My vote has been mailed. I voted for the Pirate Party, which is a new party with possible representation in the EU parliament according to the latest Swedish surveys (about 5% seems possible). According to the EU Profiler, the Pirate Party has opinions that correspond to mine 75.8% of the time, followed by the June List (73.5%) and the Center Party (72.1%). The worst possible choice would be the Sweden Democrats (37.5%), which is a relief. I detest the Sweden Democrats, which is the Swedish counterpart to the French Front National, the British National Party or the Austrian Freedom Party.

What does the Pirate Party stand for? According to their website, it is a party that believes that the protection and extension of civil liberties trump all other issues (I agree). But it is mostly known for three specific policy proposals:

1 Reforming copyright laws in order to legalize non-commercial and derivative uses. The party also proposes a shortening of the duration of copyrights to a single term of five years.

2 Abolishing patents

3 Safeguarding privacy rights against wiretapping, interception of emails etc. (by third parties, including government agencies)

I’m in total agreement with all three proposals. In addition, the two largest parties (the Social Democrats and the Moderates) have instituted policies that are the opposite of what I would like. Actually, I think the arguments against intellectual property rights are even stronger than the arguments of the Pirate Party. Yes, I think IPR discourage and distort innovation. But I also think that there is a distributional argument, leading to an additional reduction of future innovation, which is related to the winners-take-all character of the distribution of monetary rewards for the creation of ideas with attached IPR (see my paper here: http://www.studiesinemergentorder.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=69:the-double-edged-nature-of-the-hayekian-knowledge-problem-systemic-tendencies-in-markets-and-science&catid=40:social-sciences&Itemid=73.

The Pirate Party on Copyrights:

” The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.”

On patents:

“Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third-world countries every day. They hamper possibly life-saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community.”

On privacy:

“The arguments for each step on the road to the surveillance state may sound ever so convincing. But we Europeans know from experience where that road leads, and it is not somewhere we want to go. We must pull the emergency brake on the runaway train towards a society we do not want. Terrorists may attack the open society, but only governments can abolish it.”

I really like the last sentence in the above paragraph.