A 60-year-old man is facing a potential two-year prison sentence for placing 1,000 music albums on a server open to the public. While not extraordinary in itself, the man is from the Czech Republic, where Pirate Party politicians are part of the coalition government. The same Pirate Party previously ran at least three pirate sites, and a court even declared the most recent one legal.

Rick Falkvinge founded the first Pirate Party on January 1, 2006, and then rallied the masses in Sweden six months later in the wake of the first police raid against The Pirate Bay.

At the European Elections of 2009, Swedish Pirates won over 7% of the vote. Christian Engström went on to become the first Pirate Member of the European Parliament, with Amelia Andersdotter taking the second seat in 2011.

When Felix Reda of the German Pirate Party was elected vice-president of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament in 2014, and was given the job of copyright reform rapporteur, that was a moment for the archives. It wouldn’t be the last.

The rest of this article can be read on TorrentFreak.com

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