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."

Comments

Re:Sick

[rolfwind]

I for one am sick of these neo-pirates perverting the time-tested ideals of classical piratism. Copyright and patent reform?

I don't know if phasing out patents is actually "reform". If I have my history correct, patents were actually to open information up and get rid of secretive guilds. In exchange for opening info up, the government grants a limited-time monopoly on it's application to the inventor/discoverer.

I think nontrivial inventions (like Apple's implementation of multitouch, which itself was made by 2 University of Delaware Professors who started the Fingerworks company which was bought by Apple) deserve protection and the people behind it deserve compensation. It wouldn't do to allow vultures to sit by the sidelines and just copy the invention after all the hard work is done.

But yeah, the copyright and patent systems has been extended, abused, and gone beyond all its original perimeters, as bureacracies are prone to do. But is the other extreme much better here? Patents should be reformed, but how?

Re:First Vote

[unity100]

so ?

Re:Pirate party???

[CastrTroy]

How about the Marijuana Party?