If you follow the news and you’re interested in digital rights management, you’re probably at least a little familiar with the site Pirate Bay. It’s so popular that it has its own abbreviation – “TPB” as it’s called – Pirate Bay is one of the most popular websites in the world. It bills itself as “the most resiliant bittorrent site.” Based in Sweden, it has more than four million registered users, despite the fact that one need not register to use the site.

Sweden seems to be something of a hotbed of pro-piracy sentiment, despite recent injunctions that have taken TPB down for brief periods of time. Besides TPB, there’s a Pirate Bay NGO, and the Pirate Party – a political party, not directly related to the other two groups but dedicated to promoting the same ideas – that took two Parliamentary seats in 2009 elections. Using Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes, members of the Pirate party argue that free replication of ideas is inherently within the nature of modern technology – even dating back to the printing press, but accelerating as the ease of replicating information increases. The idea that a true marketplace of ideas ought not be directed by who has the dollars to pay for those ideas – and perhaps more importantly, that this is inherently facilitated by modern peer to peer filesharing technology – isn’t a concept Americans would think of for build around a political party.

Of course, Americans might be swayed by a more capitalist argument. Specifically, American piracy advocates are more likely to point out that large expenditures are only necessary to make and distribute music if one is not able to rely on the quality of the music to advertise itself. They would also point out that the fans of that pirated music are extremely likely to support the artists they like by spending money on concerts, merchandise, and the occasional legal download. As digital media gets higher in quality and lower in price to produce, this argument becomes increasingly valid.