Luke Leighton
Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for South West Surrey
As a Software Engineer I understand and deal with complex issues, how to investigate them and how to explain them, clearly. As a Free Software developer, I understand the critical importance of "The Internet", and I also understand the increasingly large role that Software is playing to underpin the foundations of modern societies. Thus, I appreciate that whoever controls that Software effectively controls a country's infrastructure. Thus, in effect, the Pirate Party is reminding people of the importance of National Sovereignty and National Security, through something as "nebulous" and "intangible" as "Intellectual Property" and "Copyright".
It doesn't just end there: there are several other areas where Copyright and "Intellectual Property" impinge on peoples' lives, such as attempts to create and own food. Genetically Modified foods, aside from being incredibly dangerous, are usually patented and are considered to be "owned". Thus, by letting GM crops (patented by a foreign corporation) into our borders, a foreign power has the right to claim ownership of crops with which the GM foods cross-pollinate!
Our lives are deeply affected by these nebulous issues which we cannot touch, because they are just "ideas". However, if you look at the synonyms for the words "Intellectual Property", you come up with the phrase "Intelligence Enslavement". Thus, the purpose of "Intellectual Property" is to use the force of law to continue slavery by a different means - and we believed slavery ended over a Century ago.
So the issues that the Pirate Party are raising aren't just about "The Right To Copy Some Music", it goes much deeper than that, and that's why I'm standing as a candidate, to raise people's awareness of these incredibly deep-rooted problems that we face, as Global Corporatism gains more and more power, justified in the name of "profit".