Ever since my fifth birthday when my parents set up a little blow up pool in my back yard and everyone got those awesome scimitars and eye patches and we’d force the weak to walk the plank, plunging towards the imagined death of fabled sharks and alligators straight from the land of Pan, I had wanted to be a pirate. I didn’t intend on it actually happening though. But as of Sunday, Swedish Pirates have taken seats on the European Parliament!
Radiohead – You and Whose Army?
The Tough Alliance – The New School
It’s weird to think that only three months ago the Pirate Bay conspirators were sentenced in a Swedish court, citing “accessory to crimes against copyright laws” and given a jail sentence along with a hefty fine. To bad “justice” is a lumbering, stumbling Ent that can’t keep up with modern times.
(When is someone going to invent a program where all you have to do is type a list of all possible arguments for their respective side and a computer will use its synthetic logic to determine who has the stronger case. Something cooler than Will Smith’s I-Robot, with less gore than Robocop and more like Garry Kasparov’s battle royal with Deep Thought, just judicial and lawyeristic… Maybe then we could jail these hooligans running a muck on the interweb.)
If you haven’t heard, some political figures unrelated to the Pirate Bay (but strikingly similar in nomenclature), better know as The Pirate Party recently won an actual seat on European Parliament… Woot… Woot… Let’s give it up for our internet brethren.
Basically, all they want is freedom to follow their manifest destiny towards a new hope and a new frontier that resides inside the limitless circuitry of the interweb. I mean c’mon, it’s the only frontier our generation has, I sure as hell ain’t looking towards the ocean or outer space.
Unlike the U.S government who like to keep a low profile in the expanding world wide web, wikipedia gracefully cites these countries as “enemies of the internet”:
* Burma
* China
* Cuba
* Egypt
* Iran
* North Korea
* Saudi Arabia
* Syria
* Tunisia
* Turkmenistan
* Uzbekistan
* Vietnam
Given, some of these countries might need to focus a little more on their population’s overall quality of life before they start policing the internet, that still doesn’t drown the point that this thing everyone is on has no formal laws, and some people are scared.
Quoting a website in Swedish and translated by the good people at Wikipedia:
Since April 17 the Pirate Party has more than doubled in size, having over 48,000 members as of 28 May 2009, and is now the third largest political party in Sweden (member-wise, not speaking about seats in the parliament). Pirate Party’s youth organization, Ung Pirat, has more than 20,700 members, making it the largest political youth organization in Sweden.[update]
Why haven’t you gone band waggin jumping yet? I mean we do have a Pirate Party USA. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen now that there’s finally some people in power who have a state of mind comparable to the emerging generation’s.
Are you a Pirate? I know I live loosely around copyright; I understand the necessity of it, but I feel that the fat oligarchic rulers of entertainment have met their match in the form of a jumble of wires and a generation that grew up ruling those wires.
Here’s to the future!
“Fat oligarchic rulers of entertainment”?
Some of us are just independent musicians trying to survive while creating our art. Piracy has only made that survival more difficult.
Very informative entry, I love Glee! Can’t wait for the new episodes to hit the TV.