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[Romano]

Pirate Bay guilty verdict surges membership to over 42,000, and leads pollsters to predict it will surpass the 4% threshold necessary to get a Swedish seat in the assembly.

The conviction of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site for facilitating copyright infringement continues to reverberate in that country.

Many youth have been angered over what they see as an intrusion by foreign, primarily US-based, entertainment industry conglomerates into the private affairs of a sovereign country. They understand that copyright laws were essentially written in a world before digital content that no longer exists and paralyze the ability of citizens to freely communicate and interact with pone another.

Adding fuel to the fire was the recent disclosure that the presiding judge in the Pirate Bay trial, Judge Tomas Norström, is an active member of several pro-copyright groups, rendering his decision anything but unbiased in the eyes of many.

The Pirate Party, an advocate of copyright law reform, has seen its membership surge since the trial ended, rising from a little over 10,000 to well over 42,000.

“We young people have a whole platform on the internet, where we have all our social contacts - it is there that we live,” said Malin Littorin-Ferm of the party’s Ung Pirat youth league to a crowd protesting the verdict in Stockholm. “The state is trying to control the internet and, by extension, our private lives.”

The Pirate Party is determined to make file-sharing legal in Sweden, and it now can count of the support of many now galvanized by the court’s decision.

“People know that it isn’t enough to listen to ordinary politicians in order to make file sharing legal,” said Jan Lindgren, head of the Pirate Party’s Stockholm district to Radio Sweden at the Pirate Bay trial. “The only way to change that is to vote us in – both in the EU and the Swedish parliament.”

According to a new survey, the Pirate Party has gained enough voter support to do just that, and pollsters predict it will win 5.1% of the Swedish vote, well above the 4% threshold necessary to win a Swedish seat in the assembly.

The poll, commissioned by Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, also says the Pirate Party is the second largest among those aged 19-29yo. It ranks 4th among 30-44yo.

“These citizens have never previously had a significant issue with which to become involved,” said Rickard Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate party. “It is not that politics does not interest young people - it is that the former generation’s problems and political solutions do not interest the youth.”

Let’s hope the poll is correct. It’s about time file-sharers had someone representing their interests for a change.

The election is set for June 7th.

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Romano