People who don't speak Swedish are missing almost all the interest of the Pirate Bay trial, which is supplied by the frankly unsavoury nature of the defendants. The money man, Carl Lundström, on whose servers The Pirate Bay was housed, is straight out of the crime novels of Stieg Larsson. He inherited a fortune built on crispbread, and has a long history of involvement with extreme rightwing politics. In the 1980s, he was a member of "Keep Sweden Swedish", an anti-immigrant fringe group; he has financially backed the Sweden Democrats, a would-be populist and anti-immigrant party; and only this month the managing director of one of his companies was charged with a robbery in a small west-coast town, part of a feud within a neo-Nazi group. Lundström told the Metro news­paper (http://bit.ly/metro) after he sacked the man that he had known he was a party member, but not that he had gone to collect another member's computer with a submachine gun.

Gottfrid Svartholm Varg and Frederik Neij, the nerds who run The Pirate Bay itself, have also been accused by the prosecutor of tax evasion, but deny that they were making any money from their business. Their attitude of sneering entitlement towards the government is all of a piece with their attitude towards the big content companies. But I can't see The Pirate Bay as morally superior to the Disney corporation. Both are out to grab everything they can get away with, and so, of course, are the majority of their users. Yes, there are legitimate uses for the Bit­Torrent protocol, but the demand for free as in beer far outstrips that for free as in speech. What's odd in a historical perspective is that all this should be going on in Sweden, which was within living memory a social democratic country with a genuinely leftwing orthodoxy. I know that a little bit of the rhetoric around The Pirate Bay sounds leftwing – the idea that it is wrong for "international capital" to push Sweden around – but that's just populist, and could be found in the rhetoric of the kind of parties that Carl Lundström has supported too.

The overwhelming impression is of a clash between two rightwing views, one that says it is all right to steal from the state, and one which says it is sinful to steal from corporations. You don't find people arguing that there might be such a thing as soc­iety that is larger than both the owners and the consumers of copyrighted material. On the contrary, it is a more or less explicit assumption that in a borderless digital world there isn't any legitimate global authority. Yet the overwhelming fact about Swedish society, when I lived there, was exactly this belief that authority was, and had to be, legitimate. Perhaps this goes back to the country's Lutheran past as a militaristic superpower: "Fear God and honour the King" says the inscription on one of the churches in Stockholm Old Town. But wherever it came from, the conformism, and the stifling respect for authority that it produced, were the characteristics that most distinguished Sweden from most of the rest of Europe. That may have been a bad thing – I certainly thought so when I lived there – but looking at the modern country you realise that it's possible to have too little of a bad thing.

The Pirate Bay trial is part of a global problem in which we all are implicated. One of the reasons we got into this mess was the absence of any kind of government that could stand above the immediate economic interests of the players involved. In the US the copyright laws were repeatedly extended not because any benevolent ruler sat down and asked what arrangement was best for society, but because it is easy to rent politicians in the US. Hardly anyone who pirates material asks themselves whether they are plundering the system that ensures that some people at least are paid for their creative labours. The pressing question, when you sit at a keyboard, is hardly ever "should I?", but "can I?" But you can't build a society – you can't even build a market – unless almost everyone in it asks themselves "should I?" In its clumsy way, that's what the Pirate Bay trial is trying to remind us.

• Fishing in Utopia, Andrew Brown's memoir of Sweden, is available from theguardian.com/bookshop