Rick Falkvinge is the face and voice of the Swedish Pirate Party, the party that he founded in 2006, but being a pirate isn't all gold doubloons and chests of booty. Falkvinge is a principled pirate—and that means working for the sake of the cause even when the pay is low, or nonexistent. He currently takes no salary for his work, but he gets along by finding supporters willing to donate toward the costs of his food and rent.

Limited resources don't mean he's thinking small, though. Indeed, he wants to (democratically) take over the world, and he has a plan.

A pirate's life for me

What catapults someone into such a lifestyle? For Falkvinge, it was Sweden's 2005 debate over changes to copyright law. In his view, the issue received tremendous media coverage and generated obvious interest among the public, but politicians basically failed to notice the entire debate. He wondered how to get their attention, and he concluded it probably couldn't be done. So Falkvinge decided that the only way to make change happen was to "bypass the politicians entirely and aim for their power base."

Credit: Jacob Bostr?m

That meant a new political party, the Pirate Party—"Piratpartiet" in Swedish. Falkvinge registered the domain in December 2005 and threw up a website that "looked like shit." But looks weren't the point; the site's manifesto was something he hoped would find an audience. (Read it in Swedish [PDF] or in an English translation).

It did. When the site went live on January 1, 2006, Falkvinge hoped he might "get a couple thousand visits," collect some volunteers, and refine the document. The goal was (eventually) to round up enough signatures to get the Pirate Party registered with Sweden's electoral authority so that it would be on the ballot for the upcoming September 2006 elections. After that, who knew—maybe the fledgling movement could even pick up a seat?

Falkvinge posted his new site into a chat channel—it was "all the advertising I ever did." The site quickly racked up three million hits and pulled in links from sites like Slashdot and Digg. The challenge turned out not to be attracting interest, but channeling massive interest into a movement.

A theory of movement

Falkvinge had given some thought to "movements" already. He had a theory that every major social shift followed a three-stage pattern. First, wild activists provoke the public to generate attention around an issue. Next, academics get involved in researching the issue. Finally, the issue is successfully politicized. It's a pattern that Falkvinge sees in both the labor and environmental movements, both of which have spawned vibrant European political parties such as the Social Democrats and the Greens.

When it came to issues of copyright, "piracy," and the production of art and entertainment, provocateurs like Shawn Fanning of Napster fame had blazed a trail for a decade already. Academics had been pumping out a recent body of literature on copyright in the digital age. But there were no political parties that even appeared to take the issue seriously.

So Falkvinge set out to organize the inchoate interest generated by his Pirate Party website. His first test was Sweden's electoral authority, which would not accept electronic signatures on petitions. That meant the hip new party's first task was an old and unbelievably mundane one: collecting paper signatures from Swedish residents. When the volunteers came through with the required signatures, Falkvinge saw that he had a loose, unstructured organization—but one capable of getting things done.

To boost the party's profile beyond the hardcore pirate demographic, the mainstream media's reach was needed. But the media didn't appear interested in a fledgling Pirate Party. That is, until the (unrelated) Pirate Bay file-sharing site was raided by Swedish authorities in the middle of 2006. In a moment, the issue of copyrights and file-sharing was front-and-center in the popular consciousness.

"We had been trying to get into mainstream media from January to May," said Falkvinge, but after the raid, suddenly "my face was on every news broadcast on every hour on every channel."

The Pirate Party tripled its member count in a week.

The election: a splash of cold water

If the sudden success of the party made it seem as though God himself wore an eyepatch and flew the Jolly Roger, the 2006 Swedish elections sounded a wake-up call: this "politics" thing was going to be tough.

Under the Swedish system, parliamentary seats are handed out on a percentage basis—win ten percent of the vote and get ten percent of the seats. But, in order to keep Parliament from dissolving into a hundred tiny parties, each party has to clear a four percent national threshold (or gain 12 percent of the votes in any particular district) before it gets any seats at all. Get 3.9 percent of the vote and you go home with nothing.

In the 2006 fall elections, when Swedes went to the polls, Falkvinge had "high expectations" that his new party might pick up a seat or more. But when the votes were tallied, Piratpartiet had a mere 0.63 percent of the national total with 34,918 votes (results in Swedish). In other words, no seats.

On the other hand, the party had been around for less than a year and managed to garner more votes than did several established politicians. The Pirate Party was dismissed as "this election's joker party," says Falkvinge now, but he never accepted that characterization. Instead, he took comfort from the fact that the Pirate Party had become the third largest party... outside of parliament. It wasn't much, but it was something.

Gaining seats

After the electoral defeat, Falkvinge and his fellow pirates sat down to talk strategy. They developed a three-part plan that would govern their actions for the next four years, fully expecting that they could board and loot both the European Parliament and the Swedish one in that amount of time.

The strategy began with the creation of a youth section called Young Pirate (Ung Pirat). Such youth political groups, common in Europe, are set up to develop young political talent and provide a counterbalance to the grey-haired elders who run most parties. Because the Pirate Party's membership already skewed young (high school and college students are the largest demographics), it wasn't long before Young Pirate was the third largest political youth group in Sweden.

What makes the Young Pirate story so odd is that the group is actually funded with taxpayer money. In Sweden, the government doles out kronor to youth groups based on the size of their membership. By January 2009, Young Pirate was raking in 1.3 million kronor a year (about $150,000) from the Swedish government, according to Swedish newspaper The Local.

The music industry was less than pleased. "It is surprising. Ung Pirat works in principle to encourage something illegal," said Lars Gustafsson, head of IFPI Sweden. "That they then receive money from a state institution is remarkable."

With the youth section developing quickly, the Pirate Party has been focused on the second bit of its plan for world domination: a seat in the European Parliament. The election for Swedish MEPs opens May 20, and voters can cast a ballot through June 7. MEP elections are notorious for significantly lower turnout than big national elections, and Falkvinge is counting on low turnout to propel his forces into a seat.

The Pirate Party needs an estimated 100,000 votes to cross the four percent threshold in the election. In 2006, it only picked up 35,000, so Falkvinge admits this is a challenge. Still, the party has seen significant growth in the last two and half years, and the success of its young wing was responsible for a 4.5 percent showing in recent mock elections in Swedish schools. Even if the pirates are closed out once more, time appears to be on Falkvinge's side—unless his Young Pirates mellow as they age.