An Introduction

           When the phrase “a typical social movement” is brought up, what regularly pops into someone’s mind involves a group of people becoming frustrated with the way things are in their life to the point they are willing to raise their voice and let the world, or at least a larger group of people, know their frustration to gain support in changing what is causing them pain in their life.  This however, is bigger than a social movement.  What is going on in a large part of Europe and pop up spots around the globe involves more than a mere social movement but a political movement.  People are not just voicing their frustrations to encourage other people to make a change for them.  Pirate Politics is about being fed up enough with the way things are to actually get out there and make a change in a democratic manor.            

            In his book, Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests, Patrick Burkart examines how the take down of The Pirate Bay, a website devoted to sharing copyrighted material to people on the internet, was taken down and how that has encouraged people to form the new political party, Pirate Politics. Pirate Politics works to try and strengthen access to copyrighted material as they believe everyone has a right to freely access the true fruit of the world, knowledge.   Burkart moves his way through the book by first setting up the context of the political party and how they came about.  He then goes on to describe antipiracy movements by the European Union and the American government and how that has also inspired Pirate Politics to respond to the restraint copyright/patent laws create.  In the latter half of his book, Burkart moves to try and explain why the Pirate Party is not just out to gain things for free, despite their label of “free culture” they are trying to promote.  It is, he believes, a libertarian movement that wants to have great effects on the cyber world.  Burkart believes they can do this by playing on their relation to the environmentalist movement in how it encourages parts working together as one, instead of independent entities.  From these claims, Burkart argues this is a revolutionary party that is going to bring forth big changes in the way information is transferred online (Burkart, 2014).  Throughout this blog, I analyze some of his arguments, good and bad, and why one ought to believe them, or not, using different authors I have recently become acquainted with.