0.9 Activism  (Page 3/11)

The majority of the new members of the party were too young to vote. Swedish schools regularly hold mock elections, and the Pirate Party took approximately 40 percent of the 2006 student vote. Recognizing the potential long-term power of this group, the Pirate Party decided to invest its resources and political capital in securing the votes these members would eventually represent. The party organized “Young Pirates” student groups.

Adult Swedes in 2006 were less inclined to support the Pirate Party than the youth, especially if the cost were to forego the chance to vote for one of the ruling parties. That disinclination was reinforced by a July 2006 newspaper article revealing that The Pirate Bay was profiting substantially through advertising revenue. This seemed out of step with the public service ethos The Pirate Bay's leaders had championed. Again, although the Pirate Party has no formal connection to the Pirate Bay, the public perceived them as interconnected.

When the 2006 ballots were cast,  Piratpartiet  earned less than one percent of the vote and therefore failed to qualify for a seat in the  Riksdag.

June 2009 european parliament elections

The Swedish Pirate Party was more successful securing seats in the European Parliament. In the June 2009 elections, the Party secured enough votes to be awarded 2 of 736 seats in the Parliament.

The Party's success was facilitated by low turnout for the elections. The Pirate Party surged as support for its competitors lagged.  Piratpartiet earned more than seven percent of the Swedish vote, most of which it picked up from Sweden's Left Party.

The Party's two elected Members were Christian Engstrom, an anti-software-patent activist and former technology executive, and 22-year-old Amelia Andersdotter, one of the early student members.

Present day

The Pirate Party now has 49,000 members. If the party gains  Riksdag  representation in the 2010 elections (scheduled for September 19th), its non-partisan stance will provide it sufficient flexibility either to bring the Red-Green voting bloc to power or alternatively to increase the narrow majority currently enjoyed by the ruling bloc.

Still, even before the polls close in 2010, it is certain that the Pirate Party has expanded its influence over the last three years. All of Sweden's major left-wing parties now voice public support for liberalizing copyright penalties for private individuals who download audio and video recordings for non-commercial personal use. This is the most important plank in the Pirate Party's platform. The chances that it will eventually be adopted seem to be increasing.

Case study #2: "click wrap" licenses and the uniform commercial code

The ucc

In the United States, contract law is shaped and enforced by the legislatures and courts of the individual states, not by the national legislature and courts. To promote national uniformity of contract law, a prominent organization of legal scholars and practitioners, known as the American Law Institute (ALI), works with the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) to promulgate the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a comprehensive model set of contract laws which it offers as the ideal version of state law. Although no state is obliged to adopt the UCC, all of the states have done so. The UCC is not published on behalf of any one set of political interests or legal perspectives. That aura of objectivity, which the ALI-NCCUSL sustains by opening their drafting process to legal practitioners and scholars of all political stripes, backgrounds, and sources of expertise, encourages state legislatures to enact successive versions of the UCC with few alterations.