This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effec

This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effectively shielded it from public access. Elections were won with other topics like taxes, economy, etc, and IP policy was strictly kept quiet about, smuggled under the public radar, then finally arranged with the content industry behind closed doors (remember ACTA being declared a "threat level national security" issue to shield it from public scrutiny). Effectively, IP was handled as something "too important to let the public vote on it". The problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers. > not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it. And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI