Pirate Party Sweden

“ We don't need to encourage creators any more, we need to set them free. We don't want to hinder innovation, strangle our minds and hold back our ideas any more. Ideas, music and knowledge can not, by their very nature, be exclusive property. ”

“ Abstract The three core beliefs of the Pirate Party are the need for protection of citizen's rights, the will to free our culture, and the insight that patents and private monopolies are damaging to society.
Ours is a control and surveillance society where practically everyone is registered and watched. It is not in the best interests of a modern judicial state to impose surveillance on all its citizens, thereby treating them as suspects. Democracy presupposes a strong protection for citizen's rights. ”

“ We demand the abolishment of patents and fair and balanced laws of copyrights, rooted in the will of the people, to enrich people's lives, enable a healthy business climate, create a knowledge and cultural commons, and thereby benefiting the development of society as a whole. ”

“ Government exists solely for the betterment of society and the protection of its citizens, the very same citizens who legitimize the government. A government who uses its powers against its own citizens is essentially illegitimate. ”

“ We believe it is only fair and natural that inventors and investors alike shall be able to gain remuneration for their work and ideas. However, patents today are mainly used to prevent innovation by hindering competitors. When created, the patent duration of 20 years was a third of the inventors' lifetime and still a reasonably short timespan compared to the general pace of development. Today, 20 years is nothing to a large corporation but an eternity for society to wait for innovation. ”

“ The goal of any monopolist is not to adjust prices and terms to what the market will bear, but rather use their ill-gotten rights as a lever to raise prices and set lopsided terms on usage and licensing. ”

“ We believe patents have become obsolete and that they actively stifle innovation and the creation of new knowledge. Besides, just by looking at all business areas that is not patentable it is clear that patents simply are not needed - the market forces derived from being first-to-market is quite sufficient for fostering innovation. Inventors should compete fairly with natural advantages like innovative designs, customer benefits, pricing and quality, instead of with a state-awarded monopoly on knowledge. ”

“ We wish to see a society where small and big parties alike can compete on equal and fair terms with weapons like quality, customer benefits and price instead of with patent attorneys. This will liberate resources they can use to innovate for the good of all. ”

“ There are more books, more content, more culture, more music, more articles, more innovations and more movies than ever before. However, most of our cultural heritage is locked up by copyrights, left rotting in vaults, unpublished and out of print. ”

“ Ideas, knowledge and information are by nature non-exclusive and their common value lies in their inherent ability to be shared and spread.
We say that copyrights need to be restored to their origins. Laws must be altered to regulate only commercial use and copying of protected works. To share copies, or otherwise spread or use works for non-profit uses, must never be illegal since such fair use benefits all of society.
We want to reform commercial copyrights. The basic notion of copyrights was always to find a fair balance between conflicting commercial interests. ”

“ The original goals are no longer needed since the barriers of entry into creating culture and innovating technology have become so low that anyone can partake as a creator - the explosion of the Internet is testament to this force. ”

“ Patents are used to block competition, big pharma stops developing countries from copying patented AIDS medicines, farmers get sued when a patented GM crop is accidentally spread on their fields, software patents cement the monopolies of big software houses, small inventors are dragged into courts for years to defend their patents and industry wants to patent your genes. ”

“ Citizens' Rights The Swedish constitution guarantees every citizen access to all basic human rights such as freedom of speech, protection against oppression and respect for personal integrity. The EU data retention act tramples on all of these rights by demanding telephone companies and Internet providers store information about every single phone call, every e-mail, every visited website and position of every mobile phone. ”

“ The Duality of Immaterial Law Copyrights and patents were created to promote the betterment of society by encouraging creators and inventors. Today, the technological and economical development has stripped them of their use and instead they have become a choke point for our common culture. ”

“ The Pirate Party has no opinion on whether Sweden should or should not be a member of the European Union, but now that we are, we have a right to demand that the union is governed by democratic principles. ”

“ Free our culture We wish to strengthen the attribution rights of the authors. This right shall have no time limit. We wish to free our cultural heritage and enable a richer society by revoking all exclusive copyrights. ”

“ Privatized monopolies are one of our society's worst enemies. They lead directly to price-hikes and large hidden costs for citizens. Patents are officially sanctioned monopolies on ideas. Large corporations fight each other in a race to file more and more patents they can use against smaller competitors to prevent them from competing on equal terms. ”

“ Whenever the publicly funded sector procures information systems or produces information itself, it must actively counteract the formation or continuation of these private monopolies on information, knowledge, ideas, or concepts. ”

“ We demand a revised and modern form of IP law firmly founded on the principle of enrichment of society. We demand a healthy climate for entrepreneurs. We demand a creative commons of knowledge and culture, promoting the enrichment of all. ”

“ We also claim that patents suffocate innovation. By creating a monopoly on knowledge, they stifle competition and prevent development, not to mention the ways they are being abused by patent holders.
Last but definitely not least is the question of privacy. Sweden is on course for a society where every citizen is being constantly supervised by the government. ”

“ Patents have many damaging effects. Pharmaceutical patents are responsible for human deaths in diseases they could have afforded medication for, research priorities are skewed, and unnecessarily high, and rising, cost of medicines in richer parts of the world.
Patents on life and genes, like patented crops, lead to unreasonable and harmful consequences. Software patents retard technological development and constitute a serious threat against Swedish as well as European small- and medium-sized businesses in the IT sector. ”

“ It can be proven that exclusivity lessens the inherent value of immaterials such as ideas, thoughts, knowledge and music. A free dissemination of information and cultural expressions enrich us all, especially when combined with a technological revolution that enables free distribution at the speed of light. ”

“ We demand justice, freedom and democracy for the citizens.
Today's copyright and patent laws lead to harmful monopolies, the loss of important democratic values, hinders the creation of culture and knowledge, and prevents them from reaching the citizens. ”

“ The government shall only be allowed access to a citizen's means of communication or put a citizen under surveillance in the case of a firm suspicion of a crime being committed by said citizen. In all other cases, the government shall assume its citizens to be innocent and leave them alone. ”

“ All restricting contracts as well as technical means and methods employed to prevent such copying shall be declared illegal for obstructing the natural right of our society to benefit from the sharing of culture and knowledge. ”

“ All non-commercial gathering, use, processing and distribution of culture shall be explicitly encouraged. Technologies limiting the consumer's legal rights to copy and use information or culture, so-called DRM, should be banned. ”

“ The Pirate Party does not strive to be part of an administration. Our goal is to use a tie breaker position in parliament as leverage, and support an administration that drives the issues in our platform in a satisfactory manner. ”

“ It shall be possible to communicate with the government without being tied to a certain private supplier of software. The use of open source in the public sector, including schools, shall be stimulated. ”

“ Millions of classical songs, movies and books are held hostages in the vaults of huge media corps, not wanted enough by their focus groups to re-publish but potentially too profitable to release. We want to free our cultural heritage and make them accessible to all, before time withers away the celluloid of the old movie reels. ”

“ Decision-making and governmental administration in both Sweden and the European Union shall be characterized by transparency and openness. Swedish representatives in the EU shall act to bring the Union closer to the Swedish principle of public access to records. ”