Rasmus Fleischer

Rasmus Fleischer (born 19 April 1978 in Halmstad) is a Swedish historian, essayist and occasional musician. He earned his Ph.D. in history in 2012 with a dissertation that was also published as a book of 640 pages: "The political economy of music: Legislation, sound media and the defence of live music, 1925–2000".

He is currently a researcher at the department of economic history, , while continuing to also publishing non-academic articles and books. Since 2004 he has been running the blog Copyriot.

In 2003, he was one of the founders of Piratbyrån, the anti-copyright organization that, in turn, once founded BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Since then he has been lecturing extensively, on subjects related to "the collapse of copyright" and the future of music, at various European conferences addressing art and/or new media.

Parts of an interview with Fleischer commenting on copyright are featured in Steal This Film (2006). While most of his writings on this topic has been in Swedish, in June 2008 the Cato Institute commissioned an essay titled The future of copyright.

When the Swedish engineering weekly Ny Teknik in September 2006 ranked the fifty most influential persons in Swedish IT-industry, he ended up as seventh on the list. During January and February 2008, he stayed as an artist in residence in Vienna, invited by Transforming Freedom, an audio archiving platform based in the Viennese Museumsquartier to live there while doing mainly theoretical and conceptual work.

Rasmus Fleischer has also studied at the and, amongst other musical activities, interpreted medieval music in the ensemble Vox Vulgaris. His main instruments are recorder and clarinet. In recent years, he has been playing together with members of bands like Dungen and appears on a LP by Our Solar System in 2013.

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