Pirata Sum (huh? why piratasum.com?)

Why piratasum.com?

"I am a pirate."

A strange thing to say; let me explain myself. I first bought the domain a few months ago as a joke because I thought it was cool. The English "iamapirate.com" was taken long ago, but I figured that the same Latin phrase would be open, and it was. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the domain, following a whim as I was, so I thought on it for a while and some ideas eventually formed in my mind.

When I was a young boy, I received a book called The Pirates, part of a Time-Life series on sailing ships, as a gift from my Grandfather. I poured over this book again and again while I was eating lunch, watching TV... anytime that I could be reading, I would be looking at it. This has had some consequences. Even today, I can probably identify 18th Century pirate flags at a glance. The seedy, dangerous, lonely world of the 18th century pirates fed my imagination for what counts as a long time in a boy's life. When I think of them now, they remind me most of my boyhood imaginary world, with its adventures and explorations.

Pirates were outlaws (when they were not working as mercenaries, privateers, for various national powers), hiding in plain sight on the expanse of the high seas or sneaking off to secluded coves to careen and provision their vessels, they spent a lot of time by and amongst themselves. Like all outlaws,  when pirates get romanticized they also become icons for the idea of the individual, the person who roams outside or even flouts the conventions of society. Steve Jobs gave a nod to the idea when he pushed  the original Macintosh team to "think different" by saying that "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy", back before his own overreaching got him fired from Apple.

When Johnny Depp was thinking about how to play Captain Jack Sparrow in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, he decided to play him like a 18th Century Keith Richards because he saw that this romantic image of individualism also played out best into some rock-star/celebrity image to reach a contemporary audience. Going back to the "real" pirates, Blackbeard used to go into battle with lit rags and firecrackers in his beard to make himself a fearsome sight that would get talked about in the waters where he operated.  This was a shock and awe strategy intended to scare his marks into laying down their weapons before they even met him on their deck. Blackbeard wanted to be known, and on this level, he was not much different from anyone who writes and puts the results before the public.

Today we hear almost daily about another sort of pirate, the software pirates. The term is commonly used for people who trade copyrighted digital media online but is probably better used for those who bypass DRM measures to make these works available for copying and distribution. These "pirates", and the attempts to stop their activities by certain corporations and industry associations, are the flashpoint for the intellectual property issues that we are trying to negotiate on a world-wide scale right now. A political movement that uses the name "pirate" has appeared on the world scene because of this conflict, and they use the word 'pirate' to indicate their sympathies: the various national Pirate parties and the Pirate Party International. The Pirate Party of Sweden, the first of the pirate parties, was founded on three aims: