Pirate Politics

An examination of the Pirate political movement in Europe analyzes its advocacy for free expression and the preservation of the Internet as a commons. The Swedish Pirate Party emerged as a political force in 2006 when a group of software programmers and file-sharing geeks protested the police takedown of The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing search engine. The Swedish Pirate Party, and later the German Pirate Party, came to be identified with a “free culture” message that came into conflict wit