Despite its fanciful name, the Pirate Party is a real party founded in 2006 in Sweden to defend the copyrighted material distribution site called Pirate Bay, which was suffering fierce legal aggression.
It is called Pirata precisely to challenge the indiscriminate criminalization that was made, and continues to this day, against people who have a love for knowledge and believe that its free movement should not be hindered.
The Pirate Party’s struggle starts from the consideration that you can never really enter the Knowledge Society if it can be imprisoned well beyond the duration of a human life and marketed through privatives and licenses, as if it were any other physical product. Usually for the benefit of organizations that by their nature are uncontrollable democratically, such as publishers, collecting societies or patent companies.
Entities that do not work against social inequality, poverty and ignorance but with a mere economic benefit. It is the sharing of knowledge that has made progress possible.
The term pirate comes from the Greek peiran, which means to try, tempt, dare. None of Homer’s heroes would have been ashamed to be the son of such a pirate who boldly challenges his fortune. In fact, in the open sea there were neither fences nor borders, nor consecrated places nor sacral location, (…) neither right nor property. Many peoples remained in the mountains, far from the coasts, without ever losing the ancient pious fear of the sea. Virgil prophesied in the fourth egloga that in the happy age that was about to come navigation would no longer exist. Indeed, in a sacred text of our Christian faith, the Apocalypse of St John, we read of the new land, purified by sin, that on it there will be no more sea (…) Many lawyers belonging to land peoples are also aware of this fear of the sea. It is still found in some Spanish and even Portuguese authors of the 16th century. A famous Italian lawyer and humanist of this period, Alciato, argues that piracy is a crime with extenuating circumstances. “Pirate minus delinquit, quia in delinquit seas.” No law is valid at sea. (Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth).
We challenge the Information Society
Information was the main political product of the 1900s, long before politics itself realised its social value. All the parties that characterized the twentieth century, for better but above all for worse, were parties that built their power and sometimes their power with information and information. The interest that society has recently developed on the issues of information manipulation and fake news clearly shows how difficult it is to separate good information from its opposite.
We support the Knowledge Society
We can give an immediately understandable and very current example by talking about Radical Radio. For 40 years Radio Radicale has represented the possibility for Italian citizens to know the life of the institutions, all political parties and the main associations, the processes and every other significant aspect of Italian civil life. A task that he fulfilled with incredible self-denial by keeping the microphones open to make full and unhandled recordings of every aspect, even what the institutions, parties, associations would not have wanted him to hear. The motto of Radio Radicale is the Einaudian “Know to deliberate”. Know, don’t inform. Know. The world of information is based on a desire for intermediation, which is done right or done wrong is always a translation. Knowledge is the mother tongue of reality.