Democracy benefits from transparency, discussion, and participation. We exist to campaign for a free society where civil liberties are respected and the rule of law is something citizens can trust will protect them. We believe in the right to privacy for individuals and the need for transparency for governments and organisations. Our government exists to serve the people and by fighting for these principles we believe it can.

When we think about the internet we don’t imagine a shopping mall first, we imagine a library. Humanity has reached the point where the cost to distribute the entirety of our knowledge, culture, and information is almost zero. So we have a choice: is this the moment we privatise and carve out for rent-seekers and profiteering our collective creativity? Or do we instead find a fairer way to reward creators while setting free our world’s knowledge, culture, and information so that everyone has a right to discover, learn, share, adapt, remix, and create anew? You can probably guess our answer, what’s yours?

We in the Pirate Party have simply decided that if sharing a love for culture, knowledge, and information with our friends and family makes us pirates, then that’s what we are and we’re proud of it. We’ve adopted as our own the very term used by rights-holders intended to demonise generations for the completely natural impulse to share discoveries with those around us.

We’ve claimed the Pirate name in the fight for a free, open and renewed democracy in the US. We hope you’ll join us.

Our name might seem silly at first, but you should remember everyone has been labelled a “pirate” at some point in the last few decades. Movie studios and recording companies place their propaganda in front of us at every chance they get, they waste your time with warnings on DVDs you’ve legitimately purchased or movies you watch at the cinema. They’ve told us over and over that home taping on to cassettes would kill the radio, that recording a TV show on to the VCR would bring an end to free-to-air TV, or sharing an MP3 music song with a friend will cause the end of musicians’ careers. The list goes on but here’s the important point: at every turn, at every change in technology, the rights-holders always say the same thing: ‘no, we don’t want you doing that’.

These rights-holders donate to our major political parties, they’ve lobbied for and changed our laws to protect their profits and their outdated distribution monopolies. They’ve had their hand in writing trade agreements and international law, all in a failing attempt to control how you access your culture online. This is how the Pirate movement began; as a reaction to the corrupt corporate, political, and rent-seeking encroachment on a free and open internet, and our democracy.