"Young people understand that Internet matters, it's their kind of arena"
With a little luck next year Amelia Anderstotter will become the first female "pirate" to have a seat in the European Parliament.
This 21 year old Swedish economics student came from the small university town of Lund to Citilab to speak about a world in which property will not be a universal right. She leafed through a novel about cyber-shamens which had won the UPC science-fiction prize while confessing that in politics it's not easy to try to see the future.
Social Media has been a key point to achieve success as an active community. Why do young people who distrust politics support a political project?
I think that maybe it's not a so much a matter of trusting politics as it is a matter of politics not discussing issues that young people care about or presenting them in a way that is successful to young people. I think the Pirate Party has had a huge advantage in that we've been established in the blogosphere and twitter and all of the social media online for a very long time, also we've had the fortune to have quite a lot of young people engaged in the Pirate Party as well, so, that in combination with treating political issues that young people actually care about, I think has given us huge success in the younger demographic.
Well, what are the interesting issues?
Well I think currently Internet issues are very important to young people, I think that young people understand that on some level that Internet matters, that it's their kind of arena, because you had in the 1970s and the 1980s you had the environmentalists, and they were the young people who were struggling for some kind of societal change. The Internet is the environment of the 21st-century. Young people have always been the first people to catch up on new ideas and new ideologies and it's going to be like that with the digital society as well, when you're looking for something new or interesting, young people will be the first ones there. But also, I mean obviously in the Swedish election result what we've also seen is a very big rise for the Liberals and in particular the Greens for the young people in particular the Greens, so what we can say is that the environment is also something that a lot of young people are concerned about. I think that maybe crudely that women are more into the environment and men are more into technological issues, but I mean I'm just extrapolating.
Is network activism the next political model for the new generation?
Yes, I think that network activism is the new form of activism, network activism will be a wonderful way for Europe to mobilise people from all over Europe around single causes or multiple causes, over the Internet it is very easy to interact with friends in Spain or Romania or Poland or Finland in a way that just wasn't possible before and as politics goes global, citizen activism has to go global as well and I see no other medium through which this could be possible other than the Internet.
What about e-democracy and initiatives such as the VEP?
I think there could be an interest for the Virtual European Parliament, now I haven't personally been involved in any of the Virtual European Parliament projects except this one, but I think, and my experience is, that when you present an arena for collaboration online it usually helps if you have a specific issue around which to collaborate. Like for instance, the Pirate Party and the activism around the Pirate Party which is, you know quite a lot, we've always mobilised around single issues like the telecoms directive, the telecoms package or the Ipred directive or the software patent directive, all of these are very single, I mean it's just one issue at a time but we've been able to mobilise like 100,000 European citizens from all over Europe around these issues. So that's my primary evaluation, that it's always easier to mobilise people around the single issue than mobilise people around the issue of say, democratic participation because when you just go, "well you need to participate because it's your democratic right", it gets too abstract I think. In many cases what you need is for an issue to be presented and, you know, you can do this and this.
And what really is lacking from the European Union is a visible way, what really is lacking in the decision-making process of the European Parliament and the EU in total is an easy way for citizens to visualise what decisions get taken and when and it's really, really difficult to find out what decisions are taken and when they are taken by looking at the European Parliament calendar or the European Commission reports or whatever, so the European Union needs to find a way in which they can make available to the population the decisions they are making. The best thing would of course be if they did so before the decisions were made so that citizens could participate in affecting the decisions.
What is your idea about rights related to intellectual propierty?
Intellectual property, what you basically have with intellectual property is you sell a licence for the right to use a specific song or programme or object or production or whatever, it's an immaterial right that doesn't exist, it's just a piece of paper that gives you the rights to do something. But know what the Pirate Party proposes is for copyright issues, a shortening of the protection terms from lifetime +70 years currently in the European Union, to 5 or 10 years of commercial exploitation rights and this means basically that the licence, if you want to use a song for commercial purposes, the time-span during which you would have to apply for a licence to do this, would be shortened about to about 5-10 years and this is essentially what the Pirate Party politics means. And how to achieve this? Well we've already got systems in place: if somebody tries to exploit a production, commercially without proper authorisation, we have the possibility to make a lawsuit, you can sue them in front of a judge, you can report them to the police, I mean we have all these systems in place already. I think they will also suffice in the future.
And in the case of patents?
Now patents in the Pirate Party vision are a bit different because we want to eliminate patterns completely. Quite a lot of people question the rationale of this but to be perfectly honest all the intellectual property rights are incredibly expensive and we see this in the patent industry, a lot in the patent industry especially with respect to the patent-able materials. The things you are able to patent today are almost 10 times as many as the things you were able to patent in 1995. Now today you can patent plants, seeds, medicines, and not just, you know you used to have process patents for medicines like you could patent in the process of making a particular substance, but now you can actually patent the substance itself. Now this essentially means that you can patent the molecule but the molecule just exists. A molecule simply exists, what if some of the patented water? It is absurd. You can't patent molecules or you shouldn't be able to.
So we have this very expansive patent industry and I think that the only way to rid ourselves of this very expansive patent industry and the very harmful way in patents are used is by disbanding the patent system altogether. This doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't certain points of the patent system than the worth preserving in a new society. My personal favourite is advocating a transfer of all positive points of patent law into, perhaps, competition law instead, because what you basically have or the basic idea of a patent is that you have a weak producer being protected against a stronger one. Now this seems like a competition issue to me. And I don't think that we need to enstate a specific licence or intellectual property right in order to preserve that protection for the small producers. Obviously this critique against the patent system could be extended to other forms of intellectual property rights as well, because copyright as we all know it is also very extensive but this is an issue we haven't really resolved yet in the Party.
After the Pirate Bay affair, how do you expect to get income for the Pirate Party?
The Pirate Bay affair has meant more donations for the Pirate Party but I don't think that we have to be afraid of those donations going away any time soon because you basically have this trial against the Pirate Bay which is going to continue for two or three years more. I think they're opening the next court instance this October or next October, 2009 and then in the next year we have the national parliamentary elections and with a bit of luck after those we'll have the regular support for political parties from the Swedish government, in which case the donations won't matter so much any more because we'll have another source of income.
Do you think that the female participation in your party will increase in the next few years?
Yes I do. I think the Pirate Party was initially very male dominated because the technological sector is very male dominated, and the problem you have with a sector being male dominated is that it is very difficult for women to get in. Usually what you have with a political party or an association is somebody enters the movement and they'll to their friends, you know, "ooh look I found this really new hot thing you should really come join or check it out" and the problem is that when you've got mostly males to begin with, is that men mostly know men, so when the men tell their friends to come, they'll only bring in more men. And the women who have ended up in the Pirate Party have usually been the kind of women who know mostly men as well. Meaning that when they tell their friends to come, for every woman you get another five men or so, but I think we're starting to get women in the Pirate Party now who actually do know women and that means possibly we'll be able to get some more women and the more women we have, ironically the more women we'll get. So I think this is something that will even out and we have a couple of projects as well in the Pirate Party, like we started a network for women in the Pirate Party, to establish that there is in fact a social network for women as well in the Pirate Party. And I think this will also help to get more women into the movement.
Do you think that some proposals of the Pirate Party could be declared ilegal?
In fact, we could be declared illegal with the proposed directive for enforcement of intellectual property rights that's expected to come up in the European Parliament in the next term. The directive is called Iprod 2 or Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive 2 and is basically on the criminalisation of file-sharing, like prison sentences for file sharing and also it proposes to make it illegal to advocate changes or breaches of the current copyright legislation. And that would make it very difficult for the Pirate Party to advocate a political change, which is not very good so obviously this directive can't go through because it would mean the end of democracy.
What would be your main priorities be if you finally achieved a position of power someday?
For the European Parliament, one of the first objectives is to get a functioning telecoms package. those are regulations for the Telecom communications market and this in the autumn of 2009, so we've only got about six months now to work with these issues. The final vote in parliament will be on 15th of December, preliminary. After 15 December, it's difficult to say what priorities will come but I have anticipated a discussion on the exceptions and limitations in copyright legislation and we shall probably try to initiate these discussions sometime this fall or next spring and with any luck they'll open up the Infosoft directive of 2001 and that the commission will open that up and that means will allow a constructive discussion about where copyright in the European Union is headed.
I'm hoping also to get the opportunity to look at the pharmaceuticals patents because the commission did already last fall state that the pharmaceutical industry or the holders of pharmaceutical patents that use pharmaceutical patents as a way to hamper competition, and when you hinder competition in the internal market generally this isn't seen lightly by the commission in the European Court of Justice, so I'm hoping that this will lead them to the conclusion that the pharmaceutical patent terms either need to be shortened or that we need a significant change in the regulations surrounding pharmaceutical patents.
I'm also a bit hopeful in a few the initiatives regarding prize funds for pharmaceutical patents but this might not be so much a political issue as an issue for universities or educational institutions. This autumn and next spring there is something called the Stockholm agenda on the combating of terrorism and international organised crime and this is something that the Pirate Party will also have to participate in, because we're very much sceptical of all the coordinations and registers across Europe and surveillance of citizens with the purpose of combating terrorism, so we're going to have to participate in those discussions to make sure, well not much make sure, but try to make these discussions end up somewhere actually constructive rather than just surveillance of the general populace. And those are the most immediate issues, this is like the next year or so. After the next year I don't really know, I can't see that far ahead in the future.
