Why has the issue of file-sharing become of increasing importance (in Sweden)?

One quick answer may be that traditional political parties and governments, faced with significant complications, usually take to enacting new laws and regulation to, effectively, criminalize all forms of file-sharing of copyrighted media. This approach is highlighted by the Swedish police’s 2006 raid on the web hosting provider of the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.

This move was highly controversial—servers belonging to organizations not affiliated with The Pirate Bay were seized; rumors abounded that the raid was forced by the U.S. government and movie companies; there were also whispers that the Swedish government had a hand in launching the raid by police—which would be a violation of Swedish law.

It was Sweden’s Social-Democratic government, which created a law making downloading of copyrighted material on the Internet illegal, that literally, overnight, transformed an entire generation into criminals.

What the government did, for all intents and purposes, was to whack the proverbial hornet’s nest with a stick. The government gave the appearance of seeking to take away a significant slice of the younger generation’s way of life—by proscribing actions that many, if not most, participated in on nearly a day-to-day basis. This issue, unlike many others, happened to directly affect not only the lives of many young people—but also their beliefs and values.

Many members of the younger generation—those who have grown up using the Internet, relish the ease with which one can obtain, essentially, any form of information or media. Having grown up with this freedom and access, many of them take it to be an essential aspect of their lifestyle. The freedom of information and media—and the freedom to receive said information and media, is taken to be of paramount importance. Intense value and significance is placed on not only the freedom to “know” but also the right to “know.” Thus, organizations and communities, such as The Pirate Bay, emerge. Their purpose is to foster and support, as well as facilitate, this one absolutely necessary aspect of life in a modern society.

Habermas (1996) and Benhabib (1996) suggest that citizenship is described with regards to agreed-upon standards of social behavior and shared values. From this we can see that the Swedish government’s raid on The Pirate Bay stimulated a new arena of political conflict—that is, the young Swedes’ view of the traditional political system and its justifications suffered a significant shift, as certain aspects of their cultural system came into serious disagreement with peremptory requests of current socio-political institutions. That is, this “clash of values” may expose some of the “cracks” in the foundations of contemporary government—the inability of the government to appear legitimate in the eyes of a large portion of society.

The Piratepartiet (Pirate Party) can be taken as a response to this state of affairs—an attempt to rectify, or influence and infuse contemporary government with some of the values that a certain segment of society holds close. Thus, we can see that one way of understanding the Piratpartiet is through the lens of culture, values, and legitimacy. The Piratpartiet began as a “bottom-up” movement, commencing with the actions and values of the younger generation—which then became of political importance, once they were taken to be incompatible with what larger society demanded.