That September, in 2006, a fervent but tiny group of German web activists called an in-person meeting to discuss what they called government and corporate interference online. The activists had been meeting for months on a German wiki dedicated to re-creating the efforts of like-minded activists in Sweden, who had recently formed a political party known as the Pirate Party. The Germans' physical meeting was an endearing collection; 50 turned up. The wiki administrator, a 31-year-old with a soul patch and a Mohawk, called himself Mor Roquen or "Dark Knight" in a fictitious Elvish language. The group decided to call itself The Pirates, named after the Swedish Pirates and the Swedish file-sharing site ThePirateBay.se, which had long been a prominent target of the same internet regulation forces that this group so opposes.

By the time they won 20 seats in the May election -- bringing their nationwide total to 45 seats in state legislatures -- Germany's Pirate Party claimed more than 30,000 members. Pirate Parties are officially registered in 15 European countries. They hold local government seats in Spain, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. In 2009, Swedish voters elected two Pirate Party members to the European Parliament. A recent German opinion poll showed the Pirate Party tied for fourth nationally, with 7 percent saying they would vote for the party today.

Germany's Pirates have seen their platform open and ranks skyrocket over the last year, absorbing some of Germany's youth and political malcontent to win local elections in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Kiel.

With Germany's 2013 federal elections swift approaching, the Pirates have become the protest party of the moment. The Party is not limited to Germany. It didn't even begin there. Sister Pirate Parties have won elected seats in Austria, Czech Republic, Spain, and Switzerland. Chapters have opened in, among others, Estonia, Taiwan, Bosnia, Nepal, New Zealand, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Russia, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Of course, not all are officially registered as political parties, much less winning elections, but their appeal clearly crosses borders.

The Pirates' success has been a surprise to many, including the Pirates themselves. The party drew ire in April when one of its leaders -- Martin Delius, 28, who wears a pony-tail -- compared the party's velocity to that of the Nazi party.

The rise of the Pirate Party is as fast as that of the NSDAP between 1928 and 1933," Mr. Delius said to Spiegel magazine, referring the Nazis by their more formal National Socialist German Worker's Party.

If anything, the Pirate Party is more akin to the Communist Party, in that it was born out of an emerging economic and social era driven by a new technology, and that it advocates for people's rights in, and postulates new rules of engagement for, how to live in this new era of new advances. If the communists were beholden to industrialization, then the Pirates are beholden to the Internet.