Pirates set sail in political waters under flag of online civil liberties

The internet was always going to be a transformative technology, but it wasn't until the arrival of Napster in 1999 that the full scope of its disruptive potential became obvious on a wider scale – the era of mass digital piracy was born, and the music business was the first to feel that disruption.

The repercussions from that disruption are still being felt, and in recent years the rise of the pirate has manifested in an unusual way - on ballot papers all across the world.

"Originally I didn't want to get elected, I just wanted politicians' attention for something I thought was important," says Rick Falkvinge, the 41-year-old Swedish IT entrepreneur who founded the original Pirate Party, the Swedish Piratpartiet, in 2006. To be clear, the policies he feels are important extend far beyond the issues of intellectual property rights that digital piracy have brought into stark relief; Falkvinge is determined to ensure the protection of our online civil liberties. How best to make politicians pay attention to these issues?

"I thought we could get their attention by making it personal to them, essentially challenging them over their jobs, on election day at the polls," he says. "That was a very effective way of getting their attention. One thing we learned is that you don't need a 51 per cent majority to set the direction of policy, you only need to take the job of one single politician, or even threaten to do so, to start affecting policy."

It was an approach that reaped almost immediate dividends, with the election of MEP Christian Engström in 2009 a measure of how fast the party established itself. Numerous similar parties were founded across Europe, under the umbrella of Pirate Parties International, and a member of the Czech Pirate Party was elected to parliament in 2012. As nascent political advocacy groups go, this is an impressive rate of development.

Falkvinge cuts an unlikely pirate - a round-faced redhead with a disarmingly polite demeanour, he builds his arguments in precise English with a rhythmic Scandinavian cadence. But the policy proposals he espouses sound very radical indeed - reforming copyright to cover only commercial activity, thereby legalising file-sharing, and reducing the copyright term to 20 years after creation, rather than the 70 years after the death of the author that is more common; abandoning the dysfunctional patent system; forbidding DRM; and ensuring online privacy.

"Either the copyright monopoly takes precedence, in which case you give up private communications as a concept, or we say that private communications is more important than a distribution monopoly for the entertainment industry. Nobody seems to stand up and realise these two things have become mutually exclusive," he explains. "The record industry in Ireland sued Eircom for the right to install wiretapping equipment in Eircom's core switches. A private industry demanded to wiretap an entire population. I mean, it's atrocious. That really puts the spotlight on the conflict between fundamental civil liberties and how some industries think they have a right to circumvent them."

That increasing conflict between authorities and incumbent industries on the one hand and the civil liberties that we take for granted in the real world on the other, whether under the guise of protecting copyright or protecting citizens, is an area on which Falkvinge and the party he created is doing critical work in the European Parliament.

"We are moving towards a society where government is opaque and the citizens are transparent," he says. "And you can observe through any point in history, anywhere on the planet, that societies where the citizenry has been transparent and government have conducted their business behind closed doors have been, shall we say, low-happiness societies. Where the opposite is true where you have accountability in government, where the government cannot hold the citizen accountable for how they vote, for the opinions they hold, have been the most progressive societies. We have a new tool that can be used either to hold governments more accountable than ever before possible, but they can also be used to build a Big Brother society that goes way beyond the dystopian fictions of the 1950s and 1960s. Which path we take depends on who takes control of this tool."

In some respects, the Pirate Party is not dissimilar to the early days of the Green Party - an ostensibly single-issue activist group that has seen many of its policy platforms become mainstream through its skilful use of political pressure at the polls.

But is there a risk that the Pirate Party label itself will be ultimately self-defeating? Pirates, by definition, take what is not theirs - for all the talk of the Pirate Party movement reappropriating the phrase from its pejorative roots, the association with piracy and the Pirate Bay site in particular potentially undermines their credibility on the larger issues they espouse.

Is there a sense that the party's immediate success was due to appealing to people who feel a sense of entitlement to enjoy other people's work without remunerating them? Falkvinge dismisses the notion: "That would feel logical at first glance, but when you look at the numbers, you realise that's not true. Pirates, people who share a lot of culture, time and time again are also those who spend the most money on culture."

Falkvinge, as more activist than politician, can afford to take absolutist positions on these issues, and he doesn't always have to accommodate otherwise unavoidable realities in forming his arguments. Some of the analogies he uses to illustrate his points, how the mass surveillance of old-fashioned letters was unthinkable while the mass surveillance of email is becoming common practice, for instance, are potent, but don't quite map accurately.

Ultimately, the ease of mass digital reproduction means that the underlying principles of information transfer are being challenged in a very tangible way. "That may be the case," says Falkvinge, "but it must not be up to the incumbents alone to determine whatever the new principles should be."

Making sure that citizens have a say in how those principles are developed will be a key goal for Falkvinge and his colleagues in the coming years. The pirate disruption, it seems, might be just beginning.