[FC-discuss] Attuned to the EU's New Pirates

[Seth Johnson]

> http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/imported/in-tune-with-the-needs-of-the-eu-s-new-pirates/65659.aspx


In Tune With the Needs of the EU's New Pirates


By Jarle Hetland

30.07.2009 / 04:10 CET


Erik Josefsson's battles for electronic freedoms led him to the
European Parliament.


It was an injury that sent Erik Josefsson along the path that led him
to where he is today, working as political adviser to Christian
Engström, a member of the European Parliament for Sweden's Pirate
Party, which seeks to reform copyright and patent laws, and is now
Sweden's third largest party. Though it has no direct link with the
Pirate Bay filesharing website, support for the Pirate Party was
boosted by a decision from a Swedish court in April that the Pirate
Bay's activities were illegal. 

After receiving a masters degree in music in 1997, Josefsson was
working as a professional double bass player in orchestras in his
native Sweden when a shoulder injury put an end to that career.

He then decided to take advantage of his earlier studies in maths and
physics and landed a job as a software developer.

Soon afterwards he joined a group for users of the Linux operating
system. Among the many issues discussed was the importance of access
to source codes for developers, either to fix software problems or to
develop new applications.

The GNU General Public Licence for software was, he says, the main
subject of conversation between developers who put their work ethics
before their own or their business' interests.

Before he knew it, Josefsson was part of a movement which claims to be
saving the world from corporate control. In 2002 he became one of the
leading opponents of the EU's software patent directive. He co-founded
the Swedish chapter of the Foundation for a Free Information
Infrastructure (FFII) with Engström and, without any knowledge of how
to lobby politicians, he spearheaded the campaign against the
directive.

"When the directive was proposed in 2002, I and many others started
following this from scratch," he says. "We were computer programmers,
students or entrepreneurs, and we knew nothing about how the EU
worked.

"It eventually developed into a grassroots movement equal in strength
to the business associations and lobby groups you normally find in
Brussels, to those whose views are normally heard and listened to," he
says.

Patent protest

The movement grew out of the blogosphere – or more correctly,
Josefsson says, out of the ‘mailsphere' – and the organising element
was no individual or organisation, but a classical self-generating
political process.

"It was like seeing a catastrophe about to happen. Imagine a bus about
to drive into a crowd of people; you want to stop the bus before it
happens. We didn't have time to launch a proper organisation and we
never asked questions about how we should do things. We just had to do
it."

By early 2005, more than 400,000 people had signed a petition against
the software patent directive and later that year it was rejected by
the Parliament.

Although Josefsson is keen to stress the collective effort involved in
stopping the directive, it was also a personal victory.

Josefsson continued at the FFII until 2007, when he started working
for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organisation that
seeks to defend freedoms on the internet and data privacy.

Joining the pirates

Earlier this year, Josefsson was a candidate to be an MEP for
Vänstrepartiet (Left Party), a left-wing party. Although the
45-year-old was not elected, he "stole", as he puts it, more than 700
votes from his current employer, the Pirate Party.

Josefsson's knowledge of EU affairs and his long-time partnership with
Engström make it easy to understand why the Pirate Party disregarded
his one-time opposition to the movement's transformation into a
political party and chose him for his current job.

"The Pirate Party grew out of organisations such as FFII and EFF, not
the Pirate Bay. When the party was launched in 2006 I thought it would
be more difficult to make people listen to us. In the end I was
wrong," says Josefsson, who will also be working for the Green group
in the Parliament. "To me, this role is natural and it feels good to
be working for the political group that first took an interest in the
issues I was campaigning for."

Although it was an injury that started the chain of events that
brought Josefsson to the heart of the Parliament, he has not
completely forgotten his old partner, the double bass. In August he
will once again be performing, this time at a summer opera back in his
home town of Malmö.