Pirate Manifesto parties at a glance

What

• To be able to find out a common Manifesto, first we should know for sure what do we have in common.

When

We have several deadlines:

Deadline for national PPs to present their politics on this page

This should be done asap.

Deadline for the first Pirate Manifesto draft

Before the first draft is finished, we intend to have a lot of discussions, ensuring that we have reached near-consensus on the draft.

Deadline: August 31st.

Deadline for proposal of amendments

The first draft should be discussed in the national parties before any meaningful proposals for amendments can be put on the table.

Deadline: November 1st.

Deadline for voting on amendments

The voting may have to be preceeded by local party votes. Because of this we suggest a window of voting ending 14 days after the deadline for amendments.

Deadline: November 15th.

Deadline for Pirate Manifesto ratification

The final document after applying amendments has to be ratified by each national party.

Deadline: The fourth Pirate Party conference in December.

How

Categorizing

• First of all, let's gonna find out in how many -and which- categories of ideologic contents are divided the manifestos/ideologies of the pirate parties
• The goal is to find out a common set of categories of ideologic contents which help us to make a more compartmentalized, modular development of the Pirate Manifesto

Defining

• After finding out the categories, it's also required to define their contents -what are those categories about-
• The goal is to make easier to find common points and also disagreement points between pirate parties.
  • common points will be automatically included in the Pirate Manifesto.
  • disagreements will require debate
    • some of them will be discarded if no further agreement is reached -i.e., each pirate party in its national scope will be allowed to defend such stance, though it won't be included as PPI stance-
    • the rest may be replaced by an alternative stance, based on an abstraction of the differing stances

exempli gratia

• Spanish section may be used as an example of how to describe each pirate party's ideologic categories & contents
• German and Austrian representatives already sent via mail a briefing of their stances, though as it was summarized and not categorized -also some of those stances may have become outdated-, feel free to introduce the info yourselves

Voting procedure for amendments

The second stage of getting to the final Pirate Manifesto entails proposing amendments and voting on them.

After the discussions on the IRC channel tonight, we propose the following:

• Each national Pirate Party has one vote.
• The national Pirate Parties may ask their members to vote on the amendments. At least we suggest that the amendments are put up for discussion on a national level before the national PP votes.
• There should be near consensus, as we want all the PPs in the world to be able to ratify the final manifesto.
• There should be some way for a national PP to indicate that a particular amendment is needed for them to be able to ratify the final document.

Who

• Sections for Sweden, United States, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Poland, Spain and Russia are provided; if you're a brand new pirate party not included in the list and you're going to attend Uppsala please feel free to add yourself to the list
• Spain is not going to attend Uppsala so no PIRATA representatives will participate in the debates that might have place; however, as the categories & contents have been completed, PIRATA stances will be taken in account
• If Parti Pirate is not going to attend Uppsala -thus not participating (together with PIRATA) in the debates that might have place-, at least should complete the ideologic categories & contents to allow a broader view of PPI stances

Piratpartiet Sverige

Categories & Contents

Copyright

• Copyright needs major reforms, id est, copyright terms should be shortened.
• Private copying should be made legal.
• Copyright should not be allowed to compete with civil rights.

Patents

• Patents were supposed to work as an incitement for invention. Currently they work in the opposite direction.
• The criteria for what constitutes patentable matter should be made more restrictive initially, and in the long-term run we want to abolish the patent system altogether.
• Especially immaterial property should not be patentable.
• Medicine patents, biopatents and patents on genes are especially harmful from a global perspective.

Integrity and privacy

• There needs to be a stop to surveilling the citizens when there is no need.
• Privacy of communication must hold in digital environments as well.
• Privacy violations to protect copyright is not OK.
• Breeching of privacy to create security is generally not a good idea.

Democracy and state issues

• Lobbyism should be more regulated, and demands on openness should be enforced. This applies in particular to the European Union, seeing as Sweden already has strong demands for transparency in its legislation.
• Any and all parliamentary, regional, state or EU official documents that can not be tied to the identity of a private individual should be available online.
• Special laws classifying terrorist crimes should be abolished. They are unreasonable.
• Politicians should respect human rights in practise as well as on paper.

Non-core issues

The Swedish Piratpartiet does not take a stance in non-core issues. Candidates or representatives of the party may not express opinions of non-core issues in the name of the party.

Piratpartiet instead aims to form alliances with other political parties. Our bartering is that we give our allies our votes, if they pull through such reforms as are among our core-issues. That or those parties which agree to give us the most support with our issues, will get our votes in parliament.

The Pirate Party of the United States

Main Issues

Reform of Copyright, Patent, and Trademark Laws

• These are separate issues.
• Copyright term must be reduced to an historically-reasonable level.
• Patents are being mishandled entirely, and "shelved" patents should be eliminated.
  • Software patents are undesirable and should be eliminated. Software should be protected and protectable by copyright.
  • If software patents are to exist, massive reforms are necessary.
• Trademarks should not have the same protections that copyrights and patents have; they should be separate altogether.
  • Images which are copyrighted should not be permitted for use as trademarks. The choice should be one or the other, not both.

Government Transparency and Accountability

• Government in any country that considers itself a democracy (such as our democratic republic in the US) should be required to answer to the people over whom it governs.
• Shame is good when one has done the wrong thing; and is a good motivator, when properly done, to prevent corruption.
• Accountability should include the risk of loss of office, even if no criminal charges are filed.
• Government officials should not be immune to the law.

Privacy

• In our country, citizens are guaranteed privacy at all levels of communication, as well as in their homes and on their persons.
• Such privacy also, by extension, also guarantees lack of interference where such communications are intended to be private.
• Encryption is a statement that the contents should remain private. We are therefore opposed to all instances of DPI (Deep Packet Inspection).

Non-Core Issues

Technology

• As previously stated, the Pirate Party of the United States opposed DPI as an inherently flawed concept.
• DRM in all forms cannot be supported by the party, as limiting access for commercial reasons is also an inherently flawed concept.

Voting

• All citizens of a country should be permitted to vote, regardless of political status.
• All voting should be done anonymously, and yet publicly. We should have the ability to view a vote as it's cast and tallied, rather than surrounding ballots in a shroud of secrecy that invites abuse.

Piratpartiet i Danmark

The political program of the danish PP is the same as Principer 3.1 from the swedish PP, so we are very close.

Core issues

Personal integrity

We strongly support basic human rights, as defined in the european declaration of human rights.

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.

A democratic society needs a transparent state and non-transparent citizens. The citizens should be able to freely gather to formulate and express their opinions without fear of government surveillance. To expand this to an information society the right to anonymity in communication must be expanded. Therefore the secrecy of correspondence should encompass all digital communication.

Free culture

The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance between the interests of cultural creators and the general population, 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.

Free information

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.

Non-core issues

For issues related to the core issues, we will take a stance if deemed necessary.

For matters not related to the core issues, we have no official stance. Individual members of the party will, however, be allowed to express opinions about non-core issues and even build personal campaign platforms around them, as long as they make it clear that these are their own opinions and not those of the party. So our support of free speech even includes party members campaigning. Elected party members are, however, encouraged to use non-core issues to pressure other parties to vote for our core issues.

Piratenpartei Deutschland

Main Issues

Privacy

• we agree with the points on privacy of the Uppsala declaration
• Privacy and data protection insure the freedom of the people.
• Data self-determination
• Aganist the Telecommunications data retention, RFID, the new Health-Card, etc
• Aganist the developing of biometric databases.
• same protection for electronic communication as for letters

Government Transparency

• All authorities have to give out information when they are asked. (information freedom)
  • exceptions have to be limited as low as posible.
• Make politic decisions more transparent (control the state instead of the citizens)

Open Access

• unrestricted Open Access to results of publicly funded scientific research (and derivative work)
• software used/developed/bought by the public administration (and other publicly funded authority) should be at least open source (or free software)

Copyright

• we agree with the points on copyright of the Uppsala declaration
• getting rid of TRIPS
• getting rid of copy protection, encourage and favor copying of digital works
• no legal privilege for DRM, no legal privilege for any vendor lock-in stuff
• no restriction of the right to make a copy of a digital work for private use (Privatkopie)
• No special rights for software in copyright law (Urheberrecht) compared to other kinds of works

Patents

• we agree with the points on patents of the Uppsala declaration
• reduction of patent term
• Reduction of Monopolies
• Against Patents on Software and genes

Infrastructure Monopolies

• Monopolies on communication inhibit development
• Infrastructure should be increased so that all people can get access to new technologies.
• No censorship

Piratenpartei Österreichs

Core Issues

Privacy

• Against data collection without suspicion
• Protection of private communication
• Video surveillance only with official permission
• Harsher penalties against those who misuse collected data

Copyright

• Legalisation of non commercial private copy
• Prevention of censorship with copyright lawsuits
• Ensuring of artistical freedom
• Shorter protection term

Patents

• Prevention of trivial patents
• Stricter patent laws
• No hold-up of scientific research with patents
• Shorter protection term

(Open) Education

• Promotion of Open Educational Resources (OER)
• Abolish access restrictions
• Improving technical infrastructure
• Financial support of education

non-core issues

• There is a section in our forum where our members can discuss other issues. This has proven necessary, as the main criticism against us is our limited range of topics. However, the possibility to discuss other issues is a very effective counter argument against that criticism.
• IF a great majority of our members agree on another issue there can be a voting wheter or not it should be part of our party program. The educational section is the result of such a vote (although not really non-core and the only one so far).

Piratenpartij Nederland

The Dutch Pirate Party is currently constructing a full party program. This wil not only contain what our vision is, but also offer solutions.

At this time, our view is most similar to that of the Danish Pirate Party.

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Note : There are no "mayor" legal issues that can be a obstacle for the construction of a Worldwide & European manifest. As in most country's We can promote the idea of something that is illegal, or will be illegal useing the political system. However, we are not allowed to stimulate people, and make them disobey the law. Therefore, words must be chosen carefully.

Parti Pirate

Although we are very excited by the Manifesto initiative, we weren't able to get more involved in its writing so far. Here are some key issues that have been raised on our forums for the past two years; sorry if it does not fit well into the existing layout, or if there are many redundancies with what has already been said. Pers

As you may know, we have been struck by several iniquitous laws here in France, so many of the following concerns are actually closely related to our specific situation (but just you wait for a couple of months, and it will happen everywhere else as well).

Civil Rights and Liberties

Privacy

The right to privacy must be protected

• on the Internet
• in real life
• its protection must be enforced by an independent structure (at an European level?), with actual decision power (in France we have this gizmo called Cnil, that has no power nor funding).
• privacy issues must be taught at school to both parents and children (as our fellow Pirate MaryPoppins rightfully pointed out, "not only pedophiles are interested in our children"...)
• data retention and logging must be declared illegal (except within a legal inquiry, explicitely asked by a judge)
• data filtering must be declared illegal
• non-public digital communications (IM, email, VoIP etc.) must be granted the same status as private mailing (letters etc.)
• citizens must be granted the right to use any encryption algorithm they want to protect their data and communications

Culture

• The right for everyone to access to culture must be guaranteed by public structures
• Some initiatives have to be taken to promote non-digitalized culture: museums, performing arts, etc.
• Each government must guarantee that its whole territory is covered by sufficient Internet access
• File-sharing must be legalized, at least within a non-commercial approach
• Direct and simple options have to be offered so the public can make (duty-free) donations to artists and creators

Patents

• Software must not be patented
• Living beings and biotechnologies must not be patented
• Pharmaceutical products should not be patented; at least such patents must be either cancelled or taken back by an international public structure

Technology

• we propose that a public organization gather the code source for every proprietary and/or patented program (for archiving purposes, for legal purposes in case of lawsuits, and to help protecting the public domain). In France, the National Library already does this for books, magazines and websites; the same has to applied to programs, but in a source-only format.
• interoperability must be regarded as a consumer's right (therefore, DRMs must be declared illegal)
• open public Wifi networks have to be securized and legally protected (FON, etc.), instead of put under constant legal threat.

Author's Rights

• intellectual and non-physical objects (art, ideas) are not subject to anyone's "property".
• copyright duration must be taken into account from the day the work is released of the work, not from the author's death
• copyright duration must be shortened (10 years would be fine)
• intellectual rights should be handled and enforced by independent, public structures, under democratic control
• the concept of "copyright holder" (ayant-droit in French) must be abolished
• moral rights and property rights cannot be ceded

Public domain

• Public domain has to be protected (currently it's not, far from it)
• Public domain has to be protected as a constitutional right! We can't stand any more illegitimate amendments specifically written for Mickey Mouse to stay property of Disney's!
• Works that have not been published by their author should be effectively in public domain after the author's death
• Works created or ordered by government or public facilities should be automatically made available as public domain (this includes cartographic and geodesic data, image banks, etc)
• the French-specific droit à l'image must be redefined. It prevents citizens from using their freedom of speech, journalists and artists from working, etc.
• Similarly, we demand a right to represent panoramas. Currently, if you take any picture in any city, you are likely to be sued by owners of the buildings one can see on the picture. It's even worse; for instance, if you want to take a picture of some public buildings that have been built centuries ago (e.g. the Louvre in Paris), you can do so at 6.59pm, but 'not at 7pm: when the lights are on, these are protected by "Intellectual property" of the company that made the lighting!

Alternate licensing

• Pedagogical initiatives and legal advice for both the authors and the public, to introduce non-proprietary rights
• Teaching how to use Free systems at school
• Official structures have to protect all sorts of author's rights.

Information Society

Medias

• measures have to be taken to prevent the increase of media concentration
• medias have to obey the interoperability clause (as stated above)
• citizen-generated medias have to be protected from legal threats (in France, there are plans to declare all these illegal)

Government Accountability and Transparency

Public services

• Public research must be promoted (universities, etc)
• Public research must be freed from private fundings (Microsoft universities, anyone?)
• Public transportations must be made accessible, and therefore guarantee the human "freedom of movement" right
• natural resources (energy, water, etc.) should be valorized as a public property

Politics

• Lobbying must be
  • limited
  • transparent
  • if not forbidden :-)
• passive or hidden lobbying is particularly harmful, and should be severely punished
• Elected representatives should be prevented from accumulating different terms (the French cumul des mandats plague)
• The European committee should be placed under a legitimate democratic control
• Voting machines have to be made secure (GPL, anyone?) and proposed through democratic ways

Economics

• The levies have to be redefined (none can demand citizen to pay for content they're not allowed to have)!
• Levies are fine, as long as their use is made public, reasonable and transparent (currently they're not, and neither are right management organizations)
• Companies which develop Free software, or services around free software, should be offered lower taxes.

Partia Piratów

Main Issuses

In brief

• Adjusting law to modern technologies and furtherance progress inforamation society troughout:

Freedom to use cultural goods

• Constitutional guaranted law to impeded access and use works like books, music or movies. Whatever form is.

Reform of the patent system

• Furtherance innovations instead of protecting monopolies.

Protection of the privacy

• Abolition data retention and guaranting communication secret.

Open administration

• Assurance every single citizen troubleless contact with administration - also using open software.

Economic openness

• Company-owners'-friendly and citizen-friendly administration, simplifing law and limiting bureaucracy.

Free education

• Enforcing constitutional law to learning freely throughout implementing "free obligatory books".

Non-Core Issuses

• Pharmaceutical patents (not suitable to current polish economy - public health care troubles and so on, which have to be solved now and maybe in 10 years there will be a time to changes like that)

Partido Pirata

Categories & Contents

Core issues

Culture & Author's Rights

• Culture is one of the goods that every citizen has right to access
• Free cultural collective exchanges as a fair and efficient way of promoting culture, so non-lucrative free sharing of cultural works is encouraged
• Rejection of the use of the intellectual property term; what are stated at the UDHR are the author's rights
• Rejection of private copying levies -according to PPI's answer to EC Consultation on Private Copying Levies-
• Defense of author's rights, thus rejecting a rights management model where authors are forced to transfer those rights to RMOs and editors under harmful conditions to their own interests
• Bringing authors the right to choose between self-managing their own performance rights or choosing to work with one of several RMOs

Patents

• No existence of software patents
• For the rest of patent areas, a new patent model will be conceived, open to development and innovation, compatibilizing promotion and protection of innovating efforts with the explotation of previous knowledge, to enhance the technological evolution for the good of the society, avoiding private monopolies to arise from the patent system

Information Society

• Make Internet as universal as nowadays radio or television are, and also to make every home, every business, every educational centre in Spain able to enjoy this information and culture universalization tool, without any kind of discrimination due to social, personal or geographic condition
• Make neutrality of the Internet a compulsory requirement, and also that every present and future Internet services to be reachable and offered without restrictions nor discriminations between them
• Make public administration use standard, non proprietary, free software, formats and documentation, not only in the search for the technological neutrality, but also to make public administration be able to guarantee safety and privacy of every single citizens' data managed by the public administration

Rights and Liberties

• Make fight against crime and terrorism compliant with the rights and liberties recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, with strong attention to those related to presumption of innocence, privacy and freedom of speech
• Make citizens have the same rights and freedoms inside and outside the Internet
• Condemn the use of violence applied to make political claims outside democratic paths, thus only accepting to negotiate claims made within the rule of the law, even when such claims aim to change that law
• Condemn any attempt against anyone's life and integrity, and will condemn any attempt of excluding and prosecuting people because of their ideologies, faith or beliefs, nationality, race, gender or sexual preferences

Non-core issues

• For non-core issues, by default, the members of the Institutional Groups -i.e., MPs- will abstain in any voting
• In order to decide in which cases there will be exceptions to that abstentionism, eligible voters for general elections will be given the right to decide through initiatives supported with signatures
  • initiatives must be supported by enough signatures
  • initiatives must be compliant with PIRATA core issues, including UDHR
  • consenssus is another requirement; if for a given subject two or more stances are proposed, if one of them has far more signatures than the rest it will be the chosen one; otherwise, PIRATA would mediate between the parts to make them easier to reach a common stance, which would be the chosen one
• This submission to the citizens' will implies that PIRATA will not be part in any coalition government, nor will give inconditional support to any of the parties represented on the chambers of the different parliaments where PIRATA obtains paliamentary representation
  • If other parliamentary groups propose PIRATA a deal involving non-core issues, PIRATA would first release a consultation before deciding; if the former requirements are not met, abstention would be held
• This support given by PIRATA to citizen's involving in politics is nonetheless totally against how Lisboa Treaty is being passed by the EU

Russian Pirate Party

Categories & Contents

Category 1

• etc, etc, etc
• ...

Category 2

• etc, etc, etc
• ...

Category ...

• etc, etc, etc
• ...

Piraattipuolue

Categories & Contents

Securing democracy and citizen's rights

• Guarantee consumer protection in digital trade
• Protect privacy and free speech
• Secrecy of correspondence must be just as secure online as offline
• Improve democratic decision-making and openness within the European Union.

Freeing culture

• Legalize all non-commercial copying
• Shorten copyright protection to 5-10 years

Reforming the patent system and abolishing private monopolies

• Abolish software and pharmaceutical patents, replacing the pharma patents with Piratpartiet's model.

Non-core issues

• For possible matters related to, but not directly part of, the core issues, Piraattipuolue will take a stance if deemed necessary.
• For instance, the Finnish Ministry of Traffic and Communications recently asked for opinions regarding a reallocation of radio frequencies, but they only gave a week to respond and neglected asking many of the communities who'd be influenced by such a decision. Piraattipuolue made a press release criticizing this and warning that such behavior damages citizens' trust in just rule.
• For matters not related to the core issues, Piraattipuolue has no official stance, and the party will not say anything about e.g. economical issues beyond those related to copyright. Individual members of the party will, however, be allowed to express opinions about non-core issues and even build personal campaign platforms around them, for as long as they make it clear that these are their own opinions and not those of the party.

Pirate Party Australia

Categories & Contents

Policy Notes

The development of the Pirate Party Australia is currently in its seminal stages, having only become somewhat active in the last month or so, and policy, and indeed the scope of that policy, has not yet been thoroughly discussed and documented by active participants in the party, so for the time being let us assume that the party policy and issues will be similar to those of the Swedish sister party, with its basic tenets of Free Culture, Open Government and the Protection of Civil Liberties.

In light of this, please excuse the current brevity of this addition, as we play catch up with the more established parties, and develop the intricacies of our policy. There are of course peculiarities to the Australian political environment and legal frameworks, however I do not expect them to pose much of a problem to the development of the International Pirate Manifesto by way of excluding or contradicting other Pirate Party issues and scopes.

Copyright

Copyright, a creature entirely constructed by statute, although recognised as being somewhat necessary, is being iniquitously employed by certain industries and organisations as a means of securing failing, increasingly inefficient and irrelevant business models. The degree and duration of monopoly control afforded by the legislation is unbalanced, and excessive.

• This is having adverse impacts on the development and freedom of culture and the dissemination of information, whilst impacting the utility of consumers.

• Enforcement of copyright legislation is more and more requiring pervasive methods of observation, and the erosion of civil liberties.

• The party seeks to have the duration of protection reduced, and non-commercial copying and sharing legalised.

Patents

The rationale for patents are that a provision of exclusivity would provide encouragement for innovation, whilst providing a mechanism where innovation would be diffused by a requirement that the patent be documented. This is not happening.

• Intangible property, business methods, software, living organisms and genes must not be patentable. Hoarding of patents with no active exploitation should be prohibited.

At this point in time, it is unknown as to whether the consensus of the party will be towards reform (and what that reform should entail) or whether, the same end as the Swedish Party will be taken (i.e. the eventual abolishing of patents).

Privacy

The growing surveillance of the citizen offends the very notions of a liberal and open democracy. By allowing the continued development of the networked surveillance state, we allow those that would seek to undermine and subvert our security, their victory. The right to privacy, is inalienable, and thus must extend to the digital environment.

Non-Core Issues & Overall Intention

Like the Swedish sister party, the Pirate Party Australia does not intend to develop or have official views on any issue or event outside of its primary focus. This does not preclude members from maintaining views outside of that scope, just that those views will be external to the official party stance.

The Party does not seek to become part of the administration, but rather a mediator in parliamentary deadlocks, and to provide representation of the emergent information society, to guard the civil liberties of the citizen by utilising this power to further the party agenda.

Although this has as of yet, not been fully discussed, it would be assumed that for issues outside of party scope conscience votes should be allowed.

Analysis

Briefing

• After analysing each pirate party stances, we are going to find common points and also disagreements in two different scopes:
  • Worldwide scope: for all pirate parties including Russian and American
  • EU scope: in order to make easier the campaign for the 2009 European Election
• Also, we have to consider restrictions existing in each pirate party's home country, to make the Pirate Manifesto operative and legal to be used by all pirate parties

Legal restrictions

USA

• United States Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 a.k.a. the Progress Clause states

  "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

  This implies that complete abolishment of copyright or similar monopoly would require constitutional amendment.

Common categories

Worldwide & EU scope

Core issues

Common categories

• Civil Rights and Liberties
• Patents
• Trade Marks
• Author's Rights
• Information Society
• Government Accountability and Transparency

Non-core issues

• Non-core issues treatment

Common stances

Civil Rights and Liberties

Worldwide & EU scope

• Defending the rechtstaat and the rule of the law, as foundations for democracy, by defending five basic human rights:
  • Freedom of speech
  • Privacy
  • Pressumption of innocence/right to go to court
  • equality before the law/no discrimination
  • right to life and moral and physical integrity
    • for understanding the context the two last points we can say that everyone has the right to life and to physical and moral integrity, and under no circumstances may be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment; and may not in any way be discriminated against on account of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance
• No political claim or position has any validity if it is not expressed through reasoned rational thought and argument. Violence is no means to obtain political objectives in a democracy
• Existing and future criminal laws, including anti-terrorist laws, will be reviewed for compatibility with human rights and civil liberties, and we will work to reform those laws where they are in conflict

Patents

Worldwide & EU scope

• The current patent system is not sustainable; biopatents -i.e., seeds, species, living beings or parts thereof (including derivations of same within the limits of natural genetic variation)- and software patents are two fields where it has become obvious that there is a need for a change in the patent system
• Abolition of software patents
• Reduction of patent term
• Abolition of biopatents
• Aiming to remove monopolies created from the patent system
• Pharmaceutical patents should not be allowed to cause pharmaceuticals to become unavailable for some countries or social groups; this is most blatant in the case of pandemics and natural emergencies

Trade Marks

Worldwide & EU scope

• Differentiated treatment for author's rights, patents and trademarks
• Not allowing registering as trade mark works under copyright

Author's Rights

Worldwide & EU scope

• Reducing term for copyright (commercial author's rights)
• Objection to DRM (not all state they are pursuing ban)
• Stop using expressions like intellectual property (everyone seems to agree on that they are misleading and harmful)
• Balance between author's rights and citizens' rights on culture: We agree on that there is inbalance and we want to pursue a balance
• Free non-commercial sharing of cultural works: Agreement seems obvious
• P2P: Let P2P be, don't promote, don't forbid. (Many thought the manifesto shouldn't concern itself with technicalities)
• Promotion of culture
• Given our stance that increased culture sharing should be seen as a positive development within society we can find no ground for levies and so they should be abolished to further commercial private copying and culture sharing

Information Society

Worldwide & EU scope

• Universalization of wired and wireless Internet, aiming to avoid the digital divide
• Preservation of Net Neutrality
• Technological neutrality at public offices through mandatory use in them of open standards

Government Accountability and Transparency

Worldwide & EU scope

• Make government officers and parliamentary representatives, together with legally, politically accountable for their actions, requiring transparency for those actions in order to make that accountability possible.

Non-core issues

Worldwide & EU scope

• In this section will be required to explain that sticking with our core issues it's not due to us not caring about non-core issues, but due to us focusing on what we have consenssus

Disagreements

• All major controversies have been solved