You can join the Pirate Party in two different ways:

Respect for the right to privacy

Following the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has allowed itself to be swept along in a panic reaction to try to end all evil by increasing the level of surveillance and control over the entire population. We Europeans should know better. It is not twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are plenty of other horrific examples of surveillance-gone-wrong in Europe's modern history. 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. The Pirate Party wants to prevent that from happening.

Come talk to us on our Forum!

An abolished patent system

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. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents. The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. This is something we would like to discuss on a European level. Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries). Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow.

Come talk to us on our Forum!

Telefoontaps met een derde gestegen

Het gebruik van telefoontaps als onderzoekstechniek blijft jaar na jaar sterk stijgen. In 2007 werden er nog 3.603 opdrachten gegeven om telefoons af te luisteren. Vorig jaar piekte dat aantal tot 4.881 afluisteropdrachten of een stijging van meer dan 35 procent.

Onderzoeksdiensten krijgen binnenkort bovendien meer mogelijkheden, aangezien het ministerie van Justitie werkt aan een wettelijk kader om ook gesprekken via de bij criminelen populaire internettelefoondienst Skype te kunnen afluisteren.

PP being a global movement which emerged from the Internet society we all adhere to the fact we use the Net's lingua-franca as a common communication vehicle, even on a local level. As such we all agree on the fact all global and local communication is done in English as far as possible. We focus on sharing and communicating with as much people as possible, whatever origin, whatever culture.