Pirate Party International

[[NOTE: this article was originally copied/transferred from Wikipedia on Sept. 26 2010]





Pirate Parties International (PPI) is the political international of the Pirate Party movement. It was formally founded in 2010 at the PPI conference in Brussels, Belgium.

Aims
The PPI statutes give its purposes as: "to help establish, to support and promote, and to maintain communication and co-operation between pirate parties around the world."

The PPI also has goals of raising awareness of, spreading and unifying the pirate movement through coordination, information-sharing, and assisting in the foundation of new pirate parties.

History
The first Pirate party was the Swedish Piratpartiet, founded on January 1, 2006. They opposed seeing the developing world starve because the developed world refuses to share its intellectual property. Other parties and groups were formed in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. In 2007, representatives of these parties met in Vienna, Austria to form an alliance and plan for the 2009 European Parliament elections. Further conferences were held in 2008 in Berlin and Uppsala, the latter leading to the "Uppsala Declaration" of a basic platform for the elections.

In September 2008, Andrew Norton (United States) was appointed as coordinator of the PPI collective. In August 2009 he stepped down and passed the function of coordinator over to the "coreteam" lead by Patrick Mächler and Samir Allioui.

On 18 April 2010 the Pirate Parties International was formally founded in Brussels at the PPI Conference from April 16 to 18.

Structure
The PPI is governed by a board, led by two co-chairs. The current co-chairmen of PPI are Gregory Engels and Jerry Weyer. Policy, govenance, and applications for membership is the responsibility of the PPI's general assembly, which must meet at least once per year.

Pirate Party movement worldwide
Outside Sweden, pirate parties have been started in over 40 countries, inspired by the Swedish initiative.