Pirate Party Wants To Host The Pirate Bay From Inside The Swedish Parliament

Politics

from the will-access-be-blocked-now? dept

No matter how you feel about The Pirate Party of Sweden, you do have to give them credit for knowing how to make a statement. Back in May, we noted that the Swedish Pirate Party had agreed to start hosting The Pirate Bay. Despite what many believe, The Pirate Bay and The Pirate Party are two totally separate entities, so this bringing them together in some form was a bit of a surprise. However, it looks like The Pirate Party is taking this effort a step further to make its point clear: it wants to host The Pirate Bay from inside the Swedish Parliament. Of course, to do that it needs to win some seats in the September election, and it’s not clear if it will be able to do so (even if it has won seats in the EU Parliament).

The idea of hosting it from Parliament is that apparently the Swedish constitution has a clause that gives “Parliamentary Immunity” in any lawsuit, for actions that were part of a political mandate, and thus it would effectively shield itself from the laws by embedding itself within Parliament. The party’s platform is also probably going to get some attention for taking extreme positions like making lawsuits against non-commercial file sharers illegal. Ditto for suing service providers who are merely linking to copyrighted material.

Obviously, no one expects most of these platform issues to become law, but the idea is to highlight how the entertainment industry has effectively done the same thing, using the law to prop up its own business model, outlaw perfectly reasonable activities and generally try to shield themselves with politicians. While it does feel quite a bit like a big publicity stunt, for a party like The Pirate Party, that’s often what it needs to do to get attention.

In all of this, there is a serious and very real point, though, that many will probably miss. This isn’t about “getting stuff for free.” There are very real economic consequences to constantly outlawing technological innovation:

“Sweden has long been a nation at the forefront of IT. But we have fallen in the rankings, largely because today’s politicians do not see the connection between file-sharing culture and future industry skills. We have now moved from place form place three to eight in available household bandwidth…. We can never accept the copyright industry’s way of systematically and legally harassing anyone who tries to build next-generation industries. The approach is criminal in the world and should be criminal in Sweden also, professional saboteurs are professional criminals, whoever they get their money from,”

Copyright system defenders will, undoubtedly, scoff at this claim, but it is making an important point. If the copyright industries had their way, all sorts of important technologies that it deemed awful “pirate” technologies would never have existed. Player pianos, radio, the VCR, mp3 players. It’s incredibly shortsighted of the industry to keep working so hard to try to ban the technology that may become the next huge innovation that drives more and more revenue for the industry.

Filed Under: pirate party
Companies: the pirate bay