Pirate Party Comes to the U.S.

Slashdot is reporting on a Wired news interview with the Pirate Party of the U.S., which was formed a week after the raid on Pirate Bay. The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party associated with The Pirate Bay, and says it wants to reform intellectual property and privacy laws. From their site:

No matter what excuses or rationalizations Big Businesses and Big Government offer, it all comes down to cold, hard corporate greed and state control at the expense of your freedom and well-being. Most Americans have wished that one of the major parties would have the courage to stand up to these undemocratic conglomerates and policies and win back control of the cultural, scientific, and personal spheres for artists, critics, scientists, patients, and citizens from all walks of life. Both the Republicans and Democrats have instead, as a whole, enthusiastically rolled over for Big Media's and Big Pharma's campaign dollars.

While fine groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, and Doctors Without Borders have been fighting these battles for a long time with us, no political party in United States has made the reform of intellectual property and privacy laws their top priority.

I'm actually fascinated by this. It's a different approach to the usual lobbying efforts which seem to only go as far as their coffers can take them, and still have to work within the two-party system. I'm not going to get much into my whole political beliefs here, but I have a firm belief that the current two-party system doesn't work, and hasn't for quite awhile now. I don't know if a group like Pirate Party can have as much success in the US as similar goups like Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party, can have as they enjoy a much different political climate. One might say that we're more of a corporate police state than a democracy anyway, but again I digress, I'm not going to get into this, really...