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The Swedish-based Pirate Party is the most popular political affiliation for people under 30 in that nation, and is now recognized by most European nations as a legitimate party. The party claims it’s main platform is the end of “copyright monopoly” — what big entertainment calls “intellectual property infringement.”
“If [copyright infringement] was theft and it was property, we wouldn’t need a copyright law, ordinary property laws would suffice,” founder Rick Falkvinge told the Guardian in a recent interview. He is partially correct — intellectual property is a slippery thing; once an idea, invention, orbit of art is out in the public sphere, it is no longer exclusively the property of the artist, his estate, or the big conglomerate that probably claims ownership (worse, they have begun trying to snap up IP that is not theirs, including material already in public domain [spurring a recent court case where the Supreme Court found public domain works could be recopywritten.])
Here’s the problem: once an idea is out in the public sphere, people will use it as they wish. You cannot, for instance, control the use of a popular song — once people can hum, play, or sing it for themselves, it’s not really property anymore. You hope people will be honest enough to attribute the work to the proper folks, but as someone who has had my material show up — uncredited — on the internet, you can’t do too much. I recognize that anything I throw up on the web is no longer mine.
More important than the copyright issue, the Pirate party shows a trend that I’m seeing in young folks here in the United States, and in other countries: pirates are part of a greater struggle — the main ideological struggle of the 21st Century, I would suggest — between crony-authoritarianism and individual freedoms. We see it in the libertarian-based arguments pushing the Republicans (unwillingly) toward fiscal conservatism over the central planning of Progressivism. We see it in the SOPA/PIPA fight. We see it in the vast pushes in the US for more self-defense rights over the British “wait for the police and hopefully we’ll get there before you bleed out” model. We see it in the youth movements in the Middle East which are being perverted by authoritarian religious fanatics. Most especially we see it in the battle for free use and speech on the internet — perhaps the most liberating, democratizing, and for that reason, dangerous to centralized authority (be it corporate or governmental) technology since the printing press.
