Pirate Party Coming To Canada
An anonymous reader writes "After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents."
US legislators appear to have forgotten that during the early phases of US growth, the US refused to acknowledge any foreign intellectual property - European books were copied and published in the US with no royalties whatsoever, and it was no less a person than Rudyard Kipling, all of whose works were stolen in this way, who described the US as a country of pirates. The US was one of the last developed countries to sign the Berne Convention, which it did not do till 1st March 1989. So you could say that the US only formally ceased to be a pirate itself 20 years ago.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."