A fledgling new political movement calling itself The Pirate Party of the United States has emerged from the dust of last month’s police raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden.
Six days after the May 31 seizure of BitTorrent servers, the new organization’s website, was up and running. Organizers claim the newly launched site drew over 100,000 hits in a little over a week.
The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party associated with The Pirate Bay, and says it wants to reform intellectual property and privacy laws. Piratpartiet was launched January 1, and by the end of that first day had gathered the 1,500 signatures it needed to participate in Sweden’s upcoming parliamentary elections in September.
Wired News interviewed the founder of The Pirate Party of the United States, Brent Allison, 30, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, and his provisional co-chair David Segal, 20, a computer science major at the University of California Santa Barbara. They shared their thoughts on the stormy seas ahead.
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If this movement does nothing more than bring some greater awareness of the harm that expanded copyright laws are doing to our cultural freedoms it will be a good thing.