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Anastasia Balezdrova

"Yo-ho-ho! And a bottle of rum! "I do not know about you, but when I hear the word pirates I always think of men with shabby clothes, teeth rotten from chewing tobacco, often with a missing leg or arm, with the typical pirate hat and a bottle of their favorite rum in hand, looking for the treasure of Captain X on a remote island. In recent years we have started talking again about pirates, but they do not even remotely resemble the characters from my favourite children's books.

Today's pirates are among us, they are interested in the things that affect our contemporary daily lives and have ideas on how to change them. The first pirate party in the world was established in Sweden six years ago. Since then pirate parties have been established in 56 countries worldwide, and 21 of them are now officially recognized. In Europe they have already elected two Members of the European Parliament, 15 Members of the local Parliaments and 194 municipal councilors. A few days ago in the Greek media the news appeared that the establishment of a Pirate Party is also expected in the country. GRReporter contacted Anestis Samurkasidis, owner of an e-commerce company, who explained what drove the pirate flag to the warm Mediterranean.

The idea of ​​creating this party is not new in Greece. As early as 2009 a group of people, very few of whom are current members of the party, began working on the idea for the creation of a Pirate Party in Greece following the model of that in Sweden. But the organization of early elections in October 2009 and the fears that someone might try to take advantage of it led them to freeze its activities. Despite the initial enthusiasm, they let their initiative fall apart.

Interest in it was renewed after the election of 15 Pirates in the Abgeordnetenhaus of the Land Berlin. "So many different people, who accidentally found one another on the Internet began to organize," said Anestis. After two meetings were held in Athens and Thessaloniki three of the members participated in the congress of the German Pirate Party in Offenbach. "There we met with representatives of the International Pirate Party and Pirates from the Czech Republic, Russia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Holland and Germany of course." In April this year the Greek pirates will attend the next annual Congress of the International Pirate in Prague, in which their fellows in ideas from at least 30 countries will participate.

Pirate Parties are united around the three main ideas set in the platform of the first political formation, founded in Sweden. They are: reforming the laws on intellectual property, trademarks, patents and design protection. Within the preparation for the elections for European Parliament in 2014 the International Pirate Party has decided to summarize the principles of the parties in each country. "Some of the principles exist in all countries and others in individual cases. Reforming copyright law exists in 20 European countries. Protection of privacy, data protection and opposition to any kind of piracy prosecution interests the Pirate parties in 19 countries. Changing the law on patents interests the parties in 18 countries, transparency in the public sector - also in 18 countries. A more direct democracy is a fundamental principle of the Pirate parties in ten countries, open data and the use of open source software - in 14 countries, the independence of the Internet - in 10 countries, opposition to censorship - in 8 countries, free and democratic training - in 7 countries, the protection of informers, journalists and bloggers - in 6 countries, including Greece. We stand for creating a law that will protect these people and others, such as an employee in a company who would be willing to provide information about illegal actions of the company against the public. Four Pirate parties in Europe raise questions related to environmental protection, four others - about the main income of people, and we get to the example of the Finnish Pirate Party, which wants the abolition of the system for daylight saving time."

The Greek Pirate Party has inevitably added a nuance to these ideas associated with the economic situation in the country. "Everyone we spoke to during those 2-3 months, said, 'Great, all this is very interesting, but what will happen with the economy?". So we prepared a special text in which we explain that our ideas also have an economic effect. In our opinion if there is transparency in the country, it would be able to provide one-fourth of the revenue which it is currently losing from tax evasion. I.e. If there was no corruption the country could collect another 15 billion euro annually. Therefore we want the government to be fully transparent and the citizen - completely non-transparent". The motto of the Greek pirates is for the citizen to be completely free and for nobody to be dealing with his personal data and beliefs, for him not to be followed, to not have filters installed on his computer, to not be punished for writing subtitles for a movie. "We came to such a foolish action on the issue of copyright. About a month ago police seized a 28-year-old who wrote the subtitles for an American film and uploaded them somewhere. This action was considered an infringement of the copyright of that particular company".