I’m psyched to see that over the holiday weekend a US branch of the Pirate party was established, or at least got their website up and running.

I first read about the Pirate Party after it was first established in Sweden and made news in conjunction with thepiratebay.org’s trials, travails and public snubbing of US corporate bullying. My first thought was “Hell yes, but this party needs to be in the United States, the source of all unfair media restrictions, ridiculous copyright laws and all evils in between”. Thankfully and with hope, it has now arrived.

There’s not much going on yet and hopefully this won’t be one of those lame-ass, never off the ground, dead in the water, psuedo non-projects started mainly to garner attention. I find that really don’t care for the name, “Pirate Party”. While I understand the use and recent history concerning the term pirate in regards to digital media, it’s use is still to grey to me and given it’s historical connections with murder, theft and a whole mess of negative things, I question whether it’s appropriate for a party mainly concerned with copyright and usage reform. Sure it’s catchy, but in today’s buzzword-dependant media, amongst the non-7337, perhaps older and less media and tech savvy population, it sounds bad. Isn’t the whole purpose about freeing media, liberating ideas and fostering creativity? If so, why chose a word that denotes thievery?

Looking at the site, I was suprised to see that the pirate party also has branches in Belgium, Italy and France as well, which is great. I’d really like to see more countries join as well.