Pirates recover faster than the Swedish police
Newspaper Aftonbladet organized a humorous online poll asking people to guess which of the two websites,
Pirate Bay or the
Swedish Police, will manage to come back online first. Indicating the huge public interest in the pirate drama, nearly 70,000 people participated in the poll, with 93 % of the people putting their bets on Pirate Bay. And indeed, at the time of this posting, the Pirate Bay website is online while the website of the Swedish police is still down.
Pirate Party keeps growing at record rate
With demonstrations underway in Stockholm and Göteborg, new people keep joining the Swedish Pirate Party literally by the minute. The member count is 4958 at the moment of this posting. The Party will need 225,000 votes in the parliamentary election to be held in September to pass the 4 percent thresold required for parliamentary representation. This is not an unrealistic goal considering there are an estimated 1,3 million active filesharers in Sweden, a country of 9 million inhabitants.
Led by a charismatic 34-year old IT specialist
Rickard Falkvinge from Sollentuna, the party has set 10 candidates to its national
candidate list, including the leader of the party, plus 12 local candidates. The party has only
three issues on its agenda (in English, worth reading!): a radical reform of the copyright law, abolishment of the patent system and the securing of people's right to privacy. In the relatively split Swedish political field even a small number of parliament members might give them a good strategic position to advance these goals.
In the picture below Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party: