With his polished shoes, and formal three-piece pinstriped suit, Rick Falkvinge looks like the kind of man you might meet to discuss your tax affairs, or the finer points of your investment portfolio.
Not radical politics. Or illegal file-sharing. Or revolutionary e-currencies that may destroy the global banking system. Although sipping a soy latte in the Stockholm cafe that he calls his office, Falkvinge has the air of a successful corporate lawyer. He’s actually the founder and chief ideologue of Europe’s youngest, boldest, and fastest growing political movement: the Pirate Party.
The Pirates are a political force that have come out of nowhere. Dreamed up by Falkvinge in 2006, they’re an offshoot of the underground computer activist scene and champion digital transparency, freedom and access for all. In three years, they gained their first seat in the European parliament (they now have two) and became the largest party in Sweden for voters under 30. Since then they’ve gained political representation in Germany and swept large parts of Europe.
photo: REUTERS
What they’ve done is to use technology in new ways to harness political power. Falkvinge describes how “we’re online 24/7,” how they operate in what he calls “the swarm” — nobody is in charge, and nobody can tell anybody else what to do — and how, essentially, they are the political embodiment of online activist culture.
The Pirates are geekdom gone mainstream and Falkvinge is the Julian Assange-style figurehead. A leading player in a fight for digital freedom that last week, came to a dramatic head when the US Congress prepared to vote on the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), and Wikipedia, supported by the likes of Google, led a 24-hour blackout of the Internet.
The legislation has, temporarily at least, been shelved, but Falkvinge is unequivocal about the gravity of the threat. The law would have given US courts the right to crack down on internet sites anywhere in the world and to monitor anybody’s private communications. It is, he claims, nothing less than an attack on fundamental human rights.
photo: AFP
“We’re at an incredible crossroads right now. They’re demanding the right to wiretap the entire population. It’s unprecedented. This is a technology that can be used to give everybody a voice. But it can also be used to build a Big Brother society so dystopian that if someone had written a book about it in the 1950s, it would have been discarded as unrealistic.”
The creeping attempts at legislation are down to the power of what he calls the “copyright monopoly,” and although the US record industry and Hollywood studios view file-sharing sites as theft, and this week succeeded in having the founders of one site, Megaupload.com, charged with racketeering, Falkvinge is clear that it’s no such thing.
“It’s not theft. It’s an infringement on a monopoly. If it was theft and it was property, we wouldn’t need a copyright law, ordinary property laws would suffice.” Nor does he have any truck with the argument that file-sharing hurts art and artists.
“It’s just not true. Musicians earn 114 percent more since the advent of Napster. The average income per artist has risen 66 percent, with 28 percent more artists being able to make a living off their hobby. What is true is that there’s an obsolete middle market of managers. And in a functioning market, they would just disappear.”
But in any case, he says, it’s not about the economy or creativity. “What it boils down to is a privileged elite who’ve had a monopoly on dictating the narrative. And suddenly they’re losing it. We’re at a point where this old corporate industry thinks that, in order to survive, it has to dismantle freedom of speech.”
Young demographic
These are rights, he says, which the younger generation takes for granted and become incensed about when they are attacked.
“There’s a complete disconnect between the way the younger generation understands technology and the way the older generation does. If you look at the record industry, particularly the British record industry, they don’t call themselves the record industry but the ‘music industry’ or even just ‘music.’
“So when the record industry is in a decline, they honestly think that music is in a decline, but it’s not: 90 percent of music online isn’t published through a label. There’s more diversity than ever.”
What isn’t in any doubt is that the Pirates have appealed directly to young people. Falkvinge turned 40 on Saturday and although he is of the first generation to have been brought up with computers — he got his first, a Commodore VIC-20 when he was eight — he’s ancient for a Pirate Party member.
“There are a few seniors, by which I mean people over 30, but the bulk is much, much younger. Honestly, if a member of a traditional party looked at our demographic, they wouldn’t not believe it. We are peaking at ages 18, 19.”
And the issues that made headlines last week, the attempts of lawmakers and the traditional, established industries to take on the new young upstarts of the digital age, are the ones which, he says, speak to the heart of this generation.
“In the 1960s the buzzwords were peace and love. For this generation, it’s openness and free speech. This generation has grown up being able to say anything to anybody. Letting ideas battle it out for themselves. And all of a sudden, corporations want to take that away. And ‘offended’ does not do their emotions justice.”
Having taught himself how to code, Falkvinge set up his first software company aged 16, and calls himself “a first generation digital native.” Although he’s stepped down from day-to-day leadership of the Pirate Party, and now operates as a self-styled “political evangelist,” he certainly doesn’t lack ambition. “Every 40 years, there’s a new grassroots political movement,” he says and traces a path between the rise of liberal parties in the 1890s, to the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s, the emergence of green politics in the 1960s and the 1970s, right up to the Pirate Party of today.
“Looking at the cycles of history, the time is right for a major new political wave. And the Pirate Party is in 56 countries now. We had this smash success where we got into the European parliament in just three and a half years from founding. We became the largest party in that election for people under 30, just sweeping the floor with the most coveted demographic.
“The establishment didn’t know what hit them.”
SUCCESS AT THE POLLS
In Germany last autumn, they gained major representation in the Berlin state parliament, and they’re likely to achieve further success in Schleswig Holstein’s elections in May.
“Where are we going?” Falkvinge asks rhetorically. “I think we are the next greens.”
That won’t be seen as the hugest threat in Britain, I point out. But Britain is not Europe, and Falkvinge and the Pirate Party are ineffably European. There’s more than a touch of Stieg Larsson to them. From the Scandi-cool roots, the computer hacking background of many of its members, and the underground nature of its support network, even up to its sexual politics.
Falkvinge’s Wikipedia entry describes him as “openly polyamorous.” What does that mean? “It means that I don’t feel jealousy. I need to logically learn what it is. And I can be in love with several people at the same time and there’s no conflict. And you know, in Sweden, this isn’t a big issue.”
Sexual libertarianism isn’t an official Pirate Party policy, but “people in the Pirate Party do tend to be more open to non-mainstream ideas. They are not as conformist as your average citizen.”
The pinstripe suit is a bit of a cover, he admits. Look like a corporate lawyer. Act like a covert revolutionary. It’s how to do politics, the Pirate Party way.
Stop Online Piracy Act
By John Naughton
The Observer, London
The US’ attempt to control Internet piracy has sparked a fierce battle between the creative industries and the free speech lobby
Here’s why:
1 What is SOPA?
It is the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill put before the US House of Representatives. Its counterpart in the Senate is PIPA, short for the Protect Intellectual Property Act. If enacted in its present form (which now seems unlikely), the legislation would significantly expand the powers of US law enforcement to combat online trafficking in copyrighted and counterfeited goods.
2 What kinds of powers was SOPA set to provide?
In a word, sweeping. Companies that claimed that their intellectual property was being appropriated or infringed could request court orders to forbid advertising networks (such as Google) and payment facilities (online services such as PayPal) from conducting business with infringing Web sites. Complainants could also ban search engines from linking to allegedly infringing sites and could obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to those sites. The proposed legislation would have expanded existing US criminal laws to include the digital streaming of copyright material, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
3 Why were these powers being sought?
The driving force behind them is undoubtedly the lobbying power of US and international multimedia companies (movie studios, record companies, publishers) who are concerned about loss of revenue stemming from widespread online piracy. These companies feel that existing US legislation is inadequate to deal with infringing Web sites which are owned and/or based in other countries. The legislation is also aimed at US-based search engines and other referring services that, proponents say, effectively engage in active promotion of infringing sites.
4 Why has there been such controversy about SOPA?
The main reason is that the powers being sought were not only so sweeping, but that they might cause significant collateral damage. They would permit US law enforcement agencies to block Web sites at the “domain” level rather than at the level of the allegedly infringing site. In that way, SOPA would interfere with the domain name system (DNS) which is at the heart of the Internet. The domain name system acts as a kind of phonebook for the network — it’s what translates www.bbc.co.uk into the machine-readable address of the BBC — 212.58.244.67, for example. If the domain name system is barred from providing the address of a particular site, then that site effectively becomes invisible (though technically adept internet users would still be able to find it).
5 Why would domain name system blocking be such a bad thing?
Firstly, because it would give commercial corporations the power to interfere with the basic architecture of the Internet, and in that sense set a very worrying precedent for a network that has become central to our lives and economies. Secondly, while it might be necessary to do it in some circumstances, domain name system-blocking is a very blunt instrument. Most Web sites are hosted under large umbrella domains. Blogger.com and wordpress.com, to give just two examples, each host tens of thousands of individual blogs. But if either of these blog-hosting sites were domain name system-blocked because some individual blogs contravened SOPA, then they would also disappear from the Net. The collateral damage in this case would be to freedom of speech, which is why some opponents of the legislation think it contravenes the US constitution. But in fact the impact of SOPA could be even more chilling, because it could also be used to take down services like Google, Twitter and Wikipedia simply because they might be providing links to infringing sites without in any way endorsing them.
6 Is there a real problem with piracy?
Yes. There are a lot of sites and services that, for commercial or ideological reasons, are contemptuous of copyright and other forms of intellectual property, and it is reasonable for society to address that problem in intelligent and proportionate ways that do not do more harm than good. But tackling piracy is not easy because one of the defining properties of digital technology it that it makes it easy to make and distribute perfect copies of digital goods. As someone once said, “copying is to digital technology as breathing is to animal life”: you can’t have one without the other.
7 Who has been opposing SOPA?
An unprecedently broad coalition of industry, activist, engineering and lobbying groups. US legislators seem to have been taken aback by the vehement opposition of the big US technology companies, for example — companies that have traditionally tended to have a relatively low profile in Washington, at least compared with the movie studios and their representatives. The truth of the matter is that, while the so-called “creative industries” are important to the economy, they are economic minnows compared with the technology industries, and realization of this may have led politicians to back-pedal on SOPA.
8 So what happens next?
The White House recently issued a statement on the bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and emphasized that the president would not support any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” On Friday, the US Senate and the House of Representatives shelved votes on the bills to enable a rethink. But, as people say in the newspaper business, this one will run and run.
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