Rick Falkvinge, leader and founder of Sweden’s Pirate Party, was elected to the European Parliament last Sunday.  He will hold one of Sweden’s 18 seats in the legislative body of the European Union. 

The Pirate Party’s goals are to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected.   It has gained support after the sentencing of four founders of Pirate Bay, a Swedish filesharing site, to jail in April (see “Pirate Bay Founders Get Jail”). 

The Party’s proposals on copyright law include the dramatic shortening of the copyright period and legalization of non-commercial copying and filesharing.  Here’s the text of the Party’s copyright law proposal:

Reform of copyright law

The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

For another view on the Pirate Party’s proposal, see this commentary from CCP CMO Ryan Dancey (see “Ryan Dancey on Pirates and Copyrights”).