Pirate Party founded in Austria

The Piraten Partei Österreichs, the Pirate Party Austria has been founded and tries to participate in the next Austrian elections on October 1st. Therefore they still need 2600 supporters to officially sign a Unterstützungserklärung until August, the 25th.

Their program: free culture, protection of privacy and a reform of the patent system. The first Pirate Party was founded January 2006 in Sweden, and now this movement is spreading like wildfire all over Europe.

BTW: their website is mostly in German, but there is a one page English PDF document. It is a PDF with the text saved as an image. I had to manually retype it, so people with mobile phones, PDAs and other small screen devices can read it, too:

Pirate Party Austria

Pirate party?

Compared to the ongoing developments in the information society the state is reacting very slow to changes. Austria and the rest of Europe are following a rather dangerous path in terms of privacy, copyright and patent systems. Being part of a large international network, the newly born Austrian Pirate Party stands for human rights in the digital era.

What do we want?

Laws which are passing now and relate to IT are setting up our way in terms of cultural constitutional development for the next decades. Europe is now on a rather direct way to becoming a surveillance state. We want to avert that! Monopolies and patents are preventing innovation, progress, research and development which Europe is needing desperately to continue to compete on an international level.

Meanwhile the music industry is issuing tons of lawsuits which affect mainly young people and children. We demand the industry to stop making whole parts of the Austrian people to criminals!

Pirate Party Austria

www.ppoe.or.at