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Pirate Party Wins First Direct National Elections, in Iceland

Update: Pirate Bay’s moved yet again! TorrentFreak reports today that when Swedish prosecutors moved to seize Pirate Bay’s Swedish (.SE) and Icelandic (.IS) domains, Pirate Bay swiftly migrated its virtual home to Sint Maarten, proprietor of the .SX top-level domain. Sint Maarten, a constituent country of the Netherlands, comprises the southern half of the Caribbean island Saint Martin.

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The Pirate Party, an Internet libertarian group, has been on the political map for a while, particularly in Europe. It has gained seats in state legislatures (in Germany) and, through a coalition, a senate seat in a national legislature (in the Czech Republic). It now claims its first national, directly elected representative, in the Icelandic parliament.

It’s been an especially big month for the piracy minded in Iceland. Last week, Iceland became the virtual home of file-sharing promoter Pirate Bay. Pirate Bay, no longer welcome in its home country of Sweden, had briefly moved its site from a Swedish domain (.SE) to Greenland-based domain (.GL). Greenland’s domain name host, however, quickly booted Pirate Bay, so it moved again, to Iceland (.IS). It seems to have found a more hospitable home there, at least for the moment. TorrentFreak reported last week that Iceland’s top-level domain name registrar had no plans to kick out Pirate Bay.

What does the Pirate Party’s parliamentary victory mean? Leo Mirani at Quartz, a business news site, thinks it means the Pirate Party will need to grow up:

…the Pirate Party will need to refine its ideology and find a balance between the ideal vision of online freedom it espouses and the unsavoury activities and people it can easily find itself associated with. That is a tricky line to walk, especially since it can’t pick its supporters and members.

We’ll see.