Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests

by Patrick Burkart

An examination of the Pirate political movement in Europe analyzes its advocacy for free expression and the preservation of the Internet as a commons. The Swedish Pirate Party emerged as a political force in 2006 when a group of software programmers and file-sharing geeks protested the police takedown of The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing search engine. The Swedish Pirate Party, and later the German Pirate Party, came to be identified with a “free culture” message that came into conflict with the European Union's legal system. In this book, Patrick Burkart examines the emergence of Pirate politics as an umbrella cyberlibertarian movement that views file sharing as a form of free expression and advocates for the preservation of the Internet as a commons. He links the Pirate movement to the Green movement, arguing that they share a moral consciousness and an explicit ecological agenda based on the notion of a commons, or public domain. The Pirate parties, like the Green Party, must weigh ideological purity against pragmatism as they move into practical national and regional politics. Burkart uses second-generation critical theory and new social movement theory as theoretical perspectives for his analysis of the democratic potential of Pirate politics. After setting the Pirate parties in conceptual and political contexts, Burkart examines European antipiracy initiatives, the influence of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the pressure exerted on European governance by American software and digital exporters. He argues that pirate politics can be seen as “cultural environmentalism,” a defense of Internet culture against both corporate and state colonization.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Jeffrey Hart]

The author spent a year in Sweden in 2012 researching and interviewing members of the Pirate Party of Sweden. The book traces the origins of the Swedish Party by reviewing the history of the Swedish government’s prosecution of the Pirate Bay, a file-sharing web site. That prosecution was motivated by recent changes in Swedish and international law regarding the protection of intellectual property (IP) and the suit against the Pirate Bay accused its administrators of facilitating illegal sharing if IP. The author provides excellent background on how this change occurred and particularly on the role of the U.S. government in pushing for stricter enforcement of IP laws. Supporting the U.S. government were the recording and movie industries, allied with the pharmaceutical and software companies.

Many Swedish users of the Internet were outraged at what they viewed as legal overreach on the part of the two governments and private intellectual property rights owners. They advocated a more open system of sharing and eventually formed a political party to make their voices heard. They were successful in getting representatives elected to the Swedish parliament. The Swedish Pirate Party was the first, but it was soon followed by others in many other countries. The German Party was initially successful in winning seats in local governments (but not the Bundestag).
At the European level, the various pirate parties and their supporters succeeded in stopping an international agreement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), from being implemented.

A lot of the book is dedicated to explaining the philosophies pursued by members of the pirate movement and examining the movement in light of New Social Movement (NSM) theories of mobilization. The guiding theoretical insights for the author’s approach come primarily from Juergen Habermas’ work on democratic theory, particularly his theory of communicative rationality.
There is a fair amount of theoretical jargon in this work mixed together with solid empirical observations. The writing as a whole is cogent and informative, however, so a little jargon can be tolerated. I would recommend this book for scholars and graduate students as well as for Internet activists. Burkart concludes that, even if pirate parties eventually are absorbed into larger entities, “pirate politics would persist as a transnational cultural movement that urges the development of the Internet as a platform supporting democracy, shared knowledge, and governmental transparency.” (p. 168)

[Miguel Caetano]

The fight for access to knowledge and culture and for the flexibilization of Intellectual Property Rights is not a middle class cause solely advanced by white, western and geekish individuals.

Dismissing Political Economy while overemphasizing the importance of New Social Movements Theory to understand the debates around Intellectual Property Rights. Not cool...

Not giving any hint about the intellectual origins of the "commons". Not mentioning Elinor Ostrom in the whole book. Not cool either...