Widebrant

My reward for getting out of bed at five and getting on the bike:

Well, officially it's a European Parliament election we're voting in today. No subject, however, has had anywhere near the media impact in the run-up as that of copyright legislation and internet integrity, and it's showing in the polls, in which The Pirate Party (PP) -- a political party formed in 2006 to fight against increasingly stringent copyright legislation -- has jumped to over 8% of the vote, despite its youth and clear self-definition as a single-issue party. It seems clear that although PP's membership growth has been closely linked to the raid of and subsequent prosecution against The Pirate Bay, the party platform has developed legs of its own that seem to carry even as the Pirate Bay case recedes from the news cycle.

In immediate terms, this seems to ensure that PP will send at least one, and probably two, representatives to the European Parliament, but a more interesting long-term question is what a big win for PP will do to domestic policy. A share of the vote of 10% or more would have a significant influence on how the implementation of IPRED -- an EU directive influencing the ability of copyright holders to directly go after suspected infringers -- will be viewed by the public and the media. There is a newly re-discovered political reluctance to be seen as going after individuals, on display in the final pre-election debate where PP were not invited to participate but representatives for all but one of the parties present denied wanting to criminalize personal file sharing.

The final effect on Swedish legal praxis from IPRED is still up in the air, with the first case brought having stalled when the ISP declined to divulge the identity behind the IP address identified by the copyright holder. The law still seems to hold the possibility of a lenient interpretation of IPRED, which could draw some of the poison from the current debate, but leave the copyright holder industry in the unenviable position of needing another law passed to reach their goal of being able to prosecute all unauthorized use of their intellectual property.

Alternatively, the courts may find a much more strict implementation of the law, which would be almost guaranteed to be widely unpopular, possibly enough so to propel a reinvigorated Pirate Party into the Swedish Parliament proper. This would in all likelihood force the pirates to take much more concrete positions on topics outside copyright law and integrity, which might be difficult for a party with a membership spread widely across the political spectrum (one of the party's Europarl candidates is a former right wing politician, another has floated the idea of donating part of her potential new salary to organizations like Attac and Amnesty International). Should the party succeed, however, it could very well find itself in just the tie-breaker position it has been planning for. Sweden's right-wing coalition has at least one party (the Christian Democrats) that's balancing on the verge of the 4% limit for parliamentary representation -- its demise would give the Pirate Party a natural space to fill. The left is dominated by the Social Democrats, but has an uneasy dependency on the ex-communist Left Party and could feel tempted to lean on the pirates for support.

All in all, this is shaping up to be a pretty exciting election night, as Europarl elections go.

(Disclaimer: I'm an active member of the Pirate Party -- I'll be watching the results come in with them in Malmö tonight, I'll try to chirp a bit about it as it breaks if there's wi-fi to be found: http://twitter.com/Widebrant )

"Chain vandals[1] here"

Did the house owners paint these, or are they a creative act of vandalism?

[1] More accurately, "taggers"