Piratbyrån
 |
|
| Formation | August 1, 2003 |
|---|---|
| Extinction | June 22, 2010 |
| Type | NGO |
| Legal status | Disbanded |
| Purpose | Think tank, opposition to intellectual property |
|
Official language
|
Swedish |
| Website | piratbyran.org (archived) |
Piratbyrån 
Piratbyrån ("The Pirate Bureau") was a Swedish organization (or think tank) established to support the free sharing of information, culture, and intellectual property. Piratbyrån provided a counterpoint to lobby groups such as the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau.
In 2005 Piratbyrån released an anthology entitled Copy Me, containing selected texts previously available from its website. Members of Piratbyrån participated in debates on Swedish Radio and Swedish Television and also gave several lectures in other European countries, such as at the 2005 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
Piratbyrån's activities might have changed over the years, partly as a result of the addition of the Pirate Party to the Swedish political scene. During Walpurgis Night 2007, Piratbyrån burned all of their remaining copies of Copy Me in a ritual-like performance, declaring:
The file-sharing debate is hereby buried. When we talk about file-sharing from now on it's as one of many ways to copy. We talk about better and worse ways of indexing, archiving and copying—not whether copying is right or wrong. Winter is pouring down the hillside. Make way for spring!
Jonas Andersson, a Swedish researcher specialized in the politics of file-sharing, gave this brief definition in October 2009:
Piratbyrån is entirely separate from The Pirate Party; it is more of a loosely organised think-tank, a website, a philosophical greenhouse or FAQ guide to digitization.
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