Taylor definitions “Pirate Politics” Diami and Sergio
Pirate Politics describes the actions of political parties established to advocate for the ethics of online piracy. With the rise of peer to peer services and torrent sites, file sharing has become a global phenomenon and was eventually conflated with an individual rights struggle. The Swedish version of the party is perhaps best known due to widespread cultural tolerance for piracy in Sweden (even allowing for a religious protection under the Church of Kopimism). The German Pirate Party has enjoyed the most political success owing to its upstart Parliamentary wins.
The party characterizes itself as neither left nor right leaning and focuses its energies primarily on promoting government transparency, online and offline privacy and copyright reform (Taylor, p.160).
Pirate politics elevate to a human right the ability to share anything, be it ideas, content, government data or formulae for life saving patent protected pharmaceuticals. The ethic is both anticapitalist and fundamentally reliant on the production of the capitalist system, without which there would be considerably less to pilfer. While there is an economic justice slant that couches piracy in redistributive terms, there does not seem to be a call for an outright abolition of private property. Instead, the goals seem limited to more esoteric concepts such as liberating creativity and equalizing access. There is as much an affinity to creators of content as there is a contempt for big business as the intermediator of content, which leaves piracy enthusiasts in an awkward position as those same companies they revile are responsible for granting wealth to the creators they celebrate.
