- published: 21 Mar 2012
- views: 79273
Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties in different countries. Pirate Parties support civil rights, direct democracy and participation, reform of copyright and patent law, free sharing of knowledge (Open Content), data privacy, transparency, freedom of information, free education, universal healthcare and a clear separation between church and state[citation needed]. They advocate network neutrality and universal, unrestricted access to the Internet as indispensable conditions to some of this.
*Majority rule, average of all electoral districts
where the party participated in the election
**Aggregated national results for Pirates de Catalunya
(0.63% in the 4 Catalonian provinces) and
Partido Pirata (Navarra 0.54%, Castellón 0.33%,
Teruel 0.28% and Huesca 0.33%)
The Swedish Piratpartiet, founded on 1 January 2006 under the leadership of Rickard Falkvinge, was the first pirate party. The party's name was derived from Piratbyrån, an organization opposed to intellectual property. Members of Piratbyrån had previously founded the BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Piratbyrån is the Swedish version of the Danish organization PiratGruppen, so named because it was founded to oppose the lobbyism of the Danish anti-piracy group AntiPiratGruppen. The "pirate" label, which had been used by the media and film industries in campaigns against copyright infringement, is therefore a reappropriation of the word.