BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN : Alliance 90/The Greens
Note: This position paper was adopted by the Green Party of Germany at their recent convention of November 27, 2011. Thanks for the link goes to the techblog Techdirt, which notes:
The founding of the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006 was regarded by many as a joke. After all, the argument went, who would want to be associated with “pirates” or vote for such a narrow platform? This overlooked the fact that the traditional political parties had consistently ignored the concerns of voters who understood that the Internet raised important questions about areas such as copyright and privacy. By focusing on precisely those issues, the Pirate Party gave disaffected voters the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the old political parties and their outdated policies.
The U.S. lacks a Pirate Party, but the concerns of tech libertarians are at the cutting edge of intellectual property and freedom of speech issues around the world. The concerns of this paper are not uniquely German or European. We’re reposting the paper here because activists in the U.S. have a great deal of work to do to address copyright in particular, and digital rights in general in the Internet age.
Original via Techdirt. Translation by Google Translate. Original here.
Exploit the opportunities of the Internet – - openness, freedom, participation, making the digital transformation go green!
Our social cohabitation has changed fundamentally over the past 20 years. After the peaceful revolution and the end of the Cold War began with the pioneering development of the World Wide Web a more decisive phase of globalization. Since then, we find ourselves in an ongoing process of global democratization, have increased while at the same dangers of censorship and surveillance by state and private agencies rapidly. Increasing transparency and participation, which we are commanded by the possibilities of the Internet have changed society and politics around the world sustainably. The digitization of the educational landscape and access to knowledge for all is the challenge before us. There are now some two billion people on our planet online, only 60 million users inside of them in Germany. All these people have more or less free access to global knowledge resources, economic, social, political and cultural participation. They use, how we could find recently in North Africa and the Middle East, which they offered new ways of communicating, to demand more democracy and transparency and to introduce to document human rights abuses and to create a global public. In many dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the Internet – at least in part – the last voice and the only remaining bastion of freedom, even when individuals or state agencies through the manipulation of information, resources, pictures and videos to try another public through its propaganda . produce All this makes the Internet and the digital revolution of the largest media achievements since the invention of printing.
