This week Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, receiving over 7% of the Swedish vote. The party was created on the first day of 2006 with a platform based on the desire “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected”. The Swedish police’s raid on the torrent-sharing website the Pirate Bay raised the party’s profile in the public eye and its membership numbers have risen considerably since. It is now the third largest political party in Sweden (in terms of members) and its youth organization Ung Pirat is Sweden’s largest political youth organization. Here, in an editorial originally published in the Swedish tabloid Expressen before the election, the Swedish novelist, poet, and scholar Lars Gustafsson explains why he voted for the Pirate Party.
According to a source from antiquity, the Emperor of Persia is said to have ordered the flogging of the sea because its waves were preventing him from transporting his troops by boat during a storm. That was stupid of him. Today he might have gone to Stockholm’s District Court, perhaps after a consultative conservation with a judge?
It is strange how strongly the struggle for civil rights in the spring of 2009 is reminiscent of the battles over the freedom of the press in France during the decades that preceded the French Revolution. A new world of ideas is emerging and it wouldn’t be possible without the ever increasingly speed of technological developments. In France there were raids on underground printing houses, confiscated publications and – even more damaging – the confiscation of printing equipment. Arrest warrants and daring nightly shipments between Paris and the Prussian enclave Neuchâtel, where not only a large percentage of the Encyclopedia was produced, but also, alongside of atheist pamphlets, a considerable amount of risqué pornography. Between around 1730 and 1780, the number of state censors in France quadrupled and raids against the illegal printing houses rose at about the same rate. As we know now, it didn’t help. On the contrary, the extensive censorship and repeated raids appear to have actually stimulated the new ideas and their propagation.
Today it is the Internet’s continued existence as a forum for ideas and as an institution for the promotion of the rights of the citizen, protected against infringements on privacy and from powerful special interests. The fact that a crazy Franco-German proposal has just failed in the European Parliament does not mean that net-freedom and integrity are now safeguarded by any means.
How substantial, then, are these threats? Let us think of the River Dalälv in Ludvika, Sweden during the spring flood season. In a really wet year – when the waters can rise over 100 meters, even 200 meters, flooding homes and meadows – does it help to call the Ludvika police? Up to the present the majority of historical experience has demonstrated that legislation has never been able to stop technological development.
In 1935 Walter Benjamin published an influential essay whose title is usually translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, where he comes to a series of interesting conclusions about consequences of the radical changes being brought about by developments in his time’s relatively modest means of reproduction. The digital revolution has brought about a reproducibility that Walter Benjamin could hardly have dreamt of. One could perhaps speak of “maximum reproducibility”. Google is assembling a library that, if it is allowed to develop, is going to make the majority of material libraries obsolete, or in any case antiquated. The cinema and printed magazines and newspapers have been drawn into this new immateriality for quite a while.
Films, novels, magazines, and newspapers are reproducible. And that’s not all; even three-dimensional objects, for example products from programmable lathes, can easily be reproduced, wirelessly and rapidly. This immaterialization naturally threatens Jan Guillou [a best selling Swedish author] and maybe a dozen other authors’ ability to acquire new mansions: a social problem that I quite frankly would bid a fond farewell.
Intellectual property rights have much more serious aspects than these, however. What have the patents of large pharmaceutical firms on HIV and AIDS medicine meant for the third world? Or what about Monsanto’s claim on the material copyright to species of frogs and pigs?
Life in society demands a balance between different interests and all the insincere attempts to ignore this are nonsense. A functioning national defense is more important than ice hockey rinks and bicycle lanes. Presumably the Internet contains a threat against the material copyright. So what?
Intellectual and personal integrity for citizens – simply put, an Internet that has not been transformed into a channel for the authorities or heavily lobbied for judicial judgments and docile EU politicians – is considerably more important than the need for a primarily industrial literature or music scene whose commodities are pulped, recycled and forgotten already within the copyright owner’s own lifetime. The need to be read, to influence, to participate in the formulation of one’s present, does not necessarily come into conflict with the desire to shift units, although it can. When a conflict does arise here, the industrial interest must give way and the intellectual sphere of art must be defended against anything and everything that threatens it.
The essential interest for artists and writers who are intellectually and morally serious about their work naturally must be to be read, to make themselves heard by their own generation. How one is read, that is to say how one reaches one’s readers, is from this perspective secondary.
The growing defense of the expansive freedom of expression on the Internet – of immaterial civil rights – that we now see in country after country, is the beginning of a liberalism borne from technology and therefore liberated – precisely like in the 18th century. That’s why I am voting for the Pirate Party.
Image on front page by cybriks. Translated by Jeff Kinkle.
