TEDxObserver - Rick Falkvinge - The Pirate Party - the politics of protest

Rick Falkvinge
Political evangelist

In 2006, Rick Falkvinge, a Swedish software entrepreneur, founded a new political party centred around the subjects of file sharing, copyright and patents. He called it the Pirate Party and it rose to prominence after a government crackdown on the file-sharing site, the Pirate Bay. Since then, the Pirate Party has swept Europe and beyond to become an international political movement, active in 40 different countries with representation in the European parliament.
In Sweden, it's the largest party for voters under the age of 30 with 25% of the vote, and in September 2011, the German Pirate Party won an unprecedented 8.9 per cent of the vote and now has several members in the Berlin state parliament. Focused on the subjects of government transparency, internet privacy and copyright law, the Pirate Party hosts Wikileaks on its servers and uses new technology to leverage political power in new and interesting ways. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine called Falkvinge one of the top 100 global thinkers.

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• Category

  News & Politics

[StatueOfMike]

There's another good quote. "Your worst adversaries aren't evil, and trying to portray them as such does not help your cause. But it does something else: it defines you."

[Edg3k]

I really like this guy> He talks sense, quotes futurama and has the attitude that one man can do something to change the world.

[U5K0]

Assume good intent. Best thing I ever learned from Wikipedia. Thing is, you only learn it by contributing.

[yassine elhouari]

I live in 50% illiteracy country. This man just inspired me to do something.

[geoffrey berman]

your a god i wish things you send would be private selling drugs would be so much eaiser ! voting for the pirate party peace out from SwEdEn

[unity20000]

'vote with money' is the most moronic thing that someone can rely on. it assumes that those corporations - but more, their big shareholders, will just sit there and take your 'voting with money' and removing their power. they dont. they conspire, they collaborate, they monopolize. 'voting with money' bullshit is something which works only in 'wild west' economic situations - the frontier times of an economy ( or a new field of economy) in which there is no dominant power. let it go.

[unity20000]

If someone told him that, in 2012, pirate party would be germany's strongest party, would he believe it ....

[dedopey39]

i dont want to leave it negative so what needs to be done is to help empower the humans of the world to demand their governments represent the layman. Because the point is when a party is elected on certain promises and break them. Technically that is fraud. When a goverment colonises other countrys and uses the media to scaremonger and dehumanise the colonised to the governed this is the media conspiring with other and comitting war crimes and terrorism eg USA and UK in many countries

[dedopey39]

but that doesnt work either do you think the newspapers would tell you if people were boycotting there paper? No and thats the problem the system works against the masses, not for them!

[fugosushi]

The keywords here are "corporations run our government." If we don't like something, we must vote with our money. That's the only thing corporations understand or respond to.

[CelticPirate King]

if you were going to say 'epic' or 'legit' to anything... well, this better be it! :P

[osdias]

If you liked this I recommend the documentary Us Now. It's free and you can watch it at Lucid Tree dot com