Politics of piracy goes global

The politics of piracy is on the march. What began in Sweden last January as a political statement by a few hundred BitTorrent advocates has now spread to the United States, France, Belgium and Italy. What does the party stand for? "The government should encourage, rather than smother, creativity and freedom."

But this is not such an easy concept to translate into the thicket of local politics. And so, each of the national Pirate Parties has developed a specific platform. The Swedish branch, which claims more than 7,300 members and is actively campaigning in the country's national elections in September, pledges to suspend copyright protection five years after the creation of a particular work, the abolition of patents and the eradication of pesky surveillance cameras. The French party has six demands at launch, including complete freedom of speech; the right to use the internet anonymously; the legalisation of peer-to-peer networks when not used for profit and the removal of taxes on blank CDs. In the US, the Pirate Party has also added the thorny issue of "net neutrality" to its charter. The Italians, meanwhile, are particularly agitated by digital rights management.

With talk of telcos prioritising the traffic that comes across their network and the near-ubiquitous installation of DRM controls on most digital devices, the formation of political parties to preserve consumer's rights was destined to happen. The first big show of their political strength will come in Sweden in September. The Swedish Pirate Party is looking to attract at least 4 per cent of the popular vote to gain a voice in parliament and install its platform of "shared culture, free knowledge and a protected private life."

The rest of the world's pirates will be watching.