Swedish Pirate Party Finally Has Second MEP

The Swedish Pirate Party is set to double its representation at the European Parliament next month when 24 year old Amelia Andersdotter is officially appointed – more than two years after she was first elected.

Andersdotter will become the youngest ever MEP and follows in the footsteps of fellow Swede Christian Engstrom, who became the party’s first minister in 2009. The Pirate Party lobbies to reform copyright and patent laws to allow greater freedom to share.

Pirates’ Rights

In Swedish European elections in June 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) won seven percent of the vote, with its success partly influenced by the prosecution of the founders of the Pirate Bay file-sharing website.

This earned the fledgling party a seat at the European parliament, with a possible second if the Lisbon Treaty was ratified. This happened in December 2009, but the slow process of implementing it has meant that Andersdotter has had to wait.

In an interview with TorrentFreak, Andersdotter said that she was pleased be finally able to take her seat and start tackling the issues she and her party see as important.

“European approaches to competition law need to be changed, at least a bit. Better sector adaptation, for instance,” she said, “The lack of real control over vertical integration creates the situation where telcos (or media enterprises) own everything from the backbone cables to the music streaming service – that’s not good.”

Pan-European Piracy

Andersdotter reaffirmed her belief in a united Europe and her hopes that the Pirate Party can help to influence a culture in which creativity and innovation can flourish.

Unsurprisingly, she was also passionate about the issue of rights, “I’m also very interested in industrial rights, like, patent rights or design rights, trademarks,” she said, before adding that she felt the “abundance of kind of side-initiatives and data exclusivity” is “not always good for society.”

Andersdotter said that she hoped that the Swedish Pirate Party’s ascension to the European Parliament would act as a platform for success in national parliaments, something that no Pirate Party has yet achieved.

The Swedish Pirate Party were unable to gain a seat in the Swedish general election in 2010, while the UK Pirate Party achieved just 1340 votes, or 0.34 percent in the last general election.

However the success of the German Pirate Party in Berlin’s state elections will offer some hope after it won 15 seats, attracting 9 percent of the vote.