IDG News Service — Sweden's Pirate Party won 7.13 percent of the vote in elections earlier this month. Its campaign for the respect of privacy, the reform of copyright law and the abolition of the patent system earned it a seat in the European Parliament, and it may yet gain another seat there, if planned changes to the number of seats attributed to each country win approval.

The issues promoted by the Pirat Partiet (Pirate Party) resonated particularly with younger voters, and were thrown into sharp relief by the prison sentence handed out to four operators of the similarly named but unrelated Pirate Bay Web site shortly before the election. Pirate Bay is a torrent tracker: it allows people to track who else is sharing a file using BitTorrent, so that they in turn can download and share it. The site's operators were sentenced to a year in prison for being accessories to crimes against copyright law.

With the French government hell-bent on cracking down on file sharing by forcing ISPs (Internet service providers) to divulge the identities and cut off the Internet access of anyone accused of sharing copyright works, it will come as no surprise that France now has its own Pirate Party.

In fact, it now has three, a perhaps-inevitable consequence of the parties' willingness to copy in order to increase access to culture and information.

The most recent pretender to the name, the Parti Pirate Français (French Pirate Party), sprang into life on June 8, the day after the elections for the European Parliament in which the Swedish party won its first seat.

The values of the Parti Pirate Français are those of the digital generation -- freedom, democracy, solidarity, respect for individual privacy, and the sharing of culture and science, its founder and president, Rémy Cérésiani, wrote in its statutes.

The party's goals are similar to those of its Swedish counterpart: reforming copyright law and the patent system to protect art and science from rampant commercialism, strengthening local democracy through the use of the Internet, and protecting individuals' privacy.

It intends to present candidates in the next round of local elections in France, according to the news release announcing its creation.

The party wants its Facebook group to become a rallying point, helping it avoid two dangers facing any nascent political movement: fragmentation and running out of steam.

It's too late to avoid the first of those, though, because the movement is already fragmented.

The Web site of the Parti Pirate (Pirate Party) predates Césériani's registration of that of the Parti Pirate Français by a couple of years. It's also the site that the Pirate Party International recognizes as its official partner in France.

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