[liberationtech] Good articles on the Pirate Party and Pirate Bay

[Fenwick Mckelvey]

Hi all,
A few sources to add to the list. I also CC’ed Patrick Bukart and Paul
Aitken who work on piracy and politics since they might offer some
good additions.

I always found the now-defunct Piratbyrån helpful in explaining the
politics of piracy. They often wrote about the ‘grey commons’ as
opposed to the creative commons. The grey commons embraces the legal
ambiguity of its content (hence grey instead of black or white). The
Pirate Bay website itself could be argued to epitomize a grey commons
since it promotes unfettered sharing. These articles offer an
explanation of the Grey Commons.

Rasmus Fleischer's of the Piratbyrån explains the concept here:
http://torrentfreak.com/piratbyran-speech/

The article ‘A Letter to the Commons’ starting on p. 19 is also good.
http://waag.org/sites/waag/files/public/Publicaties/InTheShade.pdf

In more recent years, Rasmus Fleischer’s writing on the
accelerationism and escalationism explain the The Pirate Bay’s
expansion of tactics from starting BitTorrent trackers to getting
involved in its iPredator VPN. This article is a good history of sorts
of piracy as it shifts tactics:
http://www.copyriot.se/2010/01/13/pirate-politics-from-accelerationism-to-escalationism/
I have also written on these two strategies as part of my dissertation
that I am happy to share if you’re interested.

The German Pirate Party also appears to be some really interesting
stuff with their liquid democracy project that attempts to bridge P2P
(last I checked).

http://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/BE:Liquid_Democracy_in_der_Piratenpartei&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dliquid%2Bdemocracy%2Bpiraten%2Bberlin%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3Djnu%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26biw%3D1256%26bih%3D606%26prmd%3Dimvns&sa=X&ei=WoMmULG6K4bL0QGr24GIDA&sqi=2&ved=0CGEQ7gEwAA


A few other suggestions:

This book collects a lot of the Swedish writings on the Pirate Bay,
but sadly the book has not been translated into English:
http://www.kb.se/aktuellt/Butik-och-Publikationer/Mediehistoriskt-arkiv2/Efter-the-Pirate-Bay/

The Pirate Bay also published a funny enigmatic book of slogans. It
captures some of the humour and inconsistencies of the group.
thepiratebay.org/torrent/4741944/powr.broccoli-kopimi

Here are a few academic articles on the matter that contextualize the
movement a bit more.
Lindgren, S., & Linde, J. (2012). The Subpolitics of Online Piracy: A
Swedish case study. Convergence: The International Journal of Research
into New Media Technologies, 18(2), 143–164.
doi:10.1177/1354856511433681

Miegel, F., & Olsson, T. (2008). From Pirates to Politician: The Story
of the Swedish File Sharers who became a Political Party. In N.
Carpentier, P. Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, K. Nordenstreng, M. Hartmann, P.
Vihalemm, B. Cammaerts, H. Nieminen, et al. (Eds.), Democracy,
Journalism and Technology: New Developments in an Enlarged Europe (pp.
203–217). Tartu: Tartu Publisher Press.

Dahlberg, L. (2011). Pirates, Partisans, and Politico-Juridical Space.
Law and Literature, 23(2), 262–281. (He seems to be a member of the
Swedish circles writing on piracy).

I also saw Patrick Bukart present at ICA on the Pirate Party so he
might have a paper to share too.

Let me know if you have any more questions or comments. As I said, I
have written on the Pirate Bay as well, but not published yet, so I’m
happy to circulate my own work if you want.

Best,
Fenwick

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Marcin de Kaminski
<marcin at dekaminski.se> wrote:
> I think the tips provided on the list are all good, but would like to emphasize Steal this Film which in my opinion is the best and most clear overview of the background of Piratbyran and The Pirate Bay. In particular I see it as important to study the pre-pirateparty movements - we started Piratbyran in 2003 and TPB in 2003/2004 and PP was formed several years later (maybe still forming).
>
> Marcin
>
>
>
> 11 aug 2012 kl. 00:45 skrev Yosem Companys <companys at stanford.edu>:
>
>> From: Gabriella Coleman <gabriella.coleman at mcgill.ca>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Can folks recommend articles on the Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay)
>> they find compelling or provocative?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Biella
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Fenwick McKelvey
PhD Candidate in Communication and Culture
Ryerson / York Universities
http://fenwickmckelvey.com
Research Associate
Infoscape Research Lab
http://www.infoscapelab.ca