2011-2016

This project set out to examine how the ideology of piracy, as it is embodied by the Pirate Party, relates to conceptions of authorship, creativity and modernity. It approached this questions from an empirical perspective. The core of the study consisted of interviews with 31 active Pirate Party members from across the world. Most of the interviews were conducted in Sweden, the USA and Australia, additional interviews were made with a few members of the Canadian, German and British Pirate parties. In addition analyzed documents such as political manifestos and agendas have also been analyzed.
Over the course of the project, running from 2012 to 2015, the role and organization of the Pirate Party has changed significantly. When the project was initiate, the Pirate Party was a growing political movement focusing on copyright and freedom of information. After the EU-election in 2009 the Swedish Pirate Party held two seats in the EU-parliament and the German Pirate Party made a big impact in the regional elections across Germany in 2011. About a year into the project the Pirate Party was however beginning to lose support. By the time this study was launched the party was just about to widen its political agenda, shifting focus from information politics to more general democracy issues. This also resonated well with the interviewees from the Pirate Party who often saw copyright and filesharing as secondary and preferred to talk of democratic participation, government transparency and accountability, and rights to privacy as their main motivation to join the Pirate Party.
The movement that this project set out to study when the initial research questions were formulated was thus significantly different from the one I met when I launched the project. This had consequences for the research questions since a too strong focus on copyright and authorship would not capture the essence of the movement. In the end the issue had to be framed in a wider context and the study came to look at how a movement like the Pirate Party reflect changes and challenges to contemporary politics in an information society.
The most immediate finding concerned the above mentioned changes to the Pirate Party. The opportunity to closely follow a movement going through such changes has made it possible to make interesting observation on the internal dynamics of the party, most notably regarding conflicts over organizational forms and political strategies. It was possible to see how the party was soon disrupted by tensions between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary strategies and by its relation to radical movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous.
Secondly, the study shows that the debates over copyright and filesharing are not isolated or restricted to the issues of cultural policy or media distributions. Many of the active Pirate Party-members regard filesharing as an act of cultural enlightenment or free speech and see the expansion of copyright as a threat to those values. Many other groups, such as librarians, academic and digital right groups also share a concern that too strict copyright laws can limit public access to information. The copyright issue is frequently contextualized as a democracy issue, where the copyright lobbyism and extended state surveillance is seen as part of an ongoing crisis of democracy. The Pirate Party members furthermore see themselves as part of a wider international democracy movement, also including Occupy Wall Street and protest movements in North Africa.
Thirdly, by following the Pirate party and the filsharing debate over time I have been able to see how the conflicts in information politics and digital rights have shifted over the past five years. In 2010 the filesharing debate focused on how corporate interests limited the public access to culture and information through the expansion of copyright law. Today access to information and copyright expansionism is no longer a high ranking issue either in the public debate or on the Pirate Party's agenda. Following the expansion of streamed entertainment services such as Spotify and Netflix, focus has moved to data mining and extraction of user data. This transformation of the logics of the new media economy also affects future conflicts in media politics that the Pirate Party has to adapt to. Conflicts that will also warrant more attention from researchers in the future.
Much of the filesharing debates have concerned whether culture and information is to be defined as a property that is being stolen or a commons that should be shared. This has given rise to a set of new research questions about commons and the construction of property that I am currently exploring in a project funded by Vetenskapsrådet and the EU. This project takes its staring point in media piracy as a phenomenon that explores and exploits the grey zone between public and private but extend this theme to other kinds of resources such as traditional knowledge and natural resources.
The first of the two most important publications that emanated from the project The Ideology of Piracy would be 'Pirate politics between protest movement and the parliaments' which is to be published in Ephemera in May 2016. This article deals with the conflicts over organizational form, discussed above. It relates the political mobilization around issues of copyright and file sharing to theories of subpolitics (Beck) and subactivism (Bachardijeva) and uses the Pirate Party as an example to challenge some of the theoretical assumptions about contemporary politics as moving away from traditional political institutions.
The second article of particular importance is 'Piracy, Property and the Crisis of Democracy' that I co-wrote with prof. James Arvanitakis for the Journal of edemocracy and Open Government. This examines the Pirate Party agenda as a response to what many of its members perceive as a dual crisis in contemporary society: the crisis of democracy and the crisis of capitalism. The former refers to how democratic participation is undermined by corporate influence on politics, which is a reoccurring theme in the empirical material. The latter discusses how the challenges to intellectual property that the Pirate Party represent also connect to a current crisis of capitalism where the concept of property and ownership is destabilized.
To ensure a wide dissemination the results have been published in journals with different disciplinary perspectives, from social science journals, through media journals like International Journal of Communication to more interdisciplinary forums like TripeC and Ephemera. This has been complemented with a publication in the law anthology Copyrighting Creativity. Considering the subject of this project, publishing the results in open access has been a natural part of the overall publishing strategy. All articles except the one for the book Copyrighting Creativity, have been published in open access journals and the book chapter was parallel published in open access at Linköping University electronic press.
The empirical scope of the project is obviously international, but it has also been important to engage with an international body of scholars working on similar issues. In the output this shows in the two joint publications with James Arvanitakis, professor and dean of research at Western Sydney University with whom I have collaborated closely. As I began this project I came to realize that there is a wide group of scholars working with piracy across different countries and disciplines. To engage with them and form an international research network I have organized a series of exploratory workshops at different universities in Sweden, Germany and Australia, where I have discussed the project with academics from across the world. The project has also been presented at ten international conferences in Sweden, The UK, France, USA, The Czech Republic and Greece.
As an attempt to disseminate the results from this project outside of academia I have presented it at two outreach events at Linköping University: 'Linköpings universitets populärvetenskapliga vecka' in October 2013 and 'Historikerdagarna i Norrköping' in October 2014. I have also spoken about the project at the Cultural Studies podcast: http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/e/martin-fredriksson-on-piracy-and-mining/.

Publications

Fredriksson, Martin (under review):  ‘The Pirate Party: From single issue politics to democracy movement’, Social Science.

Fredriksson, Martin (In press): ‘Pirate politics between protest movement and the parliament’, Ephemera, May 2016.

Arvanitakis, James & Martin Fredriksson (2016): ‘Commons, Piracy and the Crisis of Property’, TripeC, Vol 14, No 1, 2016. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/680

Fredriksson, Martin & James Arvanitakis (2015): ‘Piracy, Property and the Crisis of Democracy’, Journal of edemocracy and Open Government Vol 7, No. 1, 135-150. http://www.jedem.org/index.php/jedem/article/view/365

Fredriksson, Martin (2015): ‘Pirates, Librarian and Open Source Capitalists: New Alliances in the Copyright Wars’, in Copyrighting Creativity: Creative Values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, ed. Helle Porsdam (Farnham: Ashgate). https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:823604/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Fredriksson, Martin (2015): ‘The Pirate Party and the Politics of Communication’. International Journal of Communication, vol 9 (2015), 909-924: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3742/1339