Pirate Manifesto
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This Pirate Manifesto is the labour of the PiratPartiet taken from here and should be adapted to meet our own end, as we are not obligated to agree on all points, or with its current form.
The Beliefs of a Pirate
The Copyright Monopoly
- We, as pirates, believe that copyright has lost sight of its original intention, and now only exists to line pockets of existing beneficiaries and preserving a status quo. It must be returned to its original purpose, that of encouraging creation and creativity.
- We, as pirates, believe that the copyright monopoly, being commercial in nature, must never cover any noncommercial activity, such as private filesharing without purpose of financial gain.
- We, as pirates, believe that the copyright monopoly, being for the purpose of encouraging creation of cultural works, has a ridiculously long term. There is no need ever for a creative monopoly that lasts for 70 years after the monopoly holder's demise.
- We, as pirates, believe that any technological measure taken to enforce rules over and above that of a work's legal protection, robs individuals of their legitimate rights, and is therefore unjust.
- We, as pirates, believe that the copyright construct is a government-sanctioned private monopoly on certain types of broadcasts and copying, a monopoly that is impossible to defend in its current form from either a capitalist, socialist, liberal, technological, or cultural viewpoint.
The Patent Monopoly
- We, as pirates, believe that patents harm innovation. The effect of a patent is to prevent innovation – it prevents anyone else from using or improving upon an idea. It is an excluding mechanism. It prevents innovation by making it illegal under monopoly protection. In order to actually promote innovation, other effects of patents must outweigh this strong disincentive. However, no such claimed effects have stood up to scrutiny.
- In particular, patents on things non-physical – business methods, genomes, ideas, plots, software - are extraordinarily harmful because of their non-tangible nature. Today, the patent monopoly can be used to prohibit normal marketplace competition – and it is being used in just that way.
- We, as pirates, believe that patents are government-sanctioned private monopolies on ideas and innovation that are impossible to defend from either capitalist, socialist, liberal, or most any other viewpoint.
Civil Liberties
- We, as pirates, believe that the right to privacy is a basic human need – to have certain things to yourself. Therefore, indiscriminate governmental intrusion into this sphere of privacy is intolerable. The basic assumption must be that an individual not under suspicion of a crime must be guaranteed privacy. This right includes privacy in the workplace.
- We, as pirates, believe that government affairs must be as transparent as possible in order to be kept in check by the citizens. Citizens own the government, not the other way around.
- We, as pirates, believe that individuals have a right to dictate and determine how their private data is collected, stored and processed by both governmental and commercial entities. (Private data means any non-public information about an individual.) At a minimum, this right means that any entity collecting private data must tell the individual exactly how it will be used and be held accountable for its use. Individuals also have a right to revoke the right of a non-governmental entity to hold or use any private data concerning them.
Non-beliefs
- Pirates do not believe that all culture should be free of charge, nor that you should somehow be prohibited to sell and/or buy cultural works and services. Quite to the contrary. What we oppose are private monopolies on distribution and use.
- Pirates do not believe that restrictions or surveillance should never be permitted against a individual. What we believe is that there must be a system of checks and balances, where the normal state for a individual is that of a government-guaranteed right to privacy. Privacy-intruding surveillance should never be allowed against a individual not under suspicion of a crime.
- Pirates do not believe that trademarks are inherently bad. Trademarks were created as a buyer-protection mechanism, to protect against fraudulent vendors who seek in bad faith to pass off their merchandise as someone else's. This protection is opposed to patents and copyrights, which are solely for the benefit of the monopoly holder. (However, pirates do not approve of misuse of trademark protection to stifle civil liberties or creative expression, such as criticism, satire, or works of art.)
- We are not the free software or open source movement. This does not prevent us from agreeing with these movements on several issues, one of the more notable being the patentability of software.
Why We Believe This
We pirates come from many different walks of life. We have come to the above conclusions for many different reasons as we come from many different viewpoints. Therefore, we have chosen to stick to that which unites us as a political movement and not introduce new issues that might fragment us.
This decision makes us unique in that we actively choose to not take a stand on many issues. To illustrate the breadth of viewpoints that lead to the same conclusion, a few of them are listed here. They are included to illustrate the importance of sticking to that which unites us, and leaving everything else out.
The Capitalist Viewpoint
From a capitalist viewpoint, the government is just another player in the marketplace, with the special ability to trade public resources. Often it takes the form of selling exclusive market privileges. One example is auctioning out the radio spectrum – such an auction means that the government is selling a privilege to exclusively use and commercialize a public resource, one that would otherwise be part of the public domain or normal marketplace. We call such an exclusivity privilege a monopoly.
As any capitalist knows, if your customer wants exclusivity for reselling a product, preventing you and others from taking part in a particular marketplace, then that exclusivity comes with a price tag. It has a value to the buyer, and that value must be reflected in the transaction.
In any transaction, it is the seller's duty to receive a fair price for the sold resource, especially where the seller is acting on behalf of the real owner. In most jurisdictions, it is even a criminal offense to get less than fair price through intent or neglect when trading on behalf of the real stakeholders.
In the case of copyrights and patents, the government is trading in monopoly exclusivities on behalf of the public interest. It is selling commercialization and duplication monopolies for culture and ideas, monopolies that disrupt what would otherwise be a free market, and it is selling these privileges criminally short of their real market value. In fact, the government is giving away excluding monopolies like candy. This is a breach of trust towards the citizens, who are the stakeholders of the resources and the owners of the reduced marketplace.
If the intellectual monopolies – copyrights and patents – are to be traded at all, then it is the government's duty to charge full market value for them.
The Socialist Viewpoint
To write (Cultural commons good, privatization of culture bad).
The Cultural Viewpoint
The last century was unique from a cultural viewpoint. From having been partakers and participants of culture, individuals were transformed into passive receivers of culture. Radio, television, and movies all contributed to this development. The broadcast technology model caused culture to become an one-to-many, one-way communication, instead of a many-to-many, shared experience.
New technology has started to bring culture back to where it has previously always been. We are seeing that people are no longer passive recipients of culture; everybody is starting to contribute. Blogs are the most obvious example, and the development is also visible in the emergence of podcasts and small-time video productions. A taste of things to come is observable in the so-called "remix culture", where anyone can take small pieces of music and imagery, stich them together in new ways, and republish them for everybody else to use and reuse. Culture has again become a many-to-many phenomenon, and on a much larger scale. Where cultural production was before limited to a few, it is now available to everybody.
We are going from a dark century where people silently sat around a radio listening to music, back to the tradition of singing and creating together. Unfortunately, the legal framework is written solely to promote the passive cultural model; sharing, remixing and re-experiencing is discouraged at best, and often prohibited outright. These laws need to change for cultural development to flourish. The Technological Viewpoint
New technology has brought us to a crossroads. The ability to gather, communicate, store, process and cross-reference digitized information on an unprecedented scale has opened up possibilities to take part in culture, knowledge, society and communication that have never been possible, and to spread culture and knowledge at near-zero cost. But when misused, this technology also opens up the possibility for government to build a police state on a scale never imagined.
(Needs expansion.)
The Liberal Viewpoint
To write (civil liberties and government transparency; unsure of exact PoV on intellectual monopolies).
The Libertarian Viewpoint
Copyrights in the digital sphere is an example of an artificial, as opposed to a natural, right of property. Property in tangibles and land is rooted in the fact of physical reality that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. My wallet cannot be in my pocket and yours at the same time. And when I occupy a piece of ground, and homestead it with my labor, it precludes your doing the same. By the very fact of maintaining my occupancy, I am at the same time excluding others. And I can call on my neighbors, if necessary, to support me in maintaining my occupancy against any attempt to dispossess me.
The deceptively termed intellectual property, on the other hand, is a state-granted monopoly on something that is not finite by nature, and can be used by an unlimited number of people at the same time. And unlike tangible property, I cannot defend intellectual "property" rights by the mere fact of possession. In fact, I have to call on the state to invade someone else's space and coercively prevent him from arranging his own tangible property in a configuration, or using it to organize information in a configuration, over which the state has granted me a monopoly. Would-be enforcers of copyrights and patents find that there's always a way around their measures, requiring ever more intrusive forms of surveillance to control what we can do with our own stuff.
When it comes to patents: The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasions of property rights on the market.
Copyrights and patents, in other words, are theft.
The Civil Liberties Viewpoint
To write (conflict between intellectual monopolies and the right to privacy).
The Changing Value Propositions Viewpoint
When offering services for sale on a market, the idea is to present these services as having a certain value to a buyer. In financial terms, such a communicated value is called a value proposition. This is true whether we are talking about commercial services or normal employment, that is, somebody looking for a job.
Over time, services – particularly lines of employment – have appeared and vanished in value to buyers as conditions changed. When railroads arrived, track layers were in great demand and so had a very good value proposition, which diminished later. When electricity arrived and power could be transmitted from point A to point B, the value of an industry lot by a river dropped considerably (as industry was no longer dependent on water power). Entire employment groups of street lighters and ice-makers were also affected. However, new needs arose, and therefore new value propositions, and thus new services – electricians, for example.
Similar changes have happened every time there has been a major structural shift. Modern farming methods, industrialization, the advent of mass production, electricity, electronics... value propositions change all the time. Did you know that "computer" was once a profession, a person employed to make calculations on paper? The job was made obsolete by mechanical calculators, which were in turn made obsolete by electronic calculators.
The copyright industry has specialized in duplicating and moving digital information, using a physical medium, from point A to point B, where point A is usually a culture producer and point B is usually an average individual. However, this service provides no value anymore: everybody can do it themselves at little or no effort. It has lost its value proposition, it has been entirely decommercialized. But for the first time in history, a vanishing industry has managed to convince politicians to criminalize people who do not buy a service whose value proposition has vanished.
This criminalization does not only lead to a crippled market, but the statutory preservation of this nonvalue leads to severe losses in civil liberties. As the only way to enforce the old structure is to prevent people from circumventing it, and it is circumvented when people send digital information directly to each other, the only way to keep the old structure by force is to prevent or monitor all private, digital communications. This means for example that postal secrecy and the right to contact reporters anonymously are sacrificed to artificially maintain a value proposition for an unnecessary service.
Such consequences are not acceptable, and therefore the market must decide which services are necessary, and which are not. The copyright monopoly must not infringe on individuals' private, noncommercial communication, especially given that substantial parts of the monopolized services have lost their commercial value proposition. The Economic Theory Viewpoint
Many people, particularly rights holders of the intellectual monopolies, rhetorically use the term property for their monopolies, in a play on words to suggest that it is an unalienable right. "We own this song." This has become so prevalent that the deceptive wording is even present in names of major negotiations bodies such as the WIPO – World Intellectual Property Organization. However, the copyright and patent monopolies fail the most basic tests of being goods, and therefore should not be treated as goods.
In an economy, transactions take place for goods, services, and privileges. The copyright and patent monopolies fail every test for goods or services, but instead meet the criteria for privileges.
This means that there is no "natural right" to having a distribution or commercialization monopoly on a piece of culture or an idea; rather, it is a privilege granted by the government for a very specific reason. That reason was to promote the creation of new culture and technology, but those goals are no longer met in today's application of patent and copyright law, and cannot be as long as the laws fail to reflect information's fundamental nature.
Therefore, the privileges should be re-shaped to fulfill the original intentions, bearing in mind the particular nature of information as opposed to goods and services. Of course, this will mean that existing beneficiaries lose a lot of their current privileges. As these monopolatory privileges interfere with the natural exchange of goods and services, however, such a privilege revocation is only positive for the economy as a whole. The Historic Viewpoint
Whenever a new technical medium arose, the entertainment industry cried that it would be the death for them. They have always fought technical progress tooth and nail, starting with the self-playing piano about 1905, and moving on through broadcast radio (1920), reel tape (1950), cassette tape (1960), and video recorder (1980). This is no different. They have always opposed new technology and the possibilities that come with it, and in the public interest, they should have no say in the matter.
Patents were violently opposed when introduced - not the least by established economists. One of the most well-renowned economic journals, The Economist, blasted the suggested patent law quite extensively in 1851, when it was about to be introduced: "The granting [of] patents inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits...". The resistance against patents faded with the response to the Great Depression in 1930, when protectionism, subsidies and monopolies became the common wisdom. Sadly, what we are seeing today is what economists predicted 150 years ago. Patents are quite simply just plain bad.
Regarding civil liberties, there are ample examples, both historic and contemporary, of exactly why it is important to keep citizens empowered and shrouded, and the government transparent and monitored by the citizens. Every location where the opposite has been true - the government has been empowered and shrouded, and the citizens monitored and transparent to the government - has had one thing in common; they have been horrible places to live in.
Core Issues and Requirements of a Pirate Party
For a Pirate Party to be taken up into the international community of Pirate Parties, the following requirements must be met in the party's platform and principles, although the exact wording is left to each individual party's discretion: Must-Includes
- Copyright Is Commercial: The copyright monopoly must only cover commercial activity. Non-commercial cultural activities, such as file-sharing, must be legalized.
- Noncommercial Culture Encouraged: Any noncommercial gathering, use, derivation, or spread of culture and knowledge must be not just tolerated, but explicitly encouraged by the government and legislation. This should include provisions against any point-of-sale contracts that seek to restrict such encouraged activities.
- Copyright Term Shortened: The copyright monopoly, in its reduced scope, must have a drastically shorter term. It is left to the individual pirate party to determine an exact suggested time, as dictated by local conditions. Some suggest one year, some suggest five. The guiding factor in determining this is what length is required for the original purpose of copyright – to promote the creation of new works. If judged politicially possible, a pirate party may advocate the complete abolition of commercial copyright in its platform.
- Derivative Use Permitted: The basic assumption is that copyright monopoly only covers an exact copy of the creative work. A derivative work is considered a new and separate piece of culture. Any exceptions to this determination, such as subtitled movies or translated books (as determined by the pirate party), must be explicitly listed in the legislation proposed.
- DRM Technologies Prohibited: Any technology that limits the gathering, use, derivation, or spread of culture or knowledge that would otherwise be allowed by law should not be permitted, and the sale of DRM-crippled culture and knowledge should be punishable through civil or criminal law. At the very least, individuals must be allowed and permitted to circumvent such technology.
- Patents Hurt Innovation: The scope of patents must not be broadened, and as the innovative community and scientific progress is better off without the current patent system entirely, the long term goal must be to abolish it completely. In particular, patents on anything non-tangible (software, cultural and storyplot patents, business models, genomes, etc) must be abolished or not introduced (depending on the current legislation of the local party). Other forms of innovative encouragement may be discussed. If it can be shown that some particular form or field of patents does promote innovation, then such patents may be permitted if there are no better or reasonable alternatives.
- People Have A Right To Privacy: Law enforcement agencies must be prohibited from monitoring specific people, or tapping any private communication, without a warrant. Such surveillance by other agencies, governmental or not, are always prohibited. This includes employers. (This includes spyware, which should be punishable by criminal law.) Individuals' privacy must never be broken for civil law cases, such as by demanding secret phone numbers or IP addresses. (needs rewording, but content is good)
Should-Includes
Legislation in other countries is often quite different from that in Sweden, where the pirate movement originally politicized. The following is an attempt to capture things that are already present in Swedish law and therefore not part of the Swedish Pirate Party's platform, but which are still important parts of the pirate viewpoint and this Pirate Manifesto.
If applicable in local legislation, these points should be included:
- Intellectual Monopolies Have A Specific Scope: Intellectual monopolies, be they trademark, copyright or other, must never be used to stifle criticism against the rights holder, satire, or noncommercial works of art that depict the monopoly.
- Individuals' Private Data Are Theirs: When private data is collected from an individual, the collecting entity must always reveal how the data will be used, and who will have access to it, and then be held accountable for this. No private data may be collected by organizations outside of law enforcement without the individual's consent. An individual has the right to have his or her private data deleted from a nongovernmental entity at any time he or she chooses. "Private data" refers to any data not freely available from governmental registries.
May-Includes: Core Issues
At its discretion, a pirate party may hold an opinion on any of the following topics, which are our core issues, as long as they do not conflict with a must-include or a must-not-include:
- Intellectual and Other Private Monopolies: A pirate party may hold any opinions it deems right on intellectual monopolies such as trademarks, protection of design, etc. It may choose to drive issues that seek the dissolution of other private monopolies, such as telco monopolies that block an efficient information infrastructure or software monopolies that block competition and interoperability.
- Civil Liberties and Government Transparency: A pirate party may hold any opinion that strives to increase civil liberties and government transparency. Right to information, right to due process in trials, increased right to privacy, improved freedom of the press, improved freedom of speech, etc.
- Legal Framework for Culture and Knowledge: A pirate party may hold any opinion on the legal framework for culture and knowledge, such as rules for public libraries, rights to educational materials, anything copyright or patent related, etc.
- Legal Framework for Information Infrastructure: A pirate party may hold any opinion on the legal framework for information infrastructure, such as net neutrality, preventing infrastructure monopolies, or unblocking the rollout of information infrastructure (e.g., internet) as determined necessary by the pirate party.
Non-Includes
In order to unite us as a political movement, we must recognize that we, as pirates, come from many different walks of life. Some of us are capitalist, some are socialist, some are liberal, others still don't care about economic politics but care deeply about cultural development.
In order to keep us united, we acknowledge this and make no secret or fuss about it. However, it also means that we cannot and must not include any issues that promotes one viewpoint over another – such as promoting a capitalist, liberal, or socialist viewpoint. Doing so will fragment and divide us.
We must unconditionally choose to lay aside that which divides us, and unite on what we agree on. If somebody feels that capitalist or socialist issues are more important than pirate issues, then he or she cannot be a part of the pirate movement. This unification is key to our success and we must recognize that.
- No Redistribution Of Wealth: A pirate party must not under any circumstance include anything regarding the redistribution of wealth in its platform. Taxes, subsidies, fees, budget, minimum wage, etc – these issues are all off-limits. The two exceptions to this firm rule are civil liberty related or intellectual monopoly related fees and taxes, such as blank media levies, where pirate parties may hold opinions at their discretion.
- Nothing On Platform That Costs Money: A pirate party should not include, and must be extremely wary of anything that implies a monetary cost to the government in its platform. By doing so, the party would be advocating increased spending and that extra money must come from somewhere. In answering the question where the money comes from, the movement fragments into left- and right-wing, losing our critical mass.
- No Issue On Platform Outside Core: A pirate party should not have an opinion on any matter outside the core issues as listed above. This constraint is for two reasons – one, issues outside these areas do not unite us but divide us, and two, we do not have any value to add to the public debate in the traditional political discussions such as healthcare, energy policy, or employment market. Our value to society is the knowledge we contribute that today's politicians do not understand, and we stick to contributing this particular knowledge. If a pirate party chooses to hold an opinion on a non-core issue, which is not to be taken lightly, then that opinion must serve as a catalyst towards the core issues.
- Individual members may hold their own opinions on non-core issues, however these opinions must be expressed as such.
