The Swedish Pirate Party (Piratpartiet), a political party whose main platforms include copyright and patent reform, have recently taken their efforts one step further and have launched an ISP (internet service provider). Dubbed “Pirate ISP,” the service seeks to offer anonymity to its users and to provide financial assistance to Piratpartiet.
Born out of the controversy surrounding the BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, Pirate ISP was deemed necessary to ensure that competition flourished in the Swedish ISP market and that users who wished to file-share would be protected against the efforts of the Swedish anti-piracy lobby group, Svenska Antipiratbyrån. The piracy topic has been a hot-button issue in Sweden over the past several years, stemming from the popularity of The Pirate Bay as a source for copyrighted material. Because of the growth of the website, the United States government, along with trade associations the MPAA and the RIAA, have pressured Sweden and their ISPs to take action against file-sharing. This resulted in the 2006 raid of the website’s Stockholm location by Swedish police, which put the site offline for three days.
The issue of file-sharing is not just a heated matter for Sweden, however. Various countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (among others) have adopted their own political parties in order to attempt reform of copyright and patent law. According to the Swedish Pirate Party’s website, “The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.”
So it seems this isn’t just about being able to get free stuff on the internet, but about policy reform and privacy. Many would argue that copyright has been perverted over the years, through abuse from large corporations. In addition, the market for internet service providers has become a near-monopoly in most countries and freedom of choice has been severely limited not only by lack of infrastructure, but also lobbying efforts on the parts of major telecom companies who posses a stranglehold on the market in many cities.
Personally, I would welcome this kind of change to our system in the United States if for nothing more than open debate of the issues, something we as a country are severely lacking.
