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"Instead of simply recommending that you sodomize yourself with a retractable baton, let me recommend a specific model the ASP 21 inch. The previous lawyers tried to use a cheaper brand, but it broke during the action."
From a post on the BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay, in response to a cease-and-desist letter from Apple Computer, dated April 21, 2005
For the past few years, the operators of the popular Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay have taken an unusual approach to the countless letters they receive from the world's entertainment lawyers. They have subjected them to public ridicule.
"I'm not currently out of toilet paper, so you may wait a while before sending legal papers," the website responded to one legal threat from Warner Music International's lawyers. Attorneys for the record label of the metal band Disturbed even found themselves billed for their cease-and-desist letter's addition to the website's legal threats section: "Our standard web publishing fee is 10E (or USD 15) per e-mail . . . If you decide to continue using our web publishing services, ask us about our great bulk rates!"
As amusingly juvenile as this nose-thumbing might be, the jokes took a pause on the morning of May 31. At 11 a.m., some sixty-five Swedish police officers raided the site's headquarters in Stockholm, detaining its founders and confiscating its servers. In the U.S., such a raid likely would have spelled the end for a website that brazenly claims to be the web's largest bit tracker. In Sweden, it meant only a brief vacation. (Laws there remain ambiguous toward torrent trackers like The Pirate Bay, which do not host copyright-infringing material, but merely help users locate it on each other's computers.) A mere five days after the bust, The Pirate Bay came back online in flamboyant fashion, adding the outline of a fiery phoenix to its pirate-shaped logo. It has remained running ever since.
While police busts more often end political careers than launch them, the Stockholm-based Pirate Party may be the exception. Until the raid, the Pirate Party was largely unknown outside Sweden, where it had been founded only months earlier. While Sweden is a notorious hub for file-sharing — one cultural
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If it were possible to combine communism with libertarianism, the Pirate Party might be the result — there'll be booty for all, matey! The party argues for consumer rights and privacy protections, yet just as enthusiastically seeks to abolish patents on pharmaceuticals, such as AIDS drugs.
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minister even admitted to sharing music on a daily basis — few Swedes regarded file-sharing as a political act.
Then came the raid. Swedish media revealed a series of letters from the MPAA to Swedish ministers that may have inspired the raid, raising the question of whether Swedish politicians lobbied the police to conduct the raid. Such an action would be illegal under Swedish law, and the government denies it. In any case, illegal file-sharing was transformed from a morally dubious pastime into a protest against Yankee imperialism. On its relaunch, The Pirate Bay's traffic doubled. Pirate Party membership rapidly surpassed that of the Green Party, which holds nineteen seats in Parliament.
At the same time, the international media discovered the Pirate Party's thirty-four-year-old founder, Rick Falvinge, an IT entrepreneur and former Microsoft project leader. Neatly dressed with clean-cut blonde hair, Falvinge projects more legitimacy than the greasy-haired, afternoon-rising young hackers associated with the Pirate Bay. Like most of his fellow Pirate Party officials, Falvinge isn't a black-clad anarchist, but a staid-looking internet geek with little previous political experience. As a well-spoken outsider, Falvinge may be the perfect midwife for a political party that lies outside the usual political discourse, yet is anything but a fringe movement.
Nevertheless, the Party performed disappointingly in Sweden's recent national elections, garnering only a little over half a percentage point. Bo Leuf, a lumberjack-looking candidate on the Pirate Party ticket and the author of The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web points out that the party had been founded only months earlier, and that competing parties like the Greens and the Social Democrats quickly reconsidered their stance on intellectual property once the Pirate Party entered the fray. But his real enthusiasm stems from a recent survey of Swedish high school students, showing widespread support for the Pirate Party. Come 2009, when the Pirate Party runs for the European Union, the file-sharing generation will be able to vote.
"Time," Leuf predicts, "is on our side."
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