Of course, since the US is not a parliamentary democracy, our Pirate
Party would have to be much larger than the Swedish Pirate Party to
have a significant effect on our elections (except perhaps by
splitting the vote as Nader is supposed to have done). That, or it
would have to be concentrated in a single state so that it can put
representatives and senators in Congress, as the Free State Project
<http://freestateproject.org/> hopes to do for libertarianism.
This is a fundamental problem with the way our government is
structured, and not something that looks easy to fix.
~Nelson~
On 8/1/06, Elizabeth Stark <estark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> We have the potential to do just this...if we so desire. (See below.)
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1996840,00.asp
>
> The Politics of Piracy Emerge in Sweden
> We could feel the ripple effect here, too.
> John Dvorak - PC Magazine
>
> July 31 -
>
> Overlooked by the major media is the weird situation in Sweden, where a
> political party and lobbying organization has cropped up with the sole purpose
> of overturning the current crop of copyright and patent laws and creating
> something more modern and realistic: the Pirate Party and the Pro Piracy
> Lobby.
> This movement, while unlikely to have any effect in the U.S., could change
> things so dramatically in parliamentary democracies that we'd feel the
> aftershock anyway.
>
> This all began with the recent shutdown of The Pirate Bay, a famous
> quasi-legal
> Web site run out of Sweden. The Pirate Bay has been playing various games with
> the government over the past year, moving its server around. The site can best
> be described as the Napster of BitTorrent sites, one of a few mega-sites where
> kids manage their P2P file sharing. It's used mostly for music and movie
> trading in violation of copyright, and everyone knows it. But under Swedish
> law, it may not be doing this illegally. It's a middleman.
>
> Apparently various record industry interests (and movie folks, too) put a
> bunch
> of leverage on the Swedes to shut these folks down. But the Swedish system of
> such law enforcement is arcane and apparently not effective against an
> operation like this, since it is in a legal gray area. Enter Uncle Sam.
>
> The U.S. government, after getting a bunch of complaints from Hollywood and
> the
> record industry, allegedly threatened Sweden (though some diplomatic channel),
> telling the country that it would be blacklisted in the World Trade
> Organization if it didn't shut down the Pirate Bay once and for all. Of
> course,
> there would have been a huge fuss in Europe if Sweden was indeed blacklisted,
> and a trade war would have ensued, so I doubt the threat was serious. After
> all, the WTO's main purpose is preventing trade wars. And we must have our
> Volvos. Nonetheless, that's the way the story has been played in the news, and
> the idle youth of Sweden—and now, perhaps, all of Europe—are politicizing
> around the issue.—Continue reading...
>
> Let me tell you something. You do not want youth politicizing. Not that the
> kids
> shouldn't take part in politics. You just don't want to get them all jacked up
> over an issue like this. There are lots of them. They often have a lot of
> spare
> time. En masse they can ruin things for the "establishment." Luckily, they
> tend
> to be lazy and cynical and seldom take to the streets or the ballot.
>
> Well, it looks like the boneheads in Hollywood and the RIAA, along with
> onerous
> new copyright laws such as the DMCA and other restrictions, are triggering
> change. I'd be cautious. Today's youth internationally are not like anything
> we've seen before. Their view of the world is skewed by the media and new
> realities. When they see all these restrictions, they see them done on behalf
> of fat guys who are flying around in private jets with a cabin full of
> high-class hookers while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. They see
> rappers in limos wearing diamonds and having their teeth removed and replaced
> with gold for no apparent reason other than to spend the suckers' money. They
> see mega-yachts and homes that are the size of a small college all bought and
> sold on the backs of the kids buying music. Indeed, they are seeing a
> different
> world than most of us did when we were growing up. It's nuts. It looks unfair
> or, worse, exploitative.
>
> Then they see old ladies arrested for copyright violations because a grandkid
> downloaded a song. Dead people are indicted in hysterical sweeps. Kids are
> threatened with ruination for song-swapping.
>
> They're not going to put up with it for long, I can assure you. While I think
> any outrage will fall short of storming the compounds of the rich and burning
> their homes, once the next-generation youth finally figure out that they can
> take over at the ballot box, all hell will break loose.
>
> In a parliamentary system, a group like the Pirate Party, which will quickly
> surpass Sweden's Green Party, doesn't have to win a majority of seats to have
> an effect. In multiparty systems (unlike in the U.S.), you have to form
> coalitions to rule, and all sorts of deals are made for anything to get done.
> And I suspect that a lot of older politicos are tired of being pushed around
> by
> U.S. intellectual-property monopolists and would love to side with the Pirate
> Party on the excuse that they "had to."
>
> Links to the current situation are on my blog here. To American ears, this all
> seems and sounds silly. But the moniker for the Pirate Party in Swedish,
> Piratpartiet, actually has a nice ring to it.
>
> I'm not sure how far any of this will go, and perhaps this new up-and-coming
> youth culture will get caught up in chat rooms or online games or green-tea
> cultivation instead of fighting this fight. But this much I can tell you: If
> they decide to make a fight of it, they'll win, and things will indeed change.
> Stay tuned.
>
>
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