Abolish copyright. Yes, really.

Phase 1: Collect signatures for the Election Authority

We need 1,500 signatures before the end of February to contest the parliamentary elections of 2006. We collect 2,000 before February 4, giving us some margins for the red tape with the Election Authority (who are almost guaranteed to not like us either).

Support the Pirate Party's registration here! You'll be asked for name, city of residence, personal ID number, and mail address(in order to verify your signature).

RIGHT NOW: 1,523 OUT OF 2,000 SIGNATURES (1,523 STILL UNVALIDATED). 33 DAYS TO GO.

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Schedule until elections

Phase 1: Signatures

From January 1 to February 4, we collect two thousand signatures for the Election Authority.

Phase 2: Register

February 5 to 28, we quarrel with the Election Authority to get them to accept our registration.

Phase 3: Candidates

March 1 to April 15, we find our parliamentary candidates for the respective election circuits here in a forum on piratpartiet.se.

Phase 4: Ballots

April 15 to 24, we ready our ballots and order them. They're delivered 45 days before the election, that is, August 9. (Translator's note: in Sweden, challenger parties must supply the polling stations with their ballots.)

Phase 5: Campaign organisation

During May, June, July, and Augusti, we build an activist organization in all cities with more than 50,000 people.

Phase 6: The Election

September 9 to 17 is the final stretch. The goal is that we, unlike other challenger parties, will have people at every polling station where we're active. They're handing out the Pirate Party ballots, which have been printed and distributed. We need physical presence when the time comes.

 

Do you want to run for Parliament?

The Pirate Party is looking for people around the country who want to have their name on the ballots of 2006. Yes, really. We need to submit our candidates to the Election Authority fairly soon, so there's little margin.

In a later stage, in April, we'll determine who out of those interested now that end up on the printed ballots.

(opens January 9)

Give us your best reasons!

Everybody has their own reasons as to why copyright, patents etc are bad ideas. Why not submit yours and share with pirates and others alike?

(opens January 9)

Just opened, sorry about the disorder...

Ok, that was way too much attention for this site in way too little time. :) Piratpartiet.se opened at 20:30 on January 1, and had 75,000 hits six hours later.

...and over a million hits over the first whole open day, January 2.

Edges ARE a bit rough around here still. Or, to use better wording, just opened.

What's Rick doing right now?

Writing the code that validates signatures.

Sorry I haven't had time to respond to everybody, it's not to be impolite or disrespectful. The past 24 hours have been wild...

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What's all this about?

The Pirate Party aims for a parliamentary kingmaker position after the 2006 elections. There are between 800,000 and 1,100,000 active file sharers in Sweden, and they're all fed up with being called criminal. We need 225,000 of these to pass the four-percent barrier to Parliament and establish a kingmaker position. Then, we intend to use this to abolish copyright.

Getting one-fourth of a criminalized and angered mass of people along with this is far from unattainable. That's what we'll achieve in the next nine months.

Are you for real?

You had better believe it. This is the real thing.

What does the Pirate Party stand for?

The Pirate Party stands for abolishing all intellectual property rights (copyright, patents, design patents, trademarks) and their associated effects (like blank media levies), and also a heavily strengthened right to privacy for the individual citizen (among others, the Data Retention Directive shall not be implemented, raising the postal secret to a general secrecy of communications, and a constitutional right to privacy). We do not take a stand on other issues, especially not those concerning the transfer of money. (The point of this is to enable you to vote Pirate without changing the left/right balance in Swedish politics.)

We also stand for Thomas Bodström not being eligible for any new public job, after his driving the Data Retention Directive through the European Union. He could possibly get the public job of selling hot dogs outside of Parliament. In the winter half of the year.

Who are the Pirate Party?

The funny thing is that the left usually accuse us of being right-wing, and the right accuse us of being left-wing. :-) In reality, we span the entire traditional left-to-right scale; everybody has their own reasons to abolish intellectual property rights. The left say that culture should be a public commons, the right that intellectual property rights are market-harming monopolies. Others still don't care about the left-to-right scale and just want to throw out those who hinder the progress of technology and society for their own short-term gains.