Piracy in a landlocked country

At a café in Prague, Ivan Bartoš lent his friend Anežka Bubeníčková a book recently, an unusual gesture only in that the novel had been downloaded online for free and printed out.

"It's out of print," Bartoš explained, shrugging his shoulders.

The medium was appropriate given their new political affiliation with the recently established Czech Pirate Party, a movement modeled after the Swedish Pirate Party that has taken root across Europe typically among young voters. The platforms are built on the belief that obsolete copyright laws, corporate lobbyists and uninformed politicians are pushing legislation that infringes upon civil liberties on the Internet.

"Freedom of speech and freedom of Internet are related," said Bubeníčková, 23, an IT analyst. "I've realized governments have slowly but noticeably been passing laws that violate both, and it's time to do something about it before it's too late."

The Czech Pirate Party, officially registered June 22, was first initiated by Jiří Kadeřávek, 39, a computer programmer from Brno, in reaction to an April court ruling in Sweden in which four administrators of the Pirate Bay Internet downloading portal were sentenced to one year each in prison. But the original movement began in January 2006 when Rick Falkvinge established the Swedish Piratpartiet. His own party got a significant boost after the ruling, which was shocking in the severity of its sentence, he said.

"Our membership tripled in one week when the verdict was announced; we went from 14,000 members to over 40,000," he said. The ruling also came one month before the party was heading into EU parliamentary elections, and "that verdict was the ticket to the European Parliament," earning the party one of Sweden's 18 seats with 7.1 percent of the votes.

The Czech Pirate Party has similar ambitions and plans to participate in October's general elections, but its focus is also to educate Internet users about their rights and prevent government and big business from further eroding Internet privacy. Both Bubeníčková and Bartoš, 29, a database architect, stressed the aim wasn't simply to allow unlimited downloads of movies and music, activities most commonly associated with Internet piracy.

"It's about the right to know and to decide about how our information is used online," he said. "You sign a contract with your job that says they can monitor your e-mail. But with my private account, I didn't sign anything."

In the Czech Republic, Internet users can legally download software and files, regardless of whether the source obtained it legally. The law only forbids the user from then sharing the downloaded material with other users, said Jan Hlaváč, spokesman for the Business Software Alliance (BSA) in the Czech Republic.

"Why should anyone have the right to share something that he or she has not developed?" he said, adding that politicians should not be the ones to decide how to change copyright laws. "Other anti-piracy organizations, lawyers and copyright owners are all trying to work together to change and develop the laws in a way that's acceptable for all the parties. I don't think somebody who consumes the content should have the right to decide how the rights will actually be executed."

'Cart before the horse'

The Pirate Party seeks to combat those very interests, as Czech Pirate Party President Kamil Horký called the movement an "effective defense against lobbying groups ? that seek to harm us."

Pirating copyrighted works is only one possible outcome that must be accepted in order to defend the greater principle: unfettered - and, more importantly, unmonitored - personal communication on the Internet, said Falkvinge.

"Saying it's about free downloading is putting the cart before the horse. This is basically the next generation [of the] civil liberties movement," he said. "We demand the right to private, unmonitored communication, unless under formal suspicion of a crime."

Falkvinge added that it simply follows that, if you have the right to communicate privately, you could use that communication to pirate copyrighted works. Laws that maintain copyrights require such private communication be monitored, an unacceptable solution for the Pirate Party.

The movement's catchy banner has raised the eyebrows and the ire of those who work on the other side of the copyright and intellectual property issues. The platform is largely uninformed and exploits younger voters who can't grasp the legal complexities, and important benefits, of stricter regulation online, Hlaváč said. The BSA released a statement lauding the Swedish court ruling in April, in which CEO Robert Holleyman said the verdict sent a message that such "operations are immoral and punishable by law."

"When you ask them why they approve of something that's wrong, they say, 'Well, we don't actually support piracy.' It doesn't make any sense, and it proves it's just a populist move to attract young voters," Hlaváč said. "I think when they start their professional careers and develop original content themselves, they'll realize, if they're not protected, they'll lose money, and they'll also realize copyright protection is not something against them. It's important for business, and it contributes to economies."

Claire Compton can be reached at
ccompton@praguepost.com