Why It's Time to Party Like It's 2011 - Open Enterprise

"The Pirate Party has hovered on the edge of politics for a while now, acting as a kind of gadfly to traditional parties - annoying but not able to inflict much damage. Its seats in the European Parliament have proved important in terms of raising issues and obtaining access to hitherto restricted information. But last week's events in Germany are perhaps even more significant: "The German Pirate Party has scored a massive win in the elections for the Berlin state parliament today. Two hours after the voting booths closed the first results show the Pirates achieving 9 percent of the counted votes. This translates into 15 parliament seats...." Why does that matter to the outside world - or to readers of this blog? Because the programme of the Pirate Party touches on many key topics regularly discussed in these pages. As well as copyright reform that would allow private digital copies to be made, patents would be scaled-back too, avoiding “absurd patents” in the fields of software, genes and business processes. The party supports open access to knowledge...."