pirate party

Throughout the often hectic decade-long rise of mainstream file-sharing,many great characters have come to the forefront.

There can be few digital news-consuming netizens to whom the founders of The Pirate Bay are complete strangers, and for those with a political slant, Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge is always captivating and thought provoking.

It’s almost six years since Rick Falkvinge decided to enter politics and found the first Pirate Party in Sweden.

The Party quickly gained the interest of the mainstream media and at the Swedish general elections in the same year it became the third largest party outside parliament.

Inspired by this success, Pirate parties were founded in dozens of other countries.

In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels.

The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed.

TorrentFreak catches up with the soon-to-be youngest MEP to hear about her plans and expectations.

In June 2009 the Swedish Pirate Party gained an impressive victory in the European Parliament elections.

With 7% of the vote, the party earned a seat in the European Parliament, with the possibility for a second if the Lisbon Treaty passed.

It's an argument often made here at Techdirt: file sharers aren't always just leeches on the underside of content creators.

Very often, they are true music fans constantly patrolling the cutting edge of music.

Soon after Sweden’s controversial IPRED legislation became law in 2009, five book publishers coordinated by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån handed a request for information to a local court.

This first test of IPRED was designed to get the personal identifying details of a subscriber who allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books on his server, 27 of which breached the publishers’ copyrights.

For years, we've covered how GEMA, the German music collection society, has a habit of demanding royalties for Creative Commons music it has no rights over.

We've heard of it happening multiple times, and now it's happened again, and the details are even more ridiculous than usual.

In this case, a music festival/dance party in Leipzig planned to use only Creative Commons music.

Running from the 3rd to 6th November, Gamex is Sweden’s biggest gaming show.

All the big names in interactive entertainment are there showing off their wares, including giants such as Activision, Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Nintendo.

One group that will not be there, however, are the Swedish Pirate Party.

Last month, a Swedish court heard the case against a woman accused of sharing 45,000 music tracks online. No other personal file-sharing case in the country had ever considered so many alleged infringements.

The case dated back to the 58-year-old’s alleged actions in 2007, although it took a full year after IFPI’s investigation for her house to be visited by authorities.

During the search a Direct Connect client was found installed on a computer, complete with logs which were later shown to contain entries backing up IFPI’s investigation.

This week the German Pirate Party reached an impressive milestone as it hit double digits in the polls for the national elections.

With one in ten Germans embracing the ideas of the young party, the Pirates are on course to gain serious influence in one of the world’s major political arenas.