STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Last Jan. 1, almost on a whim, 35-year-old IT manager Rickard Falkvinge got into politics.

Concerned about the reach of copyright and patent law, Falkvinge erected a web page with a sign-up form for a radical new pro-piracy party to compete in Sweden's parliamentary system. He didn't know if anyone would care, but the next day the national media picked it up, and two days later international media started calling.

The site was flooded with new members – enough for the nascent movement to sail past the requirements for participation in the national election. Falkvinge now faced a decision: stay with his nice job and let the whole thing quietly sink, or quit and become a campaigning politician. He chose to become the leader of Sweden's newest and fastest-growing political party: Piratpartiet, or the Pirate Party.

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Striding through the narrow, cobbled streets of Gamla Stan, Falkvinge looks nothing like a politician in his "Pirat" baseball cap and polo shirt. "We have a lot in common with the environmental movement," he says. Where environmentalists see destruction of natural resources, the pirates see culture at risk. "(We) saw a lot of hidden costs to society in the way companies maximize their copyright."

Falkvinge is interrupted by a passing teenager. She's a young punk, with green dreads and a jacket covered in an indistinguishable combination of angry quips and band names – in short, exactly the type who once would have spent her disposable income on music.

She takes out a piece of notebook paper and asks Falkvinge for an autograph.

Lawyers, academics and pirates agree: File sharing is an institution here. Sweden has faster broadband with deeper penetration than just about anywhere in the world. That, combined with the techno-friendly attitude that pervades Scandinavia and a government slow to take any kind of action, allowed file sharing to root deeply in practice and popular culture.

In March, game show contestant Petter Nilsson won the politically themed Top Candidates show by delivering speeches supporting file sharing, and committing to donating 20 percent of his $30,000 winning to the Pirate Bay. A cultural minister from a southern Sweden municipality admitted in June to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that he downloaded music on a daily basis, and called for more adults to "come out of the file-sharing closet." Last May's raid on the Pirate Bay sparked street protests and cyberattacks on government websites.

But it was the spike in the Pirate Party's numbers after the raid that might have the most lasting consequences for Sweden. Membership shot past the nation's Green Party, which holds 17 seats in the Riksdag, Sweden's parliament. There's no guarantee that membership will translate into votes, but the pirates have raised enough funds to print 3 million ballots for next month's election, and they have enough volunteers to get them out to all the polling places.

This week, the Pirate Party broke out its own version of a chicken in every pot when it endorsed a low-cost, encrypted anonymizing service offered by a Swedish communications company called Relakks. For 5 euros a month, a portion of which goes to the party, anyone can share files or communicate from a Relakks IP address in Sweden, potentially complicating efforts to track downloaders. The party endorsement generated enough interest to cause performance issues on the new service.

Falkvinge may be learning the ropes of glad-handing and political speechmaking, but a guileless fan boy slips out when I introduce him to the founders of Piratbyran – the pro-piracy group that created the Pirate Bay in 2003, and inspired Falkvinge's foray into renegade politics. He introduces the punk girl that recognized him to co-founder Rasmus Fleischer with a hurried explanation – "Piratbyran, Piratbryan!" – and Fleischer soon finds himself autographing another piece of notebook paper, looking confused.

Piratbyran, or "Pirate Bureau," is hard to nail down as an organization. It is best described as an ad hoc pro-piracy think tank, but Fleischer's partner in the effort, Marcus Kaarto, won't even go that far. "We're like a gas," Kaarto says, laughing. "You can't get a hold on us."

Founded in 2003, Piratbyran is older than the Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party. The group has 58,000 members registered on its website, but its structure is informal, and no one seems to know exactly how much money it has. It gets by on donations, including contributions through the Pirate Bay – with which it is no longer officially affiliated.

Kaarto and Fleischer aren't the typical think tank or political types. Fleischer is a classically trained musician and former leftist journalist; Kaarto plays poker for a living. They are comfortable and funny twenty-somethings in cargo shorts, dark T-shirts and imprecise haircuts – blending artist and geek in a way that is uniquely European.

They walk me around Soder, the island in the middle of Stockholm that went from working class to gentrified bohemian in the '80s. Eventually we land in Medborgarplatsen, a square that hosts Stockholm's large communist May Day demonstration every year, and entertainment/retail the rest of the time. This night it's full of cafe-goers, and posters advertising the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie – a film destined to break box office records and top the downloading charts at the same time.

Over the din, Fleischer says the Piratbyran's message isn't so much about fighting the copyfight as explaining to the other side that they've already lost. "Their business model won't work with digital technology," he says.

In Fleischer's world, the Motion Picture Association of America and rights holders are attacking digital technology itself, trying to hang on to an outdated model. "It's an inevitability that digital data will be copied.... The alternative to peer-to-peer piracy is person-to-person piracy," he says. While some online pirates take pains to distinguish themselves from those who sell counterfeit DVDs and CDs, he sees such physical bootlegging as just "a symptom of underdeveloped computer networks."

When asked about compensation for artists, both men reject the language itself. No artist sits down to "create content," Fleischer says. "Culture has always been heterogeneous," and money is only one way of rewarding creativity. The idea of a rights holder, like a record label or movie studio, that patronizes and distributes human creativity is, for Fleischer, "a very strange utopia that has never existed."

But Piratbyran is not dedicated to copyright or patent abolition – it has no legislative agenda. It holds a nuanced view of the created work itself: Each work must find its own social and economic niche. "I don't think of this (as) the big battle," says Fleischer, "but thousands of microbattles."

Part of the surprise of Sweden is how far this approach has gotten them. Kaarto and Fleischer are quoted in the press frequently, often accorded the same respect a law professor would receive in the United States. Last year the pair co-edited Copy Me, a collection of essays about intellectual property; the first run of 2,300 sold out, and another is on its way.

Their positions find fertile ground in politics and public opinion. Piracy is the subject of serious debate here, rather than crime-busting press releases. And copyright's defenders find themselves in an uphill battle for the soul of the nation.

Attorney Monique Wadsted, the MPAA's representative here, has the hardest job in Sweden – not just to try to enforce copyright under an indifferent and occasionally hostile regime, but to convince the average Swede that file sharing is wrong.

She meets me in a corner conference room in her office high above a square full of Scandinavian hipsters and the punky goth kids of Stockholm. With a knit brow, she explains that she never expected Sweden to become a rogue nation.

"(It's) become a copyright haven, a territory where you spread everything without fear of prosecution," Wadsted says.

Wadsted knows Fleischer – she recently stood in a public debate with him at the formal opening of Sweden's election campaign season. She was not impressed. "Nobody has ever presented a good argument why this should be free.... They like to talk about music; they have a problem with (talking about) movies, because movies cost a lot to make."

Movies are Wadsted's passion, as well as her job, and she seems prepared to throw herself bodily between the medium she loves and the pirates who threaten its financial lifeblood. As a child, "I would see (movies) with my family ... or sneak off to see them on my own, all the time," she says.

And if file sharing and the Pirate Bay had existed when she was young? She confesses she doesn't know if she'd have been a downloader herself. "Would I have known any better at 14?" she muses, leaving the question unanswered.

What's certain is she'd like to see the Pirate Bay's crew in jail.

The copyright fight is getting tense in Sweden. Wadsted speaks emotionally of threats made against her and anti-piracy spokesman Henrik Pontien. She says her address has appeared online, accompanied by talk of firebombing. Ugly suggestions have been made against Pontien and his children.

Wadsted says she knew she was opening herself up for criticism by becoming the public face of the MPAA in Sweden, but the experience has clearly frightened and shocked her.

The Pirate Bay's crew hasn't been spared much from the other side.

They've been called gang members, terrorists and even child pornographers. While they laugh whenever the subject comes up, they too seem incredulous that the debate has come to this point. There's no evidence that extremists on either side will take violent action, but the idea that a previously obscure area of law excites such fanatical rhetoric was unthinkable before file sharing.

Sweden stands at a crossroads. "There will be many Pirate Bays if this case doesn't succeed," says Marianne Levin, professor of private law and intellectual property at the University of Stockholm. Everyone – pirates and lawyers and politicians – agrees: Sweden probably won't continue to be friendly ground for overt pirates if the Pirate Bay is convicted. That's the point of pursuing its operators.

But even with a victory in court, Levin and her doctoral research students acknowledge that Swedish file sharing isn't going to stop. They talk a lot about alternatives: mitigation and compromise. One oft-proposed solution would levy a tax on internet access that would be redistributed to artists – but as distinctions between professionals and amateurs get more fuzzy, it's harder to make such a system fair.

A tax would also mean more payouts to the porn industry than is politically feasible, points out legal researcher Viveca Still, a faculty member at the Institute of International Economic Law in Helsinki, Finland. That's one reason Still joins many academics in advocating a technological solution: digital rights management, or DRM, in which music and movie players – software or hardware – would simply refuse to cooperate with pirates.

But a strict DRM regime has problems, too: For one, it would require hard-coded limits on digital technology itself. "This would lead to outlawing digital technology ... the Turing machine (itself)," says Piratbyran's Kaarto. This is a price too high for society to pay to protect intellectual property, according to DRM opponents.

If piracy's foes offer flawed solutions, Sweden's pirates concede that their own vision isn't utopian. Parting with many copyright minimalists in the United States, Piratbyran acknowledges that file sharing can do real harm to rights holders. When Kaarto and Fleischer discuss this aspect of their movement, their flippancy fades, and their mood becomes reflective. Fleischer tells the story of Swedish jazz in 1962.

When pop music came to Sweden, it hit hard enough that in a single summer most of Sweden's jazz artists were left scrambling for a livelihood. Just as silent movies destroyed theater, then talkies left the silent stars unemployed, progress, he hints, always creates losers as well as winners.

But progress has to be accommodated anyway, says Kaarto. "You have to change the map, not the world."

Later, the Pirate Bay's Peter (who doesn't want his last name revealed, in part for fear it would endanger his day job) is dining with a crew of pirates from all over Europe. Over tabbouleh and sausage, the talk turns to strategy: how to create media events, awareness campaigns, educational programs to let people know that piracy isn't about free movies – it's about clearing the way for culture to progress.

Peter talks about expanding the Pirate Bay beyond the current 25-language translation. He turns to me, with bright eyes: "We want to make a Pirate Bay for kids!"

Sebastian Gjerding of Denmark's Piratgruppen warms to the idea, and starts talking about designing a poster to hang in schools, teaching children how to share files. The pirates bandy about names for the campaign and seem, for the moment, to settle on "iCopy."

Later, I'm in Peter's old BMW station wagon. "One day, all these cars will run on hydrogen," Peter proclaims, gesturing around Malmo.

"How will they make the hydrogen?" I ask.

He answers quickly, smiling, "I don't know!"

But, he assures me, they will and it isn't his problem to figure out how.

It's not the problem of the pirates, he tells me later, to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system – someone else will figure that out. Their job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.

If the next thing isn't good enough, they will tear that down, too.