An update to my previous post about the Swedish Pirate Party growing after the Pirate Bay verdict.
The results from voting today has the Pirate Party winning roughly 7% of the votes in Sweden, which will allow them to gain 2 seats in the upcoming EU parliament. According to reports from Sweden, the party did quite well among the young, receiving around 19% of voters under 30. From a US perspective those numbers may not seem too significant but in a proportional representative system, it’s actually very, very good for an upstart party, although the usual caveats about the general disinterest in EU voting certainly applies. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that outrage among young Swedes over the Pirate Bay verdict did indeed cause a reaction. Whether or not the 2 Pirate Party representatives in Strassbourg can make a difference among the 725 other MEP’s remains to be seen, but if the copyright lobby expects to continue its crusade against file-trading without opposition, both legal and otherwise, they may be in for a rude awakening.
See Torrentfreak for more detailed coverage and discussion.
Ernesto at Torrentfreak recently reported that membership in the Swedish Pirate Party is skyrocketing after the recent Pirate Bay trial that resulted in a guilty verdict for the Bay, but also uncovered a number of disturbing facts about the prosecution and the trial judge’s impartiality. In previous life, I used to study European party politics, so I had to comment, as this strikes me as somewhat silly but also not without some possible real ramifications. Despite the membership gains, the Swedish Pirate Party is unlikely to actually disrupt the party landscape in as mature a political system as Sweden, but the particular timing of the trial does really work in the Pirates’ favor. The next notable election for Sweden is for the EU parliament, something that many, many Europeans do not consider of much importance, at least in relation to local and national elections. Not surprisingly, EU voting has been used for protests in the past, to focus on specific interests rather than traditional party differences. If the Pirate Party can translate their current momentum into enough actual votes to get representatives into the EU parliament, it would do a lot to get the word out on precisely the kind of copy-left, filesharing, network neutrality that the Pirate Bay has promoted for years, and it would do so via far more mainstream avenues than in the past. Obviously the Pirate Party would not wield any tangible power, but it would be quite a propaganda coup, and would, just as with the trial, create another strong platform for the proponents of a vastly different copyright landscape than than supported by the MPA’s, BREIN’s and IFPI’s of the world.