This news has been slowly percolating through the Internet:

The Pirate Party aims to take up the roll of maintaining a balance of power after the 2006 election. There are between 800,000 and 1,100,000 active file swappers in Sweden, and they are all tired of being called criminals. We need to have 225 000 of them with us to cross the four percent threshold and land in the roll of power balance.

To get one fourth of a criminalized and angry mob with us is far from unachievable. It is that which we shall achieve in the coming nine months.

Democracy in action, or should I say “populism” of the progressives. The question is whether a common voice can really survive without investor capital and a marketing department. If this goes anywhere near as far as linux, then ten years from now we might just have to say “amazing that parties that represent normal dedicated people manage to compete with other parties that have strong corporate backers”.

The goal is to create a political one-issue party centered around the abolishment of copyright as we know it along with most IP laws in Sweden by getting into the parliament in this year’s elections.

Secondary, but equally important goals are to strengthen personal integrity by rejecting the EU “eavesdropping” directive and expand the “postal secret act” to include all forms of communication, regardless of carrier technology.

Someone had to point out, of course, that the Pirate Party webserver was running a licensed copy of Windows 2003.