an audience. (Read
it in Swedish [PDF] or in an English translation).
It did. When the site went live on January 1, 2006, Falkvinge hoped he
might “get a couple thousand visits,” collect some volunteers, and
refine the document. The goal was (eventually) to round up enough
signatures to get the Pirate Party registered with Sweden’s electoral
authority so that it would be on the ballot for the upcoming September
2006 elections. After that, who knew—maybe the fledgling movement
could even pick up a seat?
Falkvinge posted his new site into a chat channel—it was “all the
advertising I ever did.” The site quickly racked up three million hits
and pulled in links from sites like Slashdot and Digg. The challenge
turned out not to be attracting interest, but channeling massive
interest into a movement.
A theory of movement
Falkvinge had given some thought to “movements” already. He had a
theory that every major social shift followed a three-stage pattern.
First, wild activists provoke the public to generate attention around
an issue. Next, academics get involved in researching the issue.
Finally, the issue is successfully politicized. It’s a pattern that
Falkvinge sees in both the labor and environmental movements, both of
which have spawned vibrant European political parties such as the
Social Democrats and the Greens.
When it came to issues of copyright, “piracy,” and the production of
art and entertainment, provocateurs like Shawn Fanning of Napster fame
had blazed a trail for a decade already. Academics had been pumping
out a recent body of literature on copyright in the digital age. But
there were no political parties that even appeared to take the issue
seriously.
So Falkvinge set out to organize the inchoate interest generated by
his Pirate Party website. His first test was Sweden’s electoral
authority, which would not accept electronic signatures on petitions.
That meant the hip new party’s first task was an old and unbelievably
mundane one: collecting paper signatures from Swedish residents. When
the volunteers came through with the required signatures, Falkvinge
saw that he had a loose, unstructured organization—but one capable of
getting things done.
To boost the party’s profile beyond the hardcore pirate demographic,
the mainstream media’s reach was needed. But the media didn’t appear
interested in a fledgling Pirate Party. That is, until the (unrelated)
Pirate Bay file-sharing site was raided by Swedish authorities in the
middle of 2006. In a moment, the issue of copyrights and file-sharing
was front-and-center in the popular consciousness.
“We had been trying to get into mainstream media from January to May,”
said Falkvinge, but after the raid, suddenly “my face was on every
news broadcast on every hour on every channel.” The Pirate Party
tripled its member count in a week.
The election: a splash of cold water
If the sudden success of the party made it seem as though God himself
wore an eyepatch and flew the Jolly Roger, the 2006 Swedish elections
sounded a wake-up call: this “politics” thing was going to be tough.
Under the Swedish system, parliamentary seats are handed out on a
percentage basis—win ten percent of the vote and get ten percent of
the seats. But, in order to keep Parliament from dissolving into a
hundred tiny parties, each party has to clear a four percent national
threshold (or gain 12 percent of the votes in any particular district)
before it gets any seats at all. Get 3.9 percent of the vote and you
go home with nothing.
In the 2006 fall elections, when Swedes went to the polls, Falkvinge
had “high expectations” that his new party might pick up a seat or
more. But when the votes were tallied, Piratpartiet had a mere 0.63
percent of the national total with 34,918 votes (results in Swedish).
In other words, no seats.
On the other hand, the party had been around for less than a year and
managed to garner more votes than did several established politicians.
The Pirate Party was dismissed as “this election’s joker party,” says
Falkvinge now, but he never accepted that characterization. Instead,
he took comfort from the fact that the Pirate Party had become the
third largest party… outside of parliament. It wasn’t much, but it was
something.
Gaining seats
After the electoral defeat, Falkvinge and his fellow pirates sat down
to talk strategy. They developed a three-part plan that would govern
their actions for the next four years, fully expecting that they could
board and loot both the European Parliament and the Swedish one in
that amount of time.
The strategy began with the creation of a youth section called Young
Pirate (Ung Pirat). Such youth political groups, common in Europe, are
set up to develop young political talent and provide a counterbalance
to the grey-haired elders who run most parties. Because the Pirate
Party’s membership already skewed young (high school and college
students are the largest demographics), it wasn’t long before Young
Pirate was the third largest political youth group in Sweden.
What makes the Young Pirate story so odd is that the group is actually
funded with taxpayer money. In Sweden, the government doles out kronor
to youth groups based on the size of their membership. By January
2009, Young Pirate was raking in 1.3 million kronor a year (about
$150,000) from the Swedish government, according to Swedish newspaper
The Local.
The music industry was less than pleased. “It is surprising. Ung Pirat
works in principle to encourage something illegal,” said Lars
Gustafsson, head of IFPI Sweden. “That they then receive money from a
state institution is remarkable.”
With the youth section developing quickly, the Pirate Party has been
focused on the second bit of its plan for world domination: a seat in
the European Parliament. The election for Swedish MEPs opens May 20,
and voters can cast a ballot through June 7. MEP elections are
notorious for significantly lower turnout than big national elections,
and Falkvinge is counting on low turnout to propel his forces into a
seat.
The Pirate Party needs an estimated 100,000 votes to cross the four
percent threshold in the election. In 2006, it only picked up 35,000,
so Falkvinge admits this is a challenge. Still, the party has seen
significant growth in the last two and half years, and the success of
its young wing was responsible for a 4.5 percent showing in recent
mock elections in Swedish schools. Even if the pirates are closed out
once more, time appears to be on Falkvinge’s side—unless his Young
Pirates mellow as they age.
Even if the pirates get their coveted seat in the European Parliament,
they won’t have much power among the nearly 800 MEPs. But Falkvinge
hopes that gaining a seat would set the stage for a strong national
showing during the 2010 Swedish parliamentary elections. Right now,
because of the four percent threshold, many people refuse to vote for
a small party in order not to “waste” their vote. Winning an MEP seat
would “shatter that psychological barrier,” says Falkvinge.
The 2010 elections are the third stage in the strategy. If the pirates
can scrape up five percent of the votes, they will suddenly have five
percent of the seats in parliament, and they then hope to position
themselves as a tiebreaker party in a coalition government. The price
of their inclusion in a coalition: intellectual property reform, of
course.
And how could they fail to do something at the polls? The elections
are scheduled for September 19, 2010, after all—which happens to be
Talk Like A Pirate Day.
World domination?
Making the party a presence in Swedish politics is one goal, but it’s
only a stepping stone to bigger things. The pirates “want to change
Sweden, Europe, and the rest of the world, in that order,” says
Falkvinge.
The idea here is that if one country, such as Sweden, can challenge
the “groupthink” on copyright issues, it will be like “pointing out
that the emperor has no clothes.” It’s a long-term goal—Falkvinge
estimates that gaining wide influence will take 20-30 years—but he’s
convinced that his lack of pay and 90-hour workweeks are worth it.
“This is about control over our knowledge and culture,” he says. In
his view, societies can go two ways: toward a culturally rich society
where everyone participates and enjoys culture, or down another road
in which culture is locked down and comes mainly from a few
multinational companies.
It’s a stark vision of the world, but it’s one shared not just by
Falkvinge and his fellow Swedes. Pirate Party offshoots have sprung up
spontaneously in 15 or 20 countries. They aren’t controlled by the
Swedish group, but each shares a similar view of the world and works
toward similar ends. But despite the surprising success of the Swedish
Pirate Party to date, however, the movement has struggled to generate
significant support in most other places.
We checked in with the UK Pirate Party, but the party’s contact told
us that “the UK branch has faded into nothingness. From all the
initial excitement and setting up we ended up with just myself and one
other trying to get things moving. Everyone else sort of, just left…”
Canada has fared no better. After some expressions of interest back in
2007, anything resembling a “movement” failed to materialize in quite
spectacular fashion. There’s no website and no apparent leadership
structure. Posting to an international Pirate Party forum back in
December 2008, someone from Northern Ontario suggested starting small.
“We should/need to focus on smaller jurisdictions,” he wrote. “Trying
to start a federal party requires a lot of money, a lot of people, and
a central means of DIRECT interaction. So, I suggest starting parties
on a provincial/terretorial [sic] level (OR, in the case of a civic
partisan government like Vancouver, a municipal level). While this
fractures the member base, the support of a the full national parent
group would still be there, and the requirements of starting a party
would be greatly lessened.”
How much interest did the appeal generate? In February 2009, the
poster returned and noted that he had not received “the kind of reply
at all I want. Is there someone willing to at least comment?”
Ahoy, California!
In the US, the Pirate Party is currently struggling just to get its
name on at least one state ballot. Ars spoke with current party leader
Glenn Kerbein, who took charge after a 2008 vote. He’s not presiding
over a vast empire—yet, anyway. The current Pirate Party leadership in
the US amounts to two or three officers, a website, and a Facebook
group of less than 900.
The US branch was founded the week after The Pirate Bay was raided by
Swedish authorities. Its immediate object was to register as a party
in Utah, where one of the founders lived, but this required
signatures. When the founder in question fell ill, Kerbein said, the
project stalled, even though Utah required only a few thousand
signatures to put a party on the ballot.
According to the group’s “About” page, this bid for recognition also
failed “due to interference from the Libertarian Party. Many of the
people who had already signed the Pirate Party petition backed out in
order to support the Libertarians. Though we bear no ill will, this
shows the extreme difficulty the Pirate Party faces.”
Kerbein, who lives in California, is now “trying to get the ball
rolling” there; to do so, he needs to round up one percent of the
voting population from the last primary election. In this case, that
means 88,991 people. But before he can get started on that, the party
needs to hold a caucus, elect officers, and have a constitution—which
is still in progress.
Unlike the Swedish party, the US pirates are aiming their cannons at
tiny targets. Kerbein says that the group’s current target is just
getting all the signatures and being recognized by California’s
Secretary of State. Actually winning any sort of seats, even at the
state level, remains a long shot.
And the party doesn’t sound especially piratical in many ways. For one
thing, it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 (though there was debate
within the membership about this due to Obama’s eventual support for
the warrantless wiretapping bill).
Copyright isn’t even one of the main planks. Instead, Kerbein says
that the US party wants to make sure that people can protest freely
without excessive police action; to see that privacy is protected from
warrantless wiretapping and other abuses; and to insist that secret
government is wrong, and that full transparency is needed for
democracy. Still, he does believe that the noncommercial trading of
copyrighted material should be legalized.
Given the odds against him, Kerbein has chosen to invest his time in
the fledgling party because “I feel like I’ve been gypped by politics
as usual.” Nothing makes him angrier than lying politicians; his
version of a “pirate” is someone who is honest, transparent, protects
privacy, and doesn’t have anything against a little consensual
blockbuster swapping among friends. But he knows that “the national
climate for third parties is rather unforgiving” right now.
Sweden: the sneak preview
Not that the bad news bothers Falkvinge. He doesn’t believe that it’s
a coincidence that Swedish broadband is some of the best in the world.
Falkvinge talks about the heady days in the late 1990s when most of
the world was just discovering DSL and cable, while Swedish
entrepreneurs were running fiber to apartment buildings. In 1998, he
had a symmetrical 10Mbps connection to his own apartment.
Falkvinge believes that by getting such a jump on most other nations,
Sweden’s debates taking place around issues like file-sharing offer a
sneak preview of what other nations will soon grapple with. If the
pirates are now making gains in Sweden, a country where The Pirate Bay
trial has become front page news, they may have to wait a few years to
gain more credibility in countries with less-ubiquitous broadband.
That’s the hope, at least. The world’s big content industries haven’t
yet agreed to be boarded, though, and they appear to believe that so-
called “graduated response” programs can dragoon ISPs around the world
into helping them police copyright infringement on the Internet. With
such plans well underway in the US, the UK, France, Japan, New
Zealand, and other countries, it’s still possible that the vast
majority of casual Internet users can be steered into lawful shipping
lanes.
But once a movement has exploded into the mainstream, has its own
youth organization, and receives government funds, it looks
increasingly legitimate. And if Piratpartiet can execute its plan to
grab seats in the European Parliament and then at home, Sweden seems
unlikely to do the creative industries’ bidding without major
political battles.
That’s still a big “if,” and extending the scenario to the rest of the
world requires an even longer leap of faith. When so much can be
accomplished so fast by a man living off food and rent donations,
however, it’s unwise to hold too firmly to a belief that a group of
fractious “pirates” can’t possibly organize itself into something
fearsome… or wonderful.
FOUNDER
http://rickfalkvinge.se/english/
http://english.rickfalkvinge.se/
email : rick.falkvinge [at] piratpartiet [dot] se
PIRATE PARTY INTERNATIONAL
http://www.piratpartiet.se/international
History of the Party
The Swedish Pirate Party was formed by Rickard Falkvinge, and he
created the embryo of this site and mentioned the address once on a
busy DirectConnect hub on January 1, 2006. Within two days, the site
displayed three million hits, and the first thousand or so members
joined up. The principles of the Pirate Party soon began to take
shape, as more and more members joined up, and in February they were
voted through in the 3.0 version, which you can read in several
languages further down on this page. The reform of copyright laws, the
abolishing of patents and working against installing more regulations,
and remove the Data Retention Act, that are seriously threatening
citizens’ privacy are the only articles in the Pirate Party agenda.
The aim is to hold the balance of power, to be the tie-breaker, in the
Swedish Riksdag and through that offer a collaboration of parties to
gain the majority and thus give the governmental status, to either
left or right. The difference between left and right, we feel, are no
longer obvious, and therefore makes it easy for us to take this
measure.
The issues that we represent are sorely missing, or are only
fragmentarily represented, with an alarming display of lack of
knowledge, and we hope to be able to bring in the legislative groups
of Sweden into the 21st century. Feel free to show us your support by
sending us a donation or a cheer in the Visitor’s corner when you’re
here!
International Growth and Your Role In It
In order to create a place where international collaboration can start
and grow, we have created PP International Net. We would very much
like to invite you to participate. PPI can also to serve as a way of
getting people in touch with eachother, interested in starting up a
party in their respective country, as well as provide resources,
discussions and advice to eachother across the borders.
Below are the links to sister parties abroad, as well as a list of
existing translations of the Swedish Pirate Party’s declaration of
principles. If you have a translation in a language missing, feel free
to mail it to us at Piratpartiet.
Answer to a common question: Yes, you are free to use the Black Sail
logotype for the Pirate Party in your own country. Most do.
Technical information about setting up a Pirate Party website can be
found here.
http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/website_starter_kithttp://www.piratpartiet.se/international/website_starter_kit
CONTACT
email : info [at] piratpartiet [dot] se
PRINCIPLES
http://www.piratpartiet.se/documents/Principles%203.2.pdf
http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english
Introduction to Politics and Principles
The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid
of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are
respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for
representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.
Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they
are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that
led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present
throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives
under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to
set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very
dangerous direction.
The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:
Reform of copyright law
The 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.
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.
The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work
commercially should be limited to five years after publication.
Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money
seventy years after he is 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. If you
haven’t made your money back in the first one or two years, you never
will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than
enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.
We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract
clauses that aim to restrict the consumers’ 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.
An abolished patent system
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.
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. This is something
we would like to discuss on a European level.
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 outright. If we lead, the rest of the
world will eventually follow.
Respect for the right to privacy
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.
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.
PHARMA PATENTS
http://www.piratpartiet.se/an_alternative_to_pharmaceutical_patents
Pharmaceutical patents are harmful
Patents on drugs, or pharmaceutical patents, have many negative
effects.
* Pharmaceutical patents prevent hundreds of thousands of people in
poor countries from receiving the drugs they need, even though the
drugs exist and could save their lives.
* Pharmaceutical patents distort the pharmaceutical research
priorities, since it becomes more profitable to treat the symptoms of
diseases that come from a high standard of living, than to cure poor
people from malaria.
* Pharmaceutical patents continue to lead to ever increasing costs for
drugs in Sweden and Europe, outside any form of political control
Are pharmaceutical patents necessary?
Despite all these negative effects, there are many people who defend
pharmaceutical patents, and say they are nevertheless necessary.
Pharmaceutical research is very expensive, so we have to make sure it
is properly funded. Otherwise we wouldn’t get any new drugs in the
future, and that would be even worse.
Because it is so easy for anybody to copy a pharmaceutical substance
that has cost billions in research money to develop, we unfortunately
have to let the pharmaceutical companies have monopolies on new drugs,
those who defend pharmaceutical patents say. But that is not true.
The first part of the argument is of course valid. One way or another
we have to make sure that there is serious money available for
pharmaceutical research. But the claim that pharmaceutical patents is
the only conceivable system for raising that money, is simply not
true.
The government pays for the research today
Today it is already the public sector (henceforth called “the
government”) that pays for the bulk of all drugs that are used in
Europe, thanks to various systems for universal medical coverage. (See
for example page 37 in this report from EFPIA, The European Federation
of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.) It is the government
that pays for the pharmaceutical research today, by paying high prices
to the pharmaceutical companies for patented drugs.
So there is no natural law that says that patents are the only way to
get new drugs developed. If “the government” in the different
countries funded the research directly, and made the results freely
available, this would be at least as reasonable as today’s model,
where the government instead creates and maintains private monopolies
for the pharmaceutical companies.
The relevant question is which model provides the most efficient and
cost effective way of funding pharmaceutical research. Because nobody
claims that pharmaceutical research is cheap. The average cost for
developing a new drug is just over a billion US dollars.
But considering that “the government” already provides most of the
income for the pharmaceutical companies, a reasonable first step would
be to find out how much of that income actually goes to research.
Fortunately, this is very easy to do, as all the big pharmaceutical
companies have their annual reports available online. As an example,
we can look at the numbers for Novartis (page 143), Pfizer or
AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research.
The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. The
numbers are typical for the industry.
So the question is: does the patent system really give us, the
taxpayers, the maximum amount of pharmaceutical research for the money
we are spending on drugs? Or is there room for improvement, when even
the pharma companies themselves admit spending 85% of the money we
give them on other things?
If the government would instead take 20% of what it currently spends
on drugs, and allocate it directly to pharmaceutical research, there
would be more money than today for the research. If the results are
made freely available, the pharmaceutical companies would be able to
produce modern drugs without spending any money on research
themselves. All that would remain for the government would be to pay
for the actual substances.
Patent free drugs are cheap
How would it affect the price of drugs if there were no pharmaceutical
patents? To answer this question, we can look at the experience we
have from patent free generic drugs. In that market segment we already
have a situation where different (private) manufacturers of the drugs
compete with each other, and the government buys from from cheapest
and best ones.
And it works! According to a report from the Swedish Food and Drugs
Administration (pdf in Swedish), the price for drugs dropped on
average 70% when they became free of patents (page 13 in the pdf). In
the case of generic drugs we are talking about drugs that are more
than 20 years old. For newer drugs the pharmaceutical companies add an
even greater surcharge, so the actual savings if pharmaceutical
patents are abolished would almost certainly be considerably more than
70%. But let us still be conservative and use that number.
Half the cost, more money to research!
The price for a substance will then drop to 30% if we get rid of the
patents. Add 20% to fund future research according to the proposal
presented here, and we have reduced the government’s bill for drugs to
50% of what it is today. We would cut the cost in half, while still
giving more money to pharmaceutical research. Isn’t this an idea worth
exploring?
What arguments are there for keeping the pharmaceutical patents, and
rejecting the cost savings and other benefits possible if we choose a
different approach?
Summary
Let us summarize the main points of the proposal:
* In Europe it is already the government that provides most of the
revenues for the pharmaceutical industry, thanks to universal medical
coverage.
* The pharmaceutical companies spend 15% of their revenues on
research, according to their own numbers. The remaining 85 are spent
on other things (mostly marketing and profits).
* If the government would instead take 20% of what it currently spends
on drugs, and allocate that money directly to pharmaceutical research,
there would be more money for research. The pharmaceutical companies
wouldn’t have do do any research themselves, so there would be no need
for pharmaceutical patents, as they would have no research costs to
recoup.
* Without patents the price of the actual substances drop by at least
70% when they are manufactured on a free market with competition,
instead of by a monopolist.
So: compared to today’s system the government’s cost would be 20% (for
research) plus 30% (for the substances). A total of 50% of today’s
costs, and still more money than today for research.
Realistic on the European level
An obvious counterargument would be that this is not something that
Sweden alone could reasonably do. This is true. But on the European
level it is quite doable.
If the European governments wanted to, they could easily decide to get
rid of pharmaceutical patents, and instead allocate sufficient funds
directly to pharmaceutical research. Whether a country recognizes
patents or not is entirely up to the legislative body of that country
to decide. And it is already the government that pays most of the
pharmaceutical bill in all European countries.
Europe is big enough and rich enough, both to fund a substantial part
of the global pharmaceutical research so that nobody could accuse us
of freeloading on others, and to withstand the diplomatic pressures
that will no doubt be put upon us the day we choose the open road.
So, to repeat the billion dollar question: What arguments are there to
keep pharmaceutical patents, and to reject the cost savings and
improvements that the open road would offer?
The Pirate Party’s position
The Pirate Party wants to abolish pharmaceutical patents as a long
term goal, but realizes that this requires alternative systems for
funding pharmaceutical research. We believe that the introduction of a
new system should be done on the European level.
We urge the Swedish government to study the effects of different
alternative system, such as the one proposed here, and to take
initiatives to put the issue on the European political agenda for
discussions.
ENDORSEMENT
http://copyriot.se/2009/05/27/lars-gustafsson-why-my-vote-goes-to-the-pirate-party-english-translation-of-todays-text/
Lars Gustafsson: “Why my vote goes to the Pirate Party”
Lars Gustafsson is probably Sweden’s most profilic living writer.
Since the late 1950’s he has produced a steady flow of poetry, novels
and literary criticism. At the same time, he has until recently been
active as professor of philosophy at the University of Texas. Now he’s
back in Sweden and just started publishing himself on a blog. He has
also received a long list of literary awards, most recently – only two
days ago – the Selma Lagerlöf award.
Therefore, it is making quite an excitement in Sweden as Lars
Gustafsson, in today’s issue of Expressen, explains why copyright must
be left behind and declares that he is voting for the Pirate Party in
the ongoing European elections.
As this text could probably be of interest for a few people also
outside of Sweden, I made a very fast translation. It is certainly not
perfect, but please do not complain on translation wrongs in the
comments – make an updated version instead, and post the link to it!
I could also add that I do not personally share every detail in Lars
Gustafsson’s analysis. Especially, the dichotomy between “material”
and “immaterial” is problematic, as digital technologies indeed lead
to re-materializations everywhere – something we are right now
exploring in the project Embassy of Piracy, culminating next week on
the Venice Biennale. There are also good reasons to questions the
status of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “reproducibility”. However,
Lars Gustafsson – like Walter Benjamin – is powerfully formulating the
ongoing conflicts in materialist terms and putting them in a very
relevant historical perspective. Let this be a starting point for
discussions. And once again, apologized for any translation wrongs…
“Why my vote goes to the Pirate Party”
BY Lars Gustafsson
According to an ancient source, the Emperor of Persia gave orders that
the waves of the sea must be punished by beating, as the storm
hindered him from transporting his troups by ship.
That was quite stupid of him. Today, would he maybe have tried with
Stockholm district court? Or a consultative conversation with the
judge?
It is odd, how strongly the situation spring 2009 – on the area of
civil rights – reminds about the struggles over freedom of press in
France, during the decades preceding the French revolution.
A new world of ideas is emerging and would not have been able to, were
it not for an accelerating technology.
Raids against secret printing houses, confiscated pamphlets and – even
more – confiscated printing equipment. Orders of arrest and
adventurous nightly transports between Prussian enclave Neuchâtel –
where not only large parts of the Encyclopedia was produced, but also
lots of daring pornography, between the atheist pamphlets – and Paris.
Between the 1730’s and 1780’s, the number of state censors in France
was doubled by four. The raids against illegal printing houses was
rising at about the same pace. In retrospect, we know it did not help.
Rather, the increase of censorship and printing house raids had a
stimulating effect on the new ideas and made them spread even faster.
Now the conflict rage over the net’s continued existence as a forum of
ideas and as an institution of civil rights, protected from privacy-
threatening interventions and against powerful private interests.
That a mad French-German proposal just fell in the European parliament
does certainly not mean that the freeedom of the net and the privacy
is now safeguarded.
How real are then these threats? Let us think about the Dalälven river
in spring flood times. A really critical year, the water may trespass
100 meters, maybe 200 meters, into house lots and meadows. Does it
help to call the Ludvika police?
So for – this is shown by most historical experience – legislation has
never been able to stop technological development.
Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay, whose title usually is
translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“,
where he draws a series of interesting conclusions about what the
radical changes that must follow on his time’s relatively modest
degree of reproducibility. The digital revolution has brought about a
reproducibility which Walter Benjamin could hardly ever have dreamt
about. One could talk about maximal reproducibility. Google is about
to build a library that, if is is allowed to grow, will make most
material libraries obsolete or at least outmoded.
Cinema and paper newspapers are since long drawn into this new
immateriality. Films, novels, magazines let themselves be reproduced.
Further on; also three-dimensional objects, like products of
programmable lathes let themselves be reproduced. Wirelessy and
rapidly.
This immaterialisation naturally threatens the material copyright. And
then were are not only talking about run-of-the-mill writers like Mr.
Jan Guillou, whose social problems of acquiring new country estates I
am honestly ignoring.
Material copyright has much more serious aspects: What has the large
pharmaceutical firms patents on aids medicin meant for the third
world? Or what about Monsanto’s claim of holding rights on crops and
pigs?
Every society must make its balance between differing interests and
every hypocritic attempt to ignore that is nonsense. A functioning
military defence is more important than ice hockey rinks and bicycle
lanes. Probably the net implies a threat against the copyright of the
material. And so what?
Intellectual and personal integrity for the citizens, briefly speaking
an internet that has not been transformed into a government channel by
lobby-marinated courts and EU politicians in leashes, is arguably more
important than the needs of a primarily industrial scene of
literarature and music, which is rapidly crumbling away already within
the lifetime of the authors. The need of being read, of influenceing,
to formulate one’s times, may but does not need to get in conflict
with the wish to sell many copies. When the both needs are getting in
conflict, the industrial interest must be put aside and the great
intellectual sphere of the arts must be defended against threats.
The essential interest of artists and authors, given that they are
intellectually and morally serious in hat they are doing, must
certainly be to get read, to let their voice become heard in their
generation. How that goal is attained, that is, how to reach the
readers, is in this perspective of secondary importance.
The growing defence of the internet’s expanded freedom of speech, of
the immaterial civil rights, that we are now witnessing in country
after country, is the start of an – just as the last time in the early
18th century – liberalism that is carried by technology and therefore
emancipated.
Therefore, my vote goes to the Pirate Party.
http://pirate-party.us/
http://www.pp-international.net/forum/
USE LOGO AS NEEDED
http://www.piratpartiet.se/filemanager/active?fid=7
THE PIRATE PARTY
http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2009/06/01/the-euro-elections-forget-ukip-vote-pirate/
The Euro Elections: Vote Pirate / 01 Jun 09
In Sweden, a force known as the Pirate party had (at the time of
writing) grown to become the country’s third largest political
organisation by membership. Its inspiration? The successful
prosecution of file-sharing site Pirate Bay, for the illegal
distribution of millions of films, albums and television programmes.
With 45,000 members and counting, the Pirate party are campaigning on
a simple platform: “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of
the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are
respected.”
They seem likely to win at least one seat in the European parliament—
provided, Pirate party leader Rick Falkvinge notes, “we get our ballot
papers out.” As a non-established political force, they must supply
all 7,000 polling stations in Sweden with their own ballots by hand.
POST-VERDICT MEMBERSHIP BOOM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8012549.stm
Pirate Party plans election raid / 22 April 2009
Sweden’s Pirate Party says it has had a surge in membership, giving
its leaders hope that anti-corporate feeling will translate into
electoral success. The party is campaigning in the June European
elections, fielding 20 candidates. It wants sweeping reform of
copyright law and an end to patents. The membership boost followed the
jailing last week of four founders of a file-sharing website, The
Pirate Bay. The party says membership soared from 14,711 to 36,624 in
just a few days.
Party leader Rick Falkvinge told BBC News that “in terms of membership
it is now the fourth largest party in Sweden. If everybody who is
angry about the Pirate Bay verdict votes then we’ll get at least one
MEP,” he said, referring to the elections for the European Parliament.
Landmark case
Hundreds of supporters of Pirate Bay demonstrated in the Swedish
capital Stockholm on Saturday, some of them waving Jolly Roger flags.
In the verdict against the world’s most high-profile file-sharing
website, the Stockholm district court found Frederik Neij, Gottfrid
Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde guilty of breaking
copyright law and sentenced them to a year in jail. They were also
ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages. Record companies welcomed the
verdict, but the men plan to appeal.
Mr Falkvinge said support for the Pirate Party was not only coming
from young people, but also “a considerably older crowd saying ‘enough
is enough’. They see how these laws break civil liberties in an
unacceptable way,” he said. He said the party membership was split
about 50-50 between people aged under 25 and over. But its youth
section is “by far the largest” among Swedish political parties, he
added.
The party says it has only three issues on its agenda: “to
fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system and
ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected”. Mr Falkvinge
said it was funded entirely by private donations, typically of 100
kronor (£8; $12).
The Pirate Bay, with an estimated 22 million users, is reckoned to be
the most popular of the many file-sharing sites on the internet. Its
success angered executives and artists in the music, TV and film
industries, who saw the Swedish case as an important step in stamping
out the illegal sharing of copyrighted media.
TRIAL CORRUPTED
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/pirateconflict/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/pirate-bay-defendants-add-new-bias-charges/
Pirate Bay Bias Charge: ‘Random’ Judge Assignment Wasn’t
BY David Kravets and Kerstin Sjoden / May 15, 2009
New allegations questioning the legitimacy of The Pirate Bay trial
surfaced Friday when lawyers for the four file-sharing defendants
accused the Swedish courts of secretly steering the case to a hostile
judge. The latest ethics charges in the aftermath of the April
conviction of the four founders of the world’s most notorious
BitTorrent tracker alleged that the judge who presided over the trial
wasn’t chosen at random, as is required under Swedish law.
The allegations came weeks after it was revealed that the same judge,
Tomas Norström, is a member of pro-copyright enforcement groups.
“We’ve found some things, particularly about the random selection. It
doesn’t seem to have been random,” Per Samuelson, one of the
defendant’s lawyers, told Swedish television station SVT. Samuelson,
who is demanding a retrial, declined to elaborate on the latest
misconduct allegations. Norström declined comment.
Cecilia Klerbo, the chief magistrate of the district court in
Stockholm, where the case was tried, said the presiding judge was
chosen at random. “The procedure was carried out as usual,” she told
SVT.
After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay
administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde
were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was
convicted of funding the five-year-old operation.
In addition to one year of jail time, the defendants were ordered to
pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of
entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner
Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures.
The case was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in
what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants
were charged with facilitating copyright infringement.
In the trial’s aftermath, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe
have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to
crack down on torrent sites, and file sharing in Sweden has dropped.
Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, has begun
moving toward legitimacy.
But the verdict also triggered a political backlash among Swedish
youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size, giving
the copyright-reform party a genuine shot a landing a seat in the
European Parliment. The Pirate Bay, with more than 20 million users,
keeps operating as usual, despite the contested convictions.
The first ethics violations lobbed against the court centered on Judge
Norstrom’s membership in organizations that lobby for stricter
copyright legislation. Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright
Association and is a board member of the Swedish Association for the
Protection of Industrial Property.
Some legal experts said the appearance of bias by the judge is enough
for a retrial. “The confidence in the legal system demands that the
appeals court regards this is as a conflict of interest, and that
means that the appeals court must order a retrial in the district
court,” said Eric Bylander, a Gothenburg University legal scholar,
told The Local, an English-language news site in Sweden.
SWEDISH ISPs REVOLT
http://www.thelocal.se/19114/20090428/
http://www.thelocal.se/18882/20090416/
http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/danish-isp-may-fight-order-fence-in-pirate-bay-162
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/03/pirate-party-rejects-swedish-plan-to-snitch-on-filesharers.ars
3rd LARGEST PARTY IN SWEDEN
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-3rd-largest-political-party-in-sweden-090506/
Pirate Party 3rd Largest Political Party in Sweden
BY Ernesto / May 06, 2009
Support for the Swedish Pirate Party surged following the Pirate Bay
verdict and today it became the third largest political party in the
country. When they are elected for the European Parliament next month,
the party hopes to end the abuse of copyright by multi-billion dollar
corporations.
The explosive growth rate displayed after the Pirate Bay verdict has
skyrocketed the Pirate Party’s member count and today they’ve
surpassed that of the Center Party. Of all the established parties
only the Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party have more
members.
The Pirate Party has tripled its ranks in only three weeks up to
44,000 members, and it’s on course to become the second largest
political part in the country. TorrentFreak caught up with party
leader Rick Falkvinge to congratulate him on this unprecedented
achievement, and we used the opportunity to find out more about his
future plans. First off, we asked him if the recent surge in members
can be solely attributed to the outcome of the Pirate Bay trial.
“The Pirate Bay verdict was not a single event, but the final straw in
a long series of events,” Falkvinge replied. “We tripled our member
count in a week, and have kept growing at an accelerated pace. With
just one month till the European elections, the timing of these
horrible events arguably work as a catalyst for change.”
Falkvinge is looking forward to the upcoming European Parliament
elections on June 6 this year. “I’m extremely optimistic,” he told
TorrentFreak. “It’s not a question of ‘a’ seat any more. If everybody
who is angry with the Pirate Bay verdict goes to vote, we will get at
least one seat, and probably more.” Although things are looking good,
the road to Brussels is not guaranteed yet. There are two hurdles
left.
“One is to get our ballot papers out — contender parties are not
served by the Election Authority, but have to distribute their ballot
papers to all 7,000 polling stations by hand. That’s a logistical
nightmare, but with 13,000 activists, we should be able to fix that.
We had 1,600 activists in the last election, and covered 93%. The
other hurdle is getting our folks to actually vote, but I believe
they’re still angry enough.”
A question that has been under reported is what the party actually
plans to achieve when they arrive in Brussels. One of the questions we
asked is how torrent sites and trackers such as the Pirate Bay should
be handled. “The Pirate Bay is infrastructure,” Falkvinge told us.
“The messenger immunity, that the messenger is never responsible for
the contents of a message, is crucial to how our society works. The
Lobby is trying to gut that immunity, along with boneheaded
politicians who see a chance to look tough on crime.”
“First of all, copyright needs to be reduced to cover commercial
activities only. That would get copyright out of ordinary honest
peoples’ bedrooms, which is badly needed. That would also make
everything that happens over The Pirate Bay legal overnight, and so,
there would be no copyright infringement that TPB could potentially
facilitate. At that point, since they can’t be facilitating, aiding or
abetting anything illegal [anymore] in any interpretation, this would
also mean that they can be as commercial as they like.”
Falkvinge further told us that he’s toying with the idea of writing
“Nothing that happens at The Pirate Bay violates copyright law”
directly into Sweden’s copyright law. In 2010 the Pirate Party hopes
to enter the Swedish parliament, and they want to make it absolutely
clear that The Pirate Bay four will be acquitted on appeal.
“But that’s not enough,” Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “The issues at
stake are more important than that. The Lobby is constantly nagging on
the gray area, making inroads, establishing new precedents, and acting
very aggressively. They can do this without any risk at all, and that
needs to stop. The Lobby is damaging the open society and our economy
at a level that I think should be criminal, especially since they’re
doing it as a commercial operation.”
So, the Pirate Party wants to reduce the abuse of power and copyright
by the entertainment industry, and make that illegal instead. With the
current level of support and indications by recent polls there is no
doubt that they will get a seat in the European Parliament, and we
hope they will be able to be heard there.
PIRATE MOVEMENT
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/rick-falkvinge-is-the-face.ars
Political pirates: A history of Sweden’s Piratpartiet
BY Nate Anderson / February 25, 2009
The leader of Sweden’s Pirate Party is thinking big: seats in the
European Parliament, seats in the Swedish parliament, and a string of
Pirate Parties on six continents. He just needs more votes to make it
happen. Ars explores the birth, growth, and awkward adolescence of
political pirates.
Rick Falkvinge is the face and voice of the Swedish Pirate Party, the
party that he founded in 2006, but being a pirate isn’t all gold
doubloons and chests of booty. Falkvinge is a principled pirate—and
that means working for the sake of the cause even when the pay is low,
or nonexistent. He currently takes no salary for his work, but he gets
along by finding supporters willing to donate toward the costs of his
food and rent.
Limited resources don’t mean he’s thinking small, though. Indeed, he
wants to (democratically) take over the world, and he has a plan.
A pirate’s life for me
What catapults someone into such a lifestyle? For Falkvinge, it was
Sweden’s 2005 debate over changes to copyright law. In his view, the
issue received tremendous media coverage and generated obvious
interest among the public, but politicians basically failed to notice
the entire debate. He wondered how to get their attention, and he
concluded it probably couldn’t be done. So Falkvinge decided that the
only way to make change happen was to “bypass the politicians entirely
and aim for their power base.”
That meant a new political party, the Pirate Party—”Piratpartiet” in
Swedish. Falkvinge registered the domain in December 2005 and threw up
a website that “looked like shit.” But looks weren’t the point; the
site’s manifesto was something he hoped would find an audience. (Read
it in Swedish [PDF] or in an English translation).
It did. When the site went live on January 1, 2006, Falkvinge hoped he
might “get a couple thousand visits,” collect some volunteers, and
refine the document. The goal was (eventually) to round up enough
signatures to get the Pirate Party registered with Sweden’s electoral
authority so that it would be on the ballot for the upcoming September
2006 elections. After that, who knew—maybe the fledgling movement
could even pick up a seat?
Falkvinge posted his new site into a chat channel—it was “all the
advertising I ever did.” The site quickly racked up three million hits
and pulled in links from sites like Slashdot and Digg. The challenge
turned out not to be attracting interest, but channeling massive
interest into a movement.
A theory of movement
Falkvinge had given some thought to “movements” already. He had a
theory that every major social shift followed a three-stage pattern.
First, wild activists provoke the public to generate attention around
an issue. Next, academics get involved in researching the issue.
Finally, the issue is successfully politicized. It’s a pattern that
Falkvinge sees in both the labor and environmental movements, both of
which have spawned vibrant European political parties such as the
Social Democrats and the Greens.
When it came to issues of copyright, “piracy,” and the production of
art and entertainment, provocateurs like Shawn Fanning of Napster fame
had blazed a trail for a decade already. Academics had been pumping
out a recent body of literature on copyright in the digital age. But
there were no political parties that even appeared to take the issue
seriously.
So Falkvinge set out to organize the inchoate interest generated by
his Pirate Party website. His first test was Sweden’s electoral
authority, which would not accept electronic signatures on petitions.
That meant the hip new party’s first task was an old and unbelievably
mundane one: collecting paper signatures from Swedish residents. When
the volunteers came through with the required signatures, Falkvinge
saw that he had a loose, unstructured organization—but one capable of
getting things done.
To boost the party’s profile beyond the hardcore pirate demographic,
the mainstream media’s reach was needed. But the media didn’t appear
interested in a fledgling Pirate Party. That is, until the (unrelated)
Pirate Bay file-sharing site was raided by Swedish authorities in the
middle of 2006. In a moment, the issue of copyrights and file-sharing
was front-and-center in the popular consciousness.
“We had been trying to get into mainstream media from January to May,”
said Falkvinge, but after the raid, suddenly “my face was on every
news broadcast on every hour on every channel.” The Pirate Party
tripled its member count in a week.
The election: a splash of cold water
If the sudden success of the party made it seem as though God himself
wore an eyepatch and flew the Jolly Roger, the 2006 Swedish elections
sounded a wake-up call: this “politics” thing was going to be tough.
Under the Swedish system, parliamentary seats are handed out on a
percentage basis—win ten percent of the vote and get ten percent of
the seats. But, in order to keep Parliament from dissolving into a
hundred tiny parties, each party has to clear a four percent national
threshold (or gain 12 percent of the votes in any particular district)
before it gets any seats at all. Get 3.9 percent of the vote and you
go home with nothing.
In the 2006 fall elections, when Swedes went to the polls, Falkvinge
had “high expectations” that his new party might pick up a seat or
more. But when the votes were tallied, Piratpartiet had a mere 0.63
percent of the national total with 34,918 votes (results in Swedish).
In other words, no seats.
On the other hand, the party had been around for less than a year and
managed to garner more votes than did several established politicians.
The Pirate Party was dismissed as “this election’s joker party,” says
Falkvinge now, but he never accepted that characterization. Instead,
he took comfort from the fact that the Pirate Party had become the
third largest party… outside of parliament. It wasn’t much, but it was
something.
Gaining seats
After the electoral defeat, Falkvinge and his fellow pirates sat down
to talk strategy. They developed a three-part plan that would govern
their actions for the next four years, fully expecting that they could
board and loot both the European Parliament and the Swedish one in
that amount of time.
The strategy began with the creation of a youth section called Young
Pirate (Ung Pirat). Such youth political groups, common in Europe, are
set up to develop young political talent and provide a counterbalance
to the grey-haired elders who run most parties. Because the Pirate
Party’s membership already skewed young (high school and college
students are the largest demographics), it wasn’t long before Young
Pirate was the third largest political youth group in Sweden.
What makes the Young Pirate story so odd is that the group is actually
funded with taxpayer money. In Sweden, the government doles out kronor
to youth groups based on the size of their membership. By January
2009, Young Pirate was raking in 1.3 million kronor a year (about
$150,000) from the Swedish government, according to Swedish newspaper
The Local.
The music industry was less than pleased. “It is surprising. Ung Pirat
works in principle to encourage something illegal,” said Lars
Gustafsson, head of IFPI Sweden. “That they then receive money from a
state institution is remarkable.”
With the youth section developing quickly, the Pirate Party has been
focused on the second bit of its plan for world domination: a seat in
the European Parliament. The election for Swedish MEPs opens May 20,
and voters can cast a ballot through June 7. MEP elections are
notorious for significantly lower turnout than big national elections,
and Falkvinge is counting on low turnout to propel his forces into a
seat.
The Pirate Party needs an estimated 100,000 votes to cross the four
percent threshold in the election. In 2006, it only picked up 35,000,
so Falkvinge admits this is a challenge. Still, the party has seen
significant growth in the last two and half years, and the success of
its young wing was responsible for a 4.5 percent showing in recent
mock elections in Swedish schools. Even if the pirates are closed out
once more, time appears to be on Falkvinge’s side—unless his Young
Pirates mellow as they age.
Even if the pirates get their coveted seat in the European Parliament,
they won’t have much power among the nearly 800 MEPs. But Falkvinge
hopes that gaining a seat would set the stage for a strong national
showing during the 2010 Swedish parliamentary elections. Right now,
because of the four percent threshold, many people refuse to vote for
a small party in order not to “waste” their vote. Winning an MEP seat
would “shatter that psychological barrier,” says Falkvinge.
The 2010 elections are the third stage in the strategy. If the pirates
can scrape up five percent of the votes, they will suddenly have five
percent of the seats in parliament, and they then hope to position
themselves as a tiebreaker party in a coalition government. The price
of their inclusion in a coalition: intellectual property reform, of
course.
And how could they fail to do something at the polls? The elections
are scheduled for September 19, 2010, after all—which happens to be
Talk Like A Pirate Day.
World domination?
Making the party a presence in Swedish politics is one goal, but it’s
only a stepping stone to bigger things. The pirates “want to change
Sweden, Europe, and the rest of the world, in that order,” says
Falkvinge.
The idea here is that if one country, such as Sweden, can challenge
the “groupthink” on copyright issues, it will be like “pointing out
that the emperor has no clothes.” It’s a long-term goal—Falkvinge
estimates that gaining wide influence will take 20-30 years—but he’s
convinced that his lack of pay and 90-hour workweeks are worth it.
“This is about control over our knowledge and culture,” he says. In
his view, societies can go two ways: toward a culturally rich society
where everyone participates and enjoys culture, or down another road
in which culture is locked down and comes mainly from a few
multinational companies.
It’s a stark vision of the world, but it’s one shared not just by
Falkvinge and his fellow Swedes. Pirate Party offshoots have sprung up
spontaneously in 15 or 20 countries. They aren’t controlled by the
Swedish group, but each shares a similar view of the world and works
toward similar ends. But despite the surprising success of the Swedish
Pirate Party to date, however, the movement has struggled to generate
significant support in most other places.
We checked in with the UK Pirate Party, but the party’s contact told
us that “the UK branch has faded into nothingness. From all the
initial excitement and setting up we ended up with just myself and one
other trying to get things moving. Everyone else sort of, just left…”
Canada has fared no better. After some expressions of interest back in
2007, anything resembling a “movement” failed to materialize in quite
spectacular fashion. There’s no website and no apparent leadership
structure. Posting to an international Pirate Party forum back in
December 2008, someone from Northern Ontario suggested starting small.
“We should/need to focus on smaller jurisdictions,” he wrote. “Trying
to start a federal party requires a lot of money, a lot of people, and
a central means of DIRECT interaction. So, I suggest starting parties
on a provincial/terretorial [sic] level (OR, in the case of a civic
partisan government like Vancouver, a municipal level). While this
fractures the member base, the support of a the full national parent
group would still be there, and the requirements of starting a party
would be greatly lessened.”
How much interest did the appeal generate? In February 2009, the
poster returned and noted that he had not received “the kind of reply
at all I want. Is there someone willing to at least comment?”
Ahoy, California!
In the US, the Pirate Party is currently struggling just to get its
name on at least one state ballot. Ars spoke with current party leader
Glenn Kerbein, who took charge after a 2008 vote. He’s not presiding
over a vast empire—yet, anyway. The current Pirate Party leadership in
the US amounts to two or three officers, a website, and a Facebook
group of less than 900.
The US branch was founded the week after The Pirate Bay was raided by
Swedish authorities. Its immediate object was to register as a party
in Utah, where one of the founders lived, but this required
signatures. When the founder in question fell ill, Kerbein said, the
project stalled, even though Utah required only a few thousand
signatures to put a party on the ballot.
According to the group’s “About” page, this bid for recognition also
failed “due to interference from the Libertarian Party. Many of the
people who had already signed the Pirate Party petition backed out in
order to support the Libertarians. Though we bear no ill will, this
shows the extreme difficulty the Pirate Party faces.”
Kerbein, who lives in California, is now “trying to get the ball
rolling” there; to do so, he needs to round up one percent of the
voting population from the last primary election. In this case, that
means 88,991 people. But before he can get started on that, the party
needs to hold a caucus, elect officers, and have a constitution—which
is still in progress.
Unlike the Swedish party, the US pirates are aiming their cannons at
tiny targets. Kerbein says that the group’s current target is just
getting all the signatures and being recognized by California’s
Secretary of State. Actually winning any sort of seats, even at the
state level, remains a long shot.
And the party doesn’t sound especially piratical in many ways. For one
thing, it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 (though there was debate
within the membership about this due to Obama’s eventual support for
the warrantless wiretapping bill).
Copyright isn’t even one of the main planks. Instead, Kerbein says
that the US party wants to make sure that people can protest freely
without excessive police action; to see that privacy is protected from
warrantless wiretapping and other abuses; and to insist that secret
government is wrong, and that full transparency is needed for
democracy. Still, he does believe that the noncommercial trading of
copyrighted material should be legalized.
Given the odds against him, Kerbein has chosen to invest his time in
the fledgling party because “I feel like I’ve been gypped by politics
as usual.” Nothing makes him angrier than lying politicians; his
version of a “pirate” is someone who is honest, transparent, protects
privacy, and doesn’t have anything against a little consensual
blockbuster swapping among friends. But he knows that “the national
climate for third parties is rather unforgiving” right now.
Sweden: the sneak preview
Not that the bad news bothers Falkvinge. He doesn’t believe that it’s
a coincidence that Swedish broadband is some of the best in the world.
Falkvinge talks about the heady days in the late 1990s when most of
the world was just discovering DSL and cable, while Swedish
entrepreneurs were running fiber to apartment buildings. In 1998, he
had a symmetrical 10Mbps connection to his own apartment.
Falkvinge believes that by getting such a jump on most other nations,
Sweden’s debates taking place around issues like file-sharing offer a
sneak preview of what other nations will soon grapple with. If the
pirates are now making gains in Sweden, a country where The Pirate Bay
trial has become front page news, they may have to wait a few years to
gain more credibility in countries with less-ubiquitous broadband.
That’s the hope, at least. The world’s big content industries haven’t
yet agreed to be boarded, though, and they appear to believe that so-
called “graduated response” programs can dragoon ISPs around the world
into helping them police copyright infringement on the Internet. With
such plans well underway in the US, the UK, France, Japan, New
Zealand, and other countries, it’s still possible that the vast
majority of casual Internet users can be steered into lawful shipping
lanes.
But once a movement has exploded into the mainstream, has its own
youth organization, and receives government funds, it looks
increasingly legitimate. And if Piratpartiet can execute its plan to
grab seats in the European Parliament and then at home, Sweden seems
unlikely to do the creative industries’ bidding without major
political battles.
That’s still a big “if,” and extending the scenario to the rest of the
world requires an even longer leap of faith. When so much can be
accomplished so fast by a man living off food and rent donations,
however, it’s unwise to hold too firmly to a belief that a group of
fractious “pirates” can’t possibly organize itself into something
fearsome… or wonderful.
FOUNDER
http://rickfalkvinge.se/english/
http://english.rickfalkvinge.se/
email : rick.falkvinge [at] piratpartiet [dot] se
PIRATE PARTY INTERNATIONAL
http://www.piratpartiet.se/international
History of the Party
The Swedish Pirate Party was formed by Rickard Falkvinge, and he
created the embryo of this site and mentioned the address once on a
busy DirectConnect hub on January 1, 2006. Within two days, the site
displayed three million hits, and the first thousand or so members
joined up. The principles of the Pirate Party soon began to take
shape, as more and more members joined up, and in February they were
voted through in the 3.0 version, which you can read in several
languages further down on this page. The reform of copyright laws, the
abolishing of patents and working against installing more regulations,
and remove the Data Retention Act, that are seriously threatening
citizens’ privacy are the only articles in the Pirate Party agenda.
The aim is to hold the balance of power, to be the tie-breaker, in the
Swedish Riksdag and through that offer a collaboration of parties to
gain the majority and thus give the governmental status, to either
left or right. The difference between left and right, we feel, are no
longer obvious, and therefore makes it easy for us to take this
measure.
The issues that we represent are sorely missing, or are only
fragmentarily represented, with an alarming display of lack of
knowledge, and we hope to be able to bring in the legislative groups
of Sweden into the 21st century. Feel free to show us your support by
sending us a donation or a cheer in the Visitor’s corner when you’re
here!
International Growth and Your Role In It
In order to create a place where international collaboration can start
and grow, we have created PP International Net. We would very much
like to invite you to participate. PPI can also to serve as a way of
getting people in touch with eachother, interested in starting up a
party in their respective country, as well as provide resources,
discussions and advice to eachother across the borders.
Below are the links to sister parties abroad, as well as a list of
existing translations of the Swedish Pirate Party’s declaration of
principles. If you have a translation in a language missing, feel free
to mail it to us at Piratpartiet.
Answer to a common question: Yes, you are free to use the Black Sail
logotype for the Pirate Party in your own country. Most do.
Technical information about setting up a Pirate Party website can be
found here.
http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/website_starter_kithttp://www.piratpartiet.se/international/website_starter_kit
CONTACT
email : info [at] piratpartiet [dot] se
PRINCIPLES
http://www.piratpartiet.se/documents/Principles%203.2.pdf
http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english
Introduction to Politics and Principles
The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid
of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are
respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for
representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.
Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they
are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that
led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present
throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives
under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to
set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very
dangerous direction.
The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:
Reform of copyright law
The 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.
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.
The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work
commercially should be limited to five years after publication.
Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money
seventy years after he is 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. If you
haven’t made your money back in the first one or two years, you never
will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than
enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.
We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract
clauses that aim to restrict the consumers’ 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.
An abolished patent system
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.
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. This is something
we would like to discuss on a European level.
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 outright. If we lead, the rest of the
world will eventually follow.
Respect for the right to privacy
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.
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.
PHARMA PATENTS
http://www.piratpartiet.se/an_alternative_to_pharmaceutical_patents
Pharmaceutical patents are harmful
Patents on drugs, or pharmaceutical patents, have many negative
effects.
* Pharmaceutical patents prevent hundreds of thousands of people in
poor countries from receiving the drugs they need, even though the
drugs exist and could save their lives.
* Pharmaceutical patents distort the pharmaceutical research
priorities, since it becomes more profitable to treat the symptoms of
diseases that come from a high standard of living, than to cure poor
people from malaria.
* Pharmaceutical patents continue to lead to ever increasing costs for
drugs in Sweden and Europe, outside any form of political control
Are pharmaceutical patents necessary?
Despite all these negative effects, there are many people who defend
pharmaceutical patents, and say they are nevertheless necessary.
Pharmaceutical research is very expensive, so we have to make sure it
is properly funded. Otherwise we wouldn’t get any new drugs in the
future, and that would be even worse.
Because it is so easy for anybody to copy a pharmaceutical substance
that has cost billions in research money to develop, we unfortunately
have to let the pharmaceutical companies have monopolies on new drugs,
those who defend pharmaceutical patents say. But that is not true.
The first part of the argument is of course valid. One way or another
we have to make sure that there is serious money available for
pharmaceutical research. But the claim that pharmaceutical patents is
the only conceivable system for raising that money, is simply not
true.
The government pays for the research today
Today it is already the public sector (henceforth called “the
government”) that pays for the bulk of all drugs that are used in
Europe, thanks to various systems for universal medical coverage. (See
for example page 37 in this report from EFPIA, The European Federation
of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.) It is the government
that pays for the pharmaceutical research today, by paying high prices
to the pharmaceutical companies for patented drugs.
So there is no natural law that says that patents are the only way to
get new drugs developed. If “the government” in the different
countries funded the research directly, and made the results freely
available, this would be at least as reasonable as today’s model,
where the government instead creates and maintains private monopolies
for the pharmaceutical companies.
The relevant question is which model provides the most efficient and
cost effective way of funding pharmaceutical research. Because nobody
claims that pharmaceutical research is cheap. The average cost for
developing a new drug is just over a billion US dollars.
But considering that “the government” already provides most of the
income for the pharmaceutical companies, a reasonable first step would
be to find out how much of that income actually goes to research.
Fortunately, this is very easy to do, as all the big pharmaceutical
companies have their annual reports available online. As an example,
we can look at the numbers for Novartis (page 143), Pfizer or
AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research.
The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. The
numbers are typical for the industry.
So the question is: does the patent system really give us, the
taxpayers, the maximum amount of pharmaceutical research for the money
we are spending on drugs? Or is there room for improvement, when even
the pharma companies themselves admit spending 85% of the money we
give them on other things?
If the government would instead take 20% of what it currently spends
on drugs, and allocate it directly to pharmaceutical research, there
would be more money than today for the research. If the results are
made freely available, the pharmaceutical companies would be able to
produce modern drugs without spending any money on research
themselves. All that would remain for the government would be to pay
for the actual substances.
Patent free drugs are cheap
How would it affect the price of drugs if there were no pharmaceutical
patents? To answer this question, we can look at the experience we
have from patent free generic drugs. In that market segment we already
have a situation where different (private) manufacturers of the drugs
compete with each other, and the government buys from from cheapest
and best ones.
And it works! According to a report from the Swedish Food and Drugs
Administration (pdf in Swedish), the price for drugs dropped on
average 70% when they became free of patents (page 13 in the pdf). In
the case of generic drugs we are talking about drugs that are more
than 20 years old. For newer drugs the pharmaceutical companies add an
even greater surcharge, so the actual savings if pharmaceutical
patents are abolished would almost certainly be considerably more than
70%. But let us still be conservative and use that number.
Half the cost, more money to research!
The price for a substance will then drop to 30% if we get rid of the
patents. Add 20% to fund future research according to the proposal
presented here, and we have reduced the government’s bill for drugs to
50% of what it is today. We would cut the cost in half, while still
giving more money to pharmaceutical research. Isn’t this an idea worth
exploring?
What arguments are there for keeping the pharmaceutical patents, and
rejecting the cost savings and other benefits possible if we choose a
different approach?
Summary
Let us summarize the main points of the proposal:
* In Europe it is already the government that provides most of the
revenues for the pharmaceutical industry, thanks to universal medical
coverage.
* The pharmaceutical companies spend 15% of their revenues on
research, according to their own numbers. The remaining 85 are spent
on other things (mostly marketing and profits).
* If the government would instead take 20% of what it currently spends
on drugs, and allocate that money directly to pharmaceutical research,
there would be more money for research. The pharmaceutical companies
wouldn’t have do do any research themselves, so there would be no need
for pharmaceutical patents, as they would have no research costs to
recoup.
* Without patents the price of the actual substances drop by at least
70% when they are manufactured on a free market with competition,
instead of by a monopolist.
So: compared to today’s system the government’s cost would be 20% (for
research) plus 30% (for the substances). A total of 50% of today’s
costs, and still more money than today for research.
Realistic on the European level
An obvious counterargument would be that this is not something that
Sweden alone could reasonably do. This is true. But on the European
level it is quite doable.
If the European governments wanted to, they could easily decide to get
rid of pharmaceutical patents, and instead allocate sufficient funds
directly to pharmaceutical research. Whether a country recognizes
patents or not is entirely up to the legislative body of that country
to decide. And it is already the government that pays most of the
pharmaceutical bill in all European countries.
Europe is big enough and rich enough, both to fund a substantial part
of the global pharmaceutical research so that nobody could accuse us
of freeloading on others, and to withstand the diplomatic pressures
that will no doubt be put upon us the day we choose the open road.
So, to repeat the billion dollar question: What arguments are there to
keep pharmaceutical patents, and to reject the cost savings and
improvements that the open road would offer?
The Pirate Party’s position
The Pirate Party wants to abolish pharmaceutical patents as a long
term goal, but realizes that this requires alternative systems for
funding pharmaceutical research. We believe that the introduction of a
new system should be done on the European level.
We urge the Swedish government to study the effects of different
alternative system, such as the one proposed here, and to take
initiatives to put the issue on the European political agenda for
discussions.
ENDORSEMENT
http://copyriot.se/2009/05/27/lars-gustafsson-why-my-vote-goes-to-the-pirate-party-english-translation-of-todays-text/
Lars Gustafsson: “Why my vote goes to the Pirate Party”
Lars Gustafsson is probably Sweden’s most profilic living writer.
Since the late 1950’s he has produced a steady flow of poetry, novels
and literary criticism. At the same time, he has until recently been
active as professor of philosophy at the University of Texas. Now he’s
back in Sweden and just started publishing himself on a blog. He has
also received a long list of literary awards, most recently – only two
days ago – the Selma Lagerlöf award.
Therefore, it is making quite an excitement in Sweden as Lars
Gustafsson, in today’s issue of Expressen, explains why copyright must
be left behind and declares that he is voting for the Pirate Party in
the ongoing European elections.
As this text could probably be of interest for a few people also
outside of Sweden, I made a very fast translation. It is certainly not
perfect, but please do not complain on translation wrongs in the
comments – make an updated version instead, and post the link to it!
I could also add that I do not personally share every detail in Lars
Gustafsson’s analysis. Especially, the dichotomy between “material”
and “immaterial” is problematic, as digital technologies indeed lead
to re-materializations everywhere – something we are right now
exploring in the project Embassy of Piracy, culminating next week on
the Venice Biennale. There are also good reasons to questions the
status of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “reproducibility”. However,
Lars Gustafsson – like Walter Benjamin – is powerfully formulating the
ongoing conflicts in materialist terms and putting them in a very
relevant historical perspective. Let this be a starting point for
discussions. And once again, apologized for any translation wrongs…
“Why my vote goes to the Pirate Party”
BY Lars Gustafsson
According to an ancient source, the Emperor of Persia gave orders that
the waves of the sea must be punished by beating, as the storm
hindered him from transporting his troups by ship.
That was quite stupid of him. Today, would he maybe have tried with
Stockholm district court? Or a consultative conversation with the
judge?
It is odd, how strongly the situation spring 2009 – on the area of
civil rights – reminds about the struggles over freedom of press in
France, during the decades preceding the French revolution.
A new world of ideas is emerging and would not have been able to, were
it not for an accelerating technology.
Raids against secret printing houses, confiscated pamphlets and – even
more – confiscated printing equipment. Orders of arrest and
adventurous nightly transports between Prussian enclave Neuchâtel –
where not only large parts of the Encyclopedia was produced, but also
lots of daring pornography, between the atheist pamphlets – and Paris.
Between the 1730’s and 1780’s, the number of state censors in France
was doubled by four. The raids against illegal printing houses was
rising at about the same pace. In retrospect, we know it did not help.
Rather, the increase of censorship and printing house raids had a
stimulating effect on the new ideas and made them spread even faster.
Now the conflict rage over the net’s continued existence as a forum of
ideas and as an institution of civil rights, protected from privacy-
threatening interventions and against powerful private interests.
That a mad French-German proposal just fell in the European parliament
does certainly not mean that the freeedom of the net and the privacy
is now safeguarded.
How real are then these threats? Let us think about the Dalälven river
in spring flood times. A really critical year, the water may trespass
100 meters, maybe 200 meters, into house lots and meadows. Does it
help to call the Ludvika police?
So for – this is shown by most historical experience – legislation has
never been able to stop technological development.
Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay, whose title usually is
translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“,
where he draws a series of interesting conclusions about what the
radical changes that must follow on his time’s relatively modest
degree of reproducibility. The digital revolution has brought about a
reproducibility which Walter Benjamin could hardly ever have dreamt
about. One could talk about maximal reproducibility. Google is about
to build a library that, if is is allowed to grow, will make most
material libraries obsolete or at least outmoded.
Cinema and paper newspapers are since long drawn into this new
immateriality. Films, novels, magazines let themselves be reproduced.
Further on; also three-dimensional objects, like products of
programmable lathes let themselves be reproduced. Wirelessy and
rapidly.
This immaterialisation naturally threatens the material copyright. And
then were are not only talking about run-of-the-mill writers like Mr.
Jan Guillou, whose social problems of acquiring new country estates I
am honestly ignoring.
Material copyright has much more serious aspects: What has the large
pharmaceutical firms patents on aids medicin meant for the third
world? Or what about Monsanto’s claim of holding rights on crops and
pigs?
Every society must make its balance between differing interests and
every hypocritic attempt to ignore that is nonsense. A functioning
military defence is more important than ice hockey rinks and bicycle
lanes. Probably the net implies a threat against the copyright of the
material. And so what?
Intellectual and personal integrity for the citizens, briefly speaking
an internet that has not been transformed into a government channel by
lobby-marinated courts and EU politicians in leashes, is arguably more
important than the needs of a primarily industrial scene of
literarature and music, which is rapidly crumbling away already within
the lifetime of the authors. The need of being read, of influenceing,
to formulate one’s times, may but does not need to get in conflict
with the wish to sell many copies. When the both needs are getting in
conflict, the industrial interest must be put aside and the great
intellectual sphere of the arts must be defended against threats.
The essential interest of artists and authors, given that they are
intellectually and morally serious in hat they are doing, must
certainly be to get read, to let their voice become heard in their
generation. How that goal is attained, that is, how to reach the
readers, is in this perspective of secondary importance.
The growing defence of the internet’s expanded freedom of speech, of
the immaterial civil rights, that we are now witnessing in country
after country, is the start of an – just as the last time in the early
18th century – liberalism that is carried by technology and therefore
emancipated.
Therefore, my vote goes to the Pirate Party.
spectre
Jun 9, 2009, 11:57:31 PM6/9/09
to spectre.event.horizon.group
ELECTION STATS
http://www.val.se/val/ep2009/valnatt/rike/index.html
AT LEAST ONE SEAT IN EU PARLIAMENT
http://torrentfreak.com/how-pirates-shook-european-politics-090608/
How Pirates Shook European Politics
BY Ernesto / June 08, 2009
With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its
critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates
received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the
European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of
rum and loads of pirate chants. Late Sunday night, Swedish Prime
Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt congratulated the Pirate Party on their
unprecedented win at the European elections. The Pirate Party is seen
a serious competitor in Swedish politics now, a fact underscored by
the Prime Minister who said that his own party will formulate a clear
policy regarding net integrity and copyright issues in preparation for
the Swedish national elections in September 2010.
A few hours earlier, the party dinner had come to a close with
volunteers and members singing “The Broadband Hymn”. They had
fittingly gathered at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm,
and as Swedish TV published the exit polls results indicating that the
Pirate Party would get around 7% of the votes, wild cheers broke out.
Party leader Rick Falkvinge took to the stage. “Together we have today
re-shaped the political map in Europe,” he said. “Right now, Europe is
watching what is happening here and politicians everywhere are
scrambling to understand our issues. They now know that the party that
has information-political perspectives can win many votes.”
And yes, it did. 214,313 of them in Sweden on Sunday. 7.1 percent of
the vote and a guarantee of at least one seat in the European
Parliament. The Pirate Party was the most popular party among voters
under 30 years of age. Taking into account that Prime Minister Fredrik
Reinfeldt’s Moderate Party is the most popular party among voters over
65 years of age, one can understand why Reinfeldt later in the evening
said he will sit down with the Moderate Youth leader Niklas Wykman - a
critic of the surveillance legislation and anti-filesharing laws - to
discuss Internet issues. “We’ll share files in Brussels!” a young man
shouted as he ran to the bar at election night. Meanwhile, journalists
from all over Europe who had flown in to cover the unique occasion
tried to get their piece of party leader Rick Falkvinge and vice
chairman Christian Engström.
The latter, who will probably take the party’s seat in the EU
parliament, held a short speech in which he thanked all the
volunteers. The Pirate Party stays true to its net-roots and has no
formal organization. Anyone who thinks he or she can contribute is
welcome to do so simply by posting on the forum and going out and
doing it. No formal decisions on campaigning are taken and the
thousands of party ballots have been distributed to voting centers
simply by someone living close and wanting to play their part. “It’s
amazing that it worked. I never thought it would,” Engström joked.
A journalist from Swedish radio broke into the celebrations with a
question for party founder Rick Falkvinge on how he felt. With
champagne in his hand and pride in his eyes, he just smiled: “How does
it feel to write history? It feels pretty damn good.” Today, after a
night spent drinking rum and chanting seafarer standards, the pirates
woke up finding themselves on the front pages of the Swedish
newspapers. Pirates waving Jolly Rogers. Pirates taking celebratory
late night dips in fountains. Pirates laughing. Pirates hugging. And
there is consensus among the op-eds and political pundits on how it
could happen: Enthusiasm paid off.
The two large parties in Sweden, the Social Democrats and the Moderate
Party, are heavily criticized because of their lack of engagement in
the European Parliament. Meanwhile, the Green Party (which also had a
great election with 10.9%) and the Pirate Party positioned themselves
on their respective expert issues and built a lot of support from the
base. When the EU parliament meets after summer, there will be at
least one pirate in the midst of European parliament. If the Lisbon
treaty is voted through, there can be two. It may not seem a lot in
order to make a difference, but as a blogger put it: One pirate can
hijack a whole ship.
http://www.val.se/val/ep2009/valnatt/rike/index.html
AT LEAST ONE SEAT IN EU PARLIAMENT
http://torrentfreak.com/how-pirates-shook-european-politics-090608/
How Pirates Shook European Politics
BY Ernesto / June 08, 2009
With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its
critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates
received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the
European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of
rum and loads of pirate chants. Late Sunday night, Swedish Prime
Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt congratulated the Pirate Party on their
unprecedented win at the European elections. The Pirate Party is seen
a serious competitor in Swedish politics now, a fact underscored by
the Prime Minister who said that his own party will formulate a clear
policy regarding net integrity and copyright issues in preparation for
the Swedish national elections in September 2010.
A few hours earlier, the party dinner had come to a close with
volunteers and members singing “The Broadband Hymn”. They had
fittingly gathered at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm,
and as Swedish TV published the exit polls results indicating that the
Pirate Party would get around 7% of the votes, wild cheers broke out.
Party leader Rick Falkvinge took to the stage. “Together we have today
re-shaped the political map in Europe,” he said. “Right now, Europe is
watching what is happening here and politicians everywhere are
scrambling to understand our issues. They now know that the party that
has information-political perspectives can win many votes.”
And yes, it did. 214,313 of them in Sweden on Sunday. 7.1 percent of
the vote and a guarantee of at least one seat in the European
Parliament. The Pirate Party was the most popular party among voters
under 30 years of age. Taking into account that Prime Minister Fredrik
Reinfeldt’s Moderate Party is the most popular party among voters over
65 years of age, one can understand why Reinfeldt later in the evening
said he will sit down with the Moderate Youth leader Niklas Wykman - a
critic of the surveillance legislation and anti-filesharing laws - to
discuss Internet issues. “We’ll share files in Brussels!” a young man
shouted as he ran to the bar at election night. Meanwhile, journalists
from all over Europe who had flown in to cover the unique occasion
tried to get their piece of party leader Rick Falkvinge and vice
chairman Christian Engström.
The latter, who will probably take the party’s seat in the EU
parliament, held a short speech in which he thanked all the
volunteers. The Pirate Party stays true to its net-roots and has no
formal organization. Anyone who thinks he or she can contribute is
welcome to do so simply by posting on the forum and going out and
doing it. No formal decisions on campaigning are taken and the
thousands of party ballots have been distributed to voting centers
simply by someone living close and wanting to play their part. “It’s
amazing that it worked. I never thought it would,” Engström joked.
A journalist from Swedish radio broke into the celebrations with a
question for party founder Rick Falkvinge on how he felt. With
champagne in his hand and pride in his eyes, he just smiled: “How does
it feel to write history? It feels pretty damn good.” Today, after a
night spent drinking rum and chanting seafarer standards, the pirates
woke up finding themselves on the front pages of the Swedish
newspapers. Pirates waving Jolly Rogers. Pirates taking celebratory
late night dips in fountains. Pirates laughing. Pirates hugging. And
there is consensus among the op-eds and political pundits on how it
could happen: Enthusiasm paid off.
The two large parties in Sweden, the Social Democrats and the Moderate
Party, are heavily criticized because of their lack of engagement in
the European Parliament. Meanwhile, the Green Party (which also had a
great election with 10.9%) and the Pirate Party positioned themselves
on their respective expert issues and built a lot of support from the
base. When the EU parliament meets after summer, there will be at
least one pirate in the midst of European parliament. If the Lisbon
treaty is voted through, there can be two. It may not seem a lot in
order to make a difference, but as a blogger put it: One pirate can
hijack a whole ship.
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