An update to my previous post about the Swedish Pirate Party growing after the Pirate Bay verdict.
The voting results has the Pirate Party winning roughly 7% of the votes in Sweden, which will allow them to gain 2 seats in the upcoming EU parliament. According to reports from Sweden, the party did quite well among the young, receiving around 19% of voters under 30. From a US perspective those numbers may not seem too significant but in a proportional representative system, it’s actually very, very good for an upstart party, although the usual caveats about the general disinterest in EU voting certainly applies. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that outrage among young Swedes over the Pirate Bay verdict did indeed cause a reaction. Whether or not the 2 Pirate Party representatives in Strassbourg can make a difference among the 725 other MEP’s remains to be seen, but if the copyright lobby expects to continue its crusade against file-trading without opposition, both legal and otherwise, they may be in for a rude awakening.
See Torrentfreak for more detailed coverage and discussion.
Catch more of Bruce’s blog thoughts at Digitalwerks.
It’s not just about the Pirate Bay. It’s very much about civil liberties and the laws introduced lately in Sweden that gives a civil authority the right to monitor and analyse all electronic communication that passes Swedish borders, and soon we will need to implement the European data retention directive too. This has created a lot of discontent.
So to a large part this can be seen as a fight for the right to privacy and civil liberties.