Swedes Have Elected Pirates to the European Parliament

Pirates – kind of over at this point, right?  I mean, the crushing defeat of those Somali pirates by the U.S. Navy earlier this year more or less proved that a ragtag bunch of mischief-makers with only a YouTube channel and a dream will always lose to multi-billion-dollar military-industrial juggernaut.  I thought that we had sort of pinpointed that as the time when pirates stopped being cool.

Sweden, however, is about two years behind America in pop culture relevance cycles, so pirates are sailing on pretty high seas over there now.  High enough, in fact, that Sweden’s newly-formed (2006) Pirate Party just won enough votes to secure 2 of Sweden’s 18 seats in the European Parliament.  Sweden, if you were wondering how far was too far to take that joke, that was it.  

With 99.9% of the districts counted the Pirates have 7.1 percent of the votes, beating several established parties. This means that the Pirate Party will get at least one, but most likely two of the 18 (+2) available seats Sweden has at the European Parliament.

When we asked Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge about the outcome, he told TorrentFreak: “We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails [nice]. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything.”

Say something piratey, dammit!  This is clearly what the people want.  Though it seems that the Pirate Party is less about the pirates that are the scourge of the seas and more about the pirates that are the scourge of Metallica.  According to its website, the party “only has three issues on its agenda.”  (Which seems pretty sorry, but when was the last time you cared about more than three things simultaneously?)

They are “reform of copyright law” so that no one can hold a copyright longer than five years, “an abolished patent system” so that no one can hold a patent at all, and “respect for the right to privacy.”  When the pirates take over, no one will get to own anything.

Source: TorrentFreak.