Sweden’s Pirate Party (Google Translation) has won a seat in the European Parliment in elections held on Sunday. The group—which ran on a platform “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.”—earned a 7% vote.
This is a massive coup for the group, who earned only .63% of the vote in Sweden’s 2006 elections. They gained traction through active participation in a number of high-profile debates about Internet Freedom and privacy, including a case against the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay, which found one of the founders Twittering from the courtroom.
Such utilization of up-to-date technology, along with the tidal shift in voter demographics in Sweden (and elsewhere in Europe) may indicate that a time for a reasoned and rational discussion of the copyright and how it fits into modern technology may be upon us.
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