United States Pirate Party - Ideology

Ideology

Factions within the Pirate Party include left-libertarians, classical liberals, anarchists, progressives, and radical centrists. Many Pirates explicitly decline to identify with any particular political ideology or philosophy.

The Pirate Party's platform originally centered on issues of intellectual property. "Like its international counterparts, the USPP’s main practical concerns are digital intellectual property and privacy laws—specifically, the abolition of a 1998 digital U.S. copyright law, the reduction of copyrights to 14 years (from 95 years after publication, or 70 years after the author’s death), and the expiration of patents that don’t result in significant progress within four years (as opposed to 20 years)."

In 2012, the party began an expansion of its platform, inspired by the Pirate Wheel. The party emphasizes the cultural values of the hacker ethic, open source and free culture, strong protection of individual civil liberties, government transparency and participatory governance, and evidence-based policy.

As of 2013, the national Pirate Party has not adopted an agenda beyond a set of 8 core values. Individual state parties are given free rein to interpret these values and experiment with more concrete platforms. Pirate candidates from New York have interpreted these values to espouse co-operative economics, workplace democracy, and self-employment.