Partide politice

How to assess the emergence of the European Pirate Parties
Towards a research agenda
 

RADU USZKAI
[The University of Bucharest]

CONSTANTIN VICĂ
[The University of Bucharest]

Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to assess the emergence of the pirate movements in the European Union. Our goal is to sketch the steps towards a research agenda for this grassroots political movement which gained momentum since 2009. To attain our goal we showed the re-signification of the concept of piracy in the debate around intellectual property and its institutional settlement. Afterwards we analysed the big political themes of several European Pirate Parties and their struggle to follow the preferences of the median voter. We concluded with a set of hypotheses of which the most important is that the pirates will inscribe neither to the left nor to the right part of the political spectrum.

Keywords: political parties; piracy; Pirate Party; comparative politics; intellectual property; social norms; median voter

The re-signification of piracy

The history of sea piracy begins in the Mediterranean Sea, around 14th century BC. Piracy wasn’t peculiar to Greek tribes, also Illyrians and Romans entered into this „new market”. The Middle Ages were an era of Viking piracy and they dominated the European seas until the beginning of modernity. The time of so-called „the golden age of piracy”¹ is the last important period of sea piracy which generates a deep interest mainly because the pirates, like other kinds of outlaws, produced an alternative social world to the mainstream sovereignty. Piracy wasn’t anarchy, rule-free or amoralism; it was a violent form of questioning the legitimacy of the (monarchic) state, its moral and social fundamentals. Piracy could be seen as a form of counter-politics. A second lesson the history of sea privacy can teach the researcher is that there are no pirates without privateers. Privateers were entitled by the state to attack commercial ships during war times, representing a legal form of piracy. Using the same methods like the pirates, the privateers had the sovereign political power by their side. This observation is critical to understand how the term „piracy” is used in relation to information and „intellectual property” laws.

The XXth century is the witness of a new battlefield in political economy: the intellectual property (IP). Even if the first law on copyright was enacted more than 300 years ago² and the first international convention on literary and artistic property took place in the XIXth century³, the post-industrial period of modernity, after World War II and the disintegration of Communist regimes, saw the emergence of powerful international structures governing all kinds of IP, from copyright to trade marks. As is sometimes stated in the popular culture, IP is the new oil of the information society⁴. This punchline is summing up the contemporary phase of settlement on IP rights: The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) negotiated at the end of 1994 inside World Trade Organization. TRIPS is the first international agreement where the propaganda term „piracy”, used before by pro-IP organizations and big constituencies interested in information control, replaced the more suitable and comprehensive term of „copyright infringement”⁵. Even if term „piracy” was used before to describe unauthorized printing of books⁶, it entered the international arena in the late XXth century as designating an unlawful general action against intellectual property owners.

The pirate - privateer dialectic is isomorphic to another kind of dialectic: contestation and settlement in IP history⁷. IP development is set between two boundaries: dissemination and protection of information and knowledge⁸. Stakeholders in IP are manifold, from the general public, scholars, and librarians to creators, agents and big entertainment companies. On the international level of IP game the national states are playing hard one against the other for the enclosure of knowledge, therefore they alter the general rules of the game. The contemporary institutional settlement is TRIPS⁹, but if we look backward into the history of IP we can see that this institutional phase is not a final one - there it will always be a dialectic movement around the issue. IP, like other institutional approaches to property, has the role of allocating resources in an efficient way. The pirate social critique is centered on the failure of efficient resource allocation and, in the same time, on the unfairness of these rules of allocation. The tension between private protection of intellectual or ideal goods and the public or common good approach of information is recurrent¹⁰ and it can’t be overcame. From Gutenberg press machine to phonographs and radio industry, the tension is permanent. The advent of the Internet made this tension more explicit and made possible an unpredictable coordination of pirate counter-political spheres.

Pirate movements all around Europe, but also in Canada, USA, South America and Russia are re-using the term „piracy” with positive significations. The pirate movement values, as the remix of culture, the subversion and the contestation of the sovereign power, the digital disobedience etc., changed the sign and use of „piracy” instating it again as a positive propaganda term. Being a pirate in our days means fighting for the free flow of information and access, for civil digital rights (as the online privacy), for fairness in information dissemination etc. The counter-politics gains power and popular legitimacy. The turning point for the pirate movement can be set in the beginning of 2009 with „Spectrial” in Sweden, a trial of the biggest file sharing website using a peer-to-peer protocol, The Pirate Bay. The process was spectacular, with big public meetings in support of Pirate Bay founders and an online campaign, and made possible the emergence of Piratpartiet (The Swedish Pirate Party) which gained two seats in the elections for European Parliament that year. From 2009 the pirate movement spread in the European area and abroad.

1. Political themes

The purpose of this section is that of exploring the wide range of political themes of a series of Pirate Parties from Europe. Due to the scope of our article, we will focus only on several of such political movements from the following countries: Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom and France. In the following paragraphs we will try to provide a qualitative research and analysis of the ideological tenets of the pirate movements in the countries listed above, with the goal of highlighting their overlapping concerns but also some significant areas of discord. Our hypothesis is that, while they do agree on some important positions such as intellectual property, privacy or open government (to list just a few) they do not prescribe the same economic policies.

1.1 Intellectual Property: Towards the reform of the Copyright and Patent System
One common concern of all the pirate party platforms we shall analyse is the idea that the copyright system, alongside the patent one, are in need of a fundamental reform.

For example, Piratpartiet (The Swedish Pirate Party) draws attention to the fact that in our present legal system, copyright laws have far exceeded their original purpose, namely that of facilitating the spread of cultural products. In their own words, they emphasise the fact that „the official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote”¹¹. Highlighting the fact that culture and knowledge are by themselves beneficial to society as a whole, their solution to the present problem is, first of all, that of restricting the monopoly of a copyright holder to only five years. They also draw attention to the fact that file sharing has become, in our present legal system, a type of victimless crime. As a consequence, the Piratparteit consider that decriminalization of such actions is in order: „The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation. All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized”¹². With regards to patents, their main concern lies with the pharmaceutical industry and the hampering effect of the existence of patents.

The Swiss Pirate Party acknowledges the same type of concerns. They emphasise the need of liberating culture and as a corollary they talk about Digital Rights Management, namely „the non-commercial collection, use, manipulation and distribution of culture shall be expressly allowed.”¹³ As for patents, they draw attention upon the need of a reform which would limit the chance of monopoly in various industries.

The other Pirate Parties which we analyse hold similar point of views. For example, in their UK 2011 Manifesto¹⁴, the Pirate Party UK draws attention to the need of a more balanced copyright and patent system, underlining the fact that the reduction of protection granted by copyrights or patents is in order, while recognizing that P2P transactions that not include money shouldn’t be considered a crime. Moreover, if the Piraten Partei (The German Pirate Party) talks about the need of recognizing the digital Society¹⁵, the French Parti Pirate lists the „legalisation of file sharing”¹⁶ as one of their main concern.

1.2 The common concern for privacy and data security
The respect for the private sphere of each individual but also the opposition towards data collection or the surveillance of conversations or data transfers, either online or offline, is a unifying theme for all European Pirate Parties. For example, the Swedish Piratpartiet considers that the events in US on 9/11 or the terrorist attacks in London or Madrid have paved the way towards the increasing control and surveillance on behalf of the state regarding our private sphere. Following what we may call a popperian perspective, they emphasise the value of an open and transparent society.

The Swiss pirates dwell on the same assumptions. They consider that all activities that imply either surveillance or data control should be reserved only in cases of extreme emergency. Their position could be summed up as follows: „All attempts of the state or third parties to curtail these rights must be critically questioned and explicitly contested. All organizational units, systems and methods, which the state can use in the observation and surveillance of its citizens must be subjected to continuous and strict evaluation and assessment by elected officials. Surveillance and data collection in the absence of reasonable cause are an unacceptable encroachment on the private sphere”¹⁷.

Due to their historical background which consists of two types of dictatorships¹⁸ in just a century, the German Piraten Partei stresses the importance of protecting the right to privacy for a democratic society. As the Swiss Pirates pointed out earlier, the State must be granted the power to encroach on such a fundamental right only if there is a clear and present danger: „the government must only be allowed to access means of communication or to monitor citizens if there is substantiated evidence that this citizen will commit a crime. In all other cases, the government must assume that its citizens are innocent and leave them alone”¹⁹. Moreover, they accentuate the fact that citizens should also have a right to informational self-determination. For example, they consider that „all citizens must have an enforceable claim against administrators of central databases to demand disclosure of their personal information at no cost, and also for correction, blocking or deletion of their data.”

The French and UK parties share the same vision. The position of the French Parti Pirate could be summed up using two of their political slogans: „Non au fichage abusif!”(No to abusive filing!) and „La vidéo surveillance nuit gravement à vos libertés!”(Video monitoring seriously harms your freedoms!)²⁰. Last but not least, the UK Pirates, while acknowledging all the previous positions of their counterparts, also stress the fact that „we will ensure the public has the right and ability to encrypt their personal data and communication”²¹.

1.3 Open Government and the strife for a transparent political system
Another unifying theme for European Pirates lies within their scope of the following concepts: Open Government and Liquid Feedback²².

As a consequence, all the parties analysed in the present article prescribe certain types of public policies to attain this goal. For example, the Swiss Pirate Party Platform has the following demands: the relationship between business man and politicians and the sources of income of political parties must become common knowledge, the principle of political openness has to be strengthened and last but not least, the political decision making process has to become more transparent and comprehensible for each citizen. This public policy concerns stress the importance of placing mature citizens in the middle of the political process. In turn, the French have similar options, emphasising the need of preventing conflict of interests and of clarifying public expenses.

The German Piraten Partei has a similar approach and also an interesting solution: laws for protecting whistleblowers. They acknowledge that this type of activity, regarding the range of public expenses, has an important corrective function in any free and democratic society.

1.4 Parting ways
Interestingly enough, while the European Pirates we discussed have similar options regarding Intellectual Property, Digital Rights or Open Government, they do differ or at least they tend to emphasise other different aspects.

First of all, let’s start with particular differences which are not a signal of a bigger gap. For example, while all the parties agree that the duration of monopoly granted by copyright should be diminished, they do not prescribe the same policies. For instance, while the Swedish Piratpartiet considers that this period should be limited to only five years, the UK Party aims at a more conservative reform, having in mind a period of ten years.

Another interesting point well mentioning is the fact that some Pirate Parties, besides their „digital” platform, tend to punctuate some aspects which other organizations do not really focus on. For example, Pirate Party Switzerland states their option for a clear separation between Church and State and their plea for laicism and humanistic values. As a consequence, they demand that the state should abolish church taxes, bring religious organizations on parity with other types of organizations or the promotion of constructive thinking as a central part of the education process. The German Piraten Partei side with the Swiss on these issues stressing the importance of fighting against religious paternalism and for a true axiological neutrality of the state on religious or spiritual issues. While they might agree on this issue, the other Pirate Parties analysed here do not make explicit such a plea.

A more fundamental divide however between European Pirates becomes evident if we focus our attention on the particular manner in which they tackle with other social or economic issues. The German Pirates are, in this context, a paradigmatic example. Leaving aside the digital component of their political platform, they tend to display an affinity with Left politics. Only a brief review of their claims is enough to warrant this claim. First of all, for example, they ask for free public transportation. They also tend to side with the Green Party on o range of issues such as eco-sustainable economic growth or a move from fossil fuel towards generative and regenerative resources. Last, and more importantly not least, it is interesting to note the fact that they are in favor of a minimum wage in Germany²³ better understood as a safety net for all individuals: „since the goal is to secure an income and a livelihood for everyone, this income should be guaranteed directly to each individual. Only this way can we protect the dignity of all people without exception. Just as we provide public security, traffic routes and large parts of the educational system without a direct compensation, a secure livelihood must also become a part of our infrastructure”²⁴.

The French Parti Pirate, while not explicitly proposing the German policies which we presented earlier, acknowledges that capitalism represents a coercive ideology. They do advance a political discourse dominated by a plea towards equality, but not in specific terms. In their own words, „faced with economic issues, the Parti Pirate encourages economic and energy alternatives. Far from substituting another dogma to the coercive capitalist ideology, the Parti Pirate wants to promote local responses to citizens’ needs by promoting free access to knowledge and essential skills”²⁵.

The other Pirate Parties analysed in this article either ignore such issues or manifest a more pro-market attitude. For instance, the Swiss and UK pirates focus their attention on social and civil liberties. The Swedish Pirates however, while trying to position themselves as a single issue party, favor, on average, more free-market policies than their German or French counterparts.

2. Hackers, geeks, tech-savvy users and the median voter

Voter preferences in multi-party systems are a classical way to investigate the political structure of a country and the specific struggle for political power within its area. Seeing the politics as a competition market for voters’ preferences should offer an objective framework to explain political movements, expectations and outputs. The first assumption of this framework is the existence of a reasoning voter who usually thinks and evaluates the parties accordingly to her preferences (in a feedback loop). The second assumption is the rationality with limited information the voter uses. The problem of limited information is paramount to generating a preference: because the voter has limited time to get the full amount of information and sometimes the sources are scarce, she often prefers to simplify and rely upon friends, relatives or other persons. But this image of reasoning voter is challenged by the pirate movement; a typical voter for the pirates is a heavy user of the Internet and other information technologies, i.e. she is a well-informed person using the right tools to inform about how to fulfill her political preferences.

The pirate movements all across Europe face the standard dilemma of „new movements”²⁶: standing in a niche with a program only for specific issues (like those expressed in the previous section) or a more comprehensive approach of the general politics. A future research has to answer this question: do the pirates intend to make a niche politics or a more general one? In order to answer it, we need to assess how they conceive the role of the median voter.

It is widely accepted that pirate parties are a grassroots movement²⁷ building a bottom-up architecture. The core of this movement was formed by IT enthusiasts, sometimes described as hackers or computer geeks. Hackers have a long tradition of tinkering and subversion: sometimes depicted as digital villains, and some other times as network angels, the hackers are indubitably the symbol of the computer cultural revolution. But the hackers also tend to follow a deterministic view about technology and society: for them the politics resides in the power of digital code²⁸, i.e. the code shapes the social interaction, and hacktivism is the best form of political disobedience. In short, information is at war, a war for the control of information. The pirate party movement is an overturn of Clausewitz’s dictum: politics of information is the continuation of electronic war by other means. The pirates keep the affinities with the hackers’ movement Anonymous or Wikileaks²⁹, but they seek to cooperate and develop beyond the „hacking” dimension. For example, the two MEPs from Swedish Piratpartiet are affiliated to the Green Group in the European Parliament³⁰. In other words, the pirates seek to make political alliances beyond the scope of a hacking culture, overcoming the geek computer label and shifting off from the deterministic view to a more general vision of interplay between technology, information, society and politics.

This quest of positioning is in fact the quest for the median voter: the pirates intend to unlabel themselves as computer geeks for a more open and inclusive agenda that can bring more votes. And this is possible simply because in EU at least there is a critical mass of Internet users and tech savvy people³¹. The switch from hacktivism to general politics is obvious; the pirate movement passed the „romantic period” to a more pragmatic attitude within the rules of the political game. The idea of a median voter has its roots in Hotelling’s law of minimum differentiation for economic actors³²: it is rational to make similar products to compete on the market. The political actors tend to align their agenda to the median voter in campaigns therefore tend to have similar policy proposals. Going to the median preferences is the best way to achieve goals in a typical majoritarian voting systems. The median voter theorem can explain why radical parties fail to succeed and also the emergence of two parties in majoritarian systems. Our hypothesis is that pirate movements will move from the radical line and the specific niche to the median voter and general politics³³. The pirate movement is obliged to do so, otherwise it can lose its political themes in front of bigger parties like the socialists, the liberals or the greens which can embed them into their programs. Another risk of this turn to general politics is the advent of internal struggles between the purists (or the „traditionalist” computer geeks) and the maximalists (the advocates of information and knowledge politics at large with implications in other domains).

We don’t have sufficient data for a correlation, but it seems that pirate movements can succeed especially on a fragmented political market with many parties in Parliaments, like Sweden and the federal Germany.

3. Towards a research agenda; abandoning the left-right analysis

We consider that a starting point for assessing the emergence of the European Pirate Parties and a formulation of a research agenda dedicated to them should be this simple observation: the Pirates managed to transgress the virtual environment where they started into the real world of politics. File sharing on the Internet imposed as a social norm subverting the legal rules of copyright. That’s why pirate movements are grassroots: they encompass social norms online. In this light their politics must be always bottom-up, from the social norm to the legal rule. A second reason for the emergence of pirates is their realised claim of direct democracy: at least the German pirates use an online tool, Liquid Feedback, which is the instantiation of the participatory democracy dream.

A theoretical analysis of political parties, some political scientists might argue, should focus on whether the particular organization which we are focusing on belongs either on the Left or on the Right of the political spectrum. For example, in their article Putting Parties in Their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Party Manifetstos Data, Matthew J. Gabel and John D. Huber dwell on such an assumption. They argue that „the left-right ideological positions of political parties play a central role in theorizing many different aspects of democratic processes. Scholars employ the left-right positions of parties in theoretical arguments and empirical tests on such topics as macro-economic policy-making, legislative institutional choice, electoral competition, voting behavior, political representation, and cabinet stability. Thus, evaluation of a wide range of theoretical arguments in comparative politics requires reliable measures of the left-right positions of political parties”³⁵. They consider that, in order for political scientists to do this task, they should take a closer look at how political parties present themselves in their manifestos.

The example of the European Pirate Parties though might pose a serious difficulty to such a theoretical endeavour. While some of the parties do exhibit a preference towards some policies which might seem closer to the Left (such is the case of the German Pirate Party) or pro-market attitudes (the case of Sweden’s Piratpartiet) it would be difficult to argue that Pirates are, on a whole, either Left or Right wing. As a consequence, we consider that the formulation of a framework for the analysis of the emergence of Pirate Parties should take into account this observation. In addition, our own proposal stems from Stuart A. Lillie and William S. Maddox’s 1981 article An Alternative analysis of Mass Belief Systems: Liberal, Conservative, Populist and Libertarian.³⁵ The two American political scientists have an interesting proposal: instead of thinking of the US political realm as being divided in two parts, the liberal (left of the center) and the conservative (right of the center), a more accurate approach would take into account the following variables: the attitudes towards government intervention in the economy and the attitudes towards individual liberty. In this new framework, they consider that a more explicit analysis should focus on the following political categories: liberals, conservatives, libertarians and populists. We consider that the rise of the Pirate Parties invokes the necessity of a new measurable variable: the attitude towards digital freedom, liberties and rights.

In the long run we have to test several hypotheses. For this, we need to wait for another two years of national elections and the European Parliament election of 2014.

Hypothesis 1. Pirate movements will move from the radical line and the specific niche to the median voter and general politics.

Hypothesis 2. Pirate movement will never totally ascribe to either left or right policies. It is possible to see in the near future two kinds of political pirate parties having the same informational policies but with different social visions. It is also possible to have two different pirate parties in the same country.

Hypothesis 3. If the first two hypotheses are true, then pirate movement will face big internal struggles on the national and international level. This will imply the lack of success for an International Pirate Parties and the impossibility of a common European politics.

We intend to develop the research using qualitative data from interviews with the emergent leaders of pirate movements, a much deeper linguistic analysis of official pirate documents, and also to establish a set of correlations between economic and social welfare in each European country, the digital readiness & inclusion, and the policies that the Pirate Parties propose.

References
GABEL, Matthew J., HUBER, John D., „Putting Parties in Their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Party Manifestos Data”, American Journal of Political Science, 1, 2000, 94-103.
HOTELLING, Harold, „Stability in Competition”, Economic Journal, 39, 1929, 41-57.
JOHNS, Adrian, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2009.
KUHN, Gabriel, Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy, Oakland California, PM Press, 2009.
LILLIE, Stuart A., MADDOX, William S., „An Alternative analysis of Mass Belief Systems: Liberal, Conservative, Populist and Libertarian”, Cato Institute Policy Analysis, 3, 1981, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa003.html.
SELL, Susan, MAY, Christopher, „Moments in law: contestation and settlement in the history of intellectual property”, Review of International Political Economy, 8 (3), 2001, 467-500.
YOUNG, Iris Marion, „Political Theory: An Overview”, in A New Handbook of Political Science, Robert E. Goodin, Hans-Dieter Klingemann eds., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998.

RADU USZKAI – Cercetător, Centru de Cercetare în Etică Aplicată, Universitatea din Bucureşti.

CONSTANTIN VICĂ – Cercetător, Centru de Cercetare în Etică Aplicată, Universitatea din Bucureşti.

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