[pp.int.general] A Rough Draft I wrote for a short introduction booklet about the Pirate Party

[Ryan Martin]

I wrote the following a few months ago with the intention of using it as a
handout material (with pictures).  This never happened, but I'd like to put
it forward to you all.  I'm afraid I may have been a little liberal with my
use of the branding.  I hope it is at least interesting to someone here.  I
warn you, it's a really rough draft, but here you go!

--

Homesteading is an American Tradition. The ever present migration of people
and their cultures to the United States, the push for the populace to always
head west and stake claims to unknown territory, and the movement of
residents into cities all represent the American right to locate and
relocate where desired. The US Pirate Party believes that the free flow of
people IS the free flow of information. This has been seen historically,
within social and cultural movements; these movements directly match the
movement of people. Imagine that you where choosing a new place to live. Job
availability, housing costs, educational institutions, crime rates - there
are many metrics for choosing. What if your virtual community was settling
with you, together purchasing of an entire city block or an apartment
complex. Would a U-Haul be much different than a Conestoga wagon?


Content creators of all sorts have an exciting new frontier ahead of them.
Bands have a wide assortment of possible distribution and monetization
experiments from which to take and traditional artists are finding homes for
their works in various non-traditional replacements of a gallery. Video
media workers are able to directly engage their audiences without need of
much in the way of resources. These are all examples of an iceberg tip that
is responsible for sinking entire industries. The print industry is on the
wane but readership is on the rise. Obviously the reporter who is trained to
ask, “Who, What, Where, When, and Why,” is still needed and will have a
place in the new America, yet this does not change the fact that his
industry is collapsing. Each of these types of skilled laborer must now
strike out into the frontier of future America. Many will have to take a
hand at shaping these industries; industries they will have to create and
define anew as they work. The US Pirate Party wants to make sure that no
remnants of the old are able to block options from future innovators and
pioneers who are, even now, ensuring that America survives a transition
already underway.


Great swaths of the American populace are, today, woefully underrepresented.
The atheist, the homosexual, and even the small business owner are all
traditionally living in a representative democracy without a voice, even
while in some areas of the country, they make up a majority. The days of the
two party political system are numbered. Even those two parties are unable
to maintain cohesion of message as the populace becomes more and more
engaged in the world. As the 3rd and 4th parties rise in prominence, as well
as the rise of regional parties, the fragmenting of constituent
representation will ensure that these smaller groups of citizenry are
represented more fully. The “All or Nothing” approach to democracy cannot
hold up any longer, not under the weight of an ever more empowered and vocal
majority of minorities. We are not the only 3rd party in the United States,
nor are we the largest, yet our message is being heard.


Having a political ideology that does not extend beyond national borders is
foolhardy. We would not tolerate such a nationalistic approach to science or
religion, so why would we continue to accept it in our politics? Good ideas,
developments, and experiments happen every day all over the world. Politics
itself is undergoing radical redefinement by the ever changing political
landscapes that straddle the world. The United States firmly refuses to
modernize its approach to politics, only because any change whatsoever would
instantly uncover a depth of incompetence and corruption; the country would
have to contend with an immediate crisis of identity. The innovators of the
day, the next generation of Americans, are eager for this process to start,
so that we may all get over our expectations and start fixing. It is as
simple as destroying the 90% retention rate of our elected representatives,
and we can start the healing process that we so obviously need. The Pirate
Party International movement proves that we, at least, recognize the value
of ideas and politics that are without borders. There is no need to view the
entire world as a “Them” to protect “Us” from anymore.


The next generation, and in many ways the current generation, are monstrous.
These generations are so different from their predecessors that they have
powers and abilities only dreamed of by generations past. One can whisper
and be heard in Australia, a feat even the Greek gods could not oft perform
without a messenger. Virtual spaces are holding just as much cultural
influence as physical spaces, and the new generation has become accustomed
to this. They even seem to be blending the two on top of each other. Nuclear
reactors are being built in basements, radio telescopes and satellites are
being built by private citizens who are merely ‘interested,” and our
workspaces are shifting into the co-op and out of the garage. The future is
not ours to tell, as it will not be contained by any theory we may have. It
is assumed that a child living right now may live to 500 years old. What
does that child’s culture look like? We must ensure that those who are our
innovators, our payloads into the future, are given the ability and tools
they need to build the world for humans that are nothing like you or I.


Mutant Cultures have a right to exist. There is a tapestry of cultures
stretched across the United States. Though many people believe that America
has been overtaken by a corpolitikal monoculture of Walmarts and McDonalds,
anyone who takes a step outside their front door and ventures to talk to
others, knows that this is not wholly true. Just off the beaten track of
mainstream culture there lie land trusts, co-ops, collectives, communes, and
more, each staking out a frontier for themselves and their participants
against zoning laws, fire codes, permits, outright banning, and a never
ending dread that ‘the city,’ or ‘the government,’ are going to shut them
down without warning. These communities have a right to thrive. The natural
growth of mutant cultures has been impeded for too long in the United
States, and the Pirate Party hopes to one day represent them in the making
of law and policy. When these types of living arrangements are truly
decriminalized and no longer looked down upon, they will provide us
invaluable information and raw data from experimental microcommunities
inside the American nation. This data may very well reveal important facts
about the reality of living in America.


Most users of computers and modern gadgetry are criminals, by the letter of
the law in the United States. Accidentally becoming a pirate can very easily
happen. It is possible to own media, physically, that you cannot legally use
in ways that we would consider fair use (such as adding an album you own to
a music playing device you also own). Some lobby and lawmaking bodies argue
that your “Fair Use” of technology is extremely limited. The laws that exist
today that define the legal use of patent and trademarks are often skewed to
ensure the public have little to no control over what they can do, often
without some form of corporate sponsorship. It is even argued that opening
up a device that you own is a violation of patent laws. It is increasingly
obvious that we are not ready, legally, to move into a culture of
information free flow. Horror stories of small farmers being shut down by
multinational genetics companies are growing more frequent as the media
lobbies push steeper and steeper fines onto individuals who are involved in
the promotion and distribution of media. The Pirate Party does not believe
that there is such a thing as "piracy," and that the concept is merely
another remnant of a bygone era that refuses to modernize with its populace.
No publically available media or data access can be controlled by
circumvention, without the criminalization of knowing; a situation that
cannot ever happen. There is no such thing as an illegal idea. As the old
Pirate Party axiom states, “If speech is free, and music is speech, how can
you steal free speech?”


Fair use is an American legal doctrine that states that copyrighted
materials can be used without permission in use of academia, in parody, for
review, or for other somewhat nebulous uses. The public domain is a concept
of materials that are now, and are forever, free for anyone to use.
Currently, things fall into the public domain much slower than they used to.
In some cases, the life of an author plus 70 years, which ensures that many
cultural icons in our society are locked off from public use. We recognize
in art and creative works that we build onto what already exists and very
rarely create something truly new, but without having access to a wide and
rich field of public domain works that are relevant to us culturally, we
have very little to build onto. Permission culture is the culture of
requiring permission to do much of anything, and it’s on the rise. Imagine
trying to take an image of a crowd of people and enter it into the
historical record. Then imagine the sheer number of trademarked and
copyrighted symbols that the crowd is peppered with. Without permission from
all the holders of those things, does that picture not get entered into our
historical record? Sure they can be removed, but do those insignias convey a
cultural phenomena that should be on record? It’s a complicated issue that
cannot be truly described here, but it’s a core tenant for the founding of
the Pirate Party movement.

-- 
Ryan Martin
Administrator
United States Pirate Party
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.pirateweb.net/pipermail/pp.international.general/attachments/20100113/6940318d/attachment.htm>