Avast ye you swabs! Move aside for the pirate party! Arrr!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Pirate_Party
[h=1]United States Pirate Party[/h]
The
Pirate Party is an
American political party founded in 2006 by
Brent Allison and
Alex English.[SUP]
[1][/SUP] The party's platform is aligned with the global
Pirate movement, and supports reform of
intellectual property laws to reflect
open source and
free culture values,
government transparency, protection of
privacy and
civil liberties, rolling back
corporate personhood and
corporate welfare,
evidence-based policy, and
egalitarianism and
meritocracy based on the
hacker ethic.[SUP]
[2][/SUP]
The party's national organization has existed in multiple incarnations since its 2006 founding. Its most recent is the Pirate National Committee (PNC), formed in 2012 as a coalition of state parties. The PNC officially recognizes Pirate parties from 8 states,[SUP]
[3][/SUP] and tracks and assists the growth of more state parties throughout the United States.
[h=2]Ideology[/h] Factions within the Pirate Party include
left-libertarians,
classical liberals,
anarchists,
progressives, and
radical centrists. Many Pirates explicitly decline to identify with any particular political ideology or philosophy.
The Pirate Party's platform originally centered on issues of
intellectual property. "Like its international counterparts, the USPP’s main practical concerns are digital intellectual property and privacy laws—specifically, the abolition of
a 1998 digital U.S. copyright law, the reduction of copyrights to 14 years (from 95 years after publication, or 70 years after the author’s death), and the expiration of patents that don’t result in significant progress within four years (as opposed to 20 years)."[SUP]
[7][/SUP]
In 2012, the party began an expansion of its platform, inspired by the Pirate Wheel.[SUP]
[9][/SUP] The party emphasizes the cultural values of the
hacker ethic,
open source and
free culture, strong protection of individual
civil liberties,
government transparency and participatory governance, and
evidence-based policy.
As of 2013, the national Pirate Party has not adopted an agenda beyond a set of 8 core values. Individual state parties are given free rein to interpret these values and experiment with more concrete platforms. Pirate candidates from
New York have interpreted these values to espouse
co-operative economics,
workplace democracy, and
self-employment.[SUP]
[11][/SUP]