Sweden has a Pirate Party! Seriously! Not like, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, but like, a real honest-to-goodness political party with enough votes to be on the next generation election! They're campaigning to get the 225,000 votes necessary to have a member in Parliament. Wow. Pirate Party! They must be super duper bored over there.
Found it via this Wired article. The short version is that when sites like SuprNova got shut down, The Pirate Bay, operating from Sweden, eventually became the only torrent tracker left standing. They still exist because linking to copyrighted materials has not been ruled illegal in Sweden the way it has been elsewhere. (Hm, so am I breaking the law by linking to a site that links to copyrighted materials? I figure if Wired can, so can I. :P)
And so now there is apparently a big battle over copyright vs privacy, etc., in Sweden. The stuff that only Internet geeks care about here, a significant proportion of the population cares about over there, enough to have their own Pirate Party!
Comments (2)
arrrrrr matey.
actually you know pirates are probably the ones who are going to be least swayed by big biz when it comes down to meeting rubber and road. perhaps a good idea?
Posted by badxmaru | March 14, 2006
Posted on March 14, 2006
Only reason that there can be a pirate party in sweden is because its the country with most% broadband users... All download in that country
Posted by yeah | July 17, 2006
Posted on July 17, 2006