Dean Baker - The Pirate Party Knows Where the Money Is

One of the oddities of recent election results in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe is the rise of the Pirate Party. This party received 7.8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia yesterday, making it the 4th state government in Germany in which it has enough support to get into the state parliament.  It also won enough votes to get seats in the European Parliament. The Pirate Party is widely expected to cross the 5 percent threshold in the German national elections next year, allowing it to get into the national parliament.

Like many new and rapidly growing parties, the Pirate Party has only a partially formed agenda and undoubtedly means many different things to different supporters. However a general theme is clearly a support for freedom of the Internet. This means a rebellion against governmental efforts to track users and to limit the flow of material over the web.

Near the top of the list of the Pirate Party’s demons is copyright protection, and rightly so. Copyright protection is an antiquated relic of the late Middle Ages that has no place in the digital era. It is debatable whether such government-granted monopolies were ever the best way to finance the production of creative and artistic work, but now that the Internet will allow this material to be instantly transferred at zero cost anywhere in the world, copyrights are clearly a counter-productive restraint on technology.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012514204029381972.html