Getting caught is the mother of invention (Robert Byrne).

So the Pirate Bay founders have been found guillty and each sentenced to a year’s jail and ordered to pay around a million dollars.  One might suspect that this will only cause them to look for more creative ways to achieve their ends.  Then again, of course, this may well have been the case all along.

Interesting stuff, more interesting perhaps is the fact that the Swedish Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) is, as I write this, the fourth largest political party in Sweden with about 32000 members (having doubled in size since the adverse court decision on 17 April).

Certainly an interesting way to grow a political party, and perhaps the ‘martydom’ of jail time and unpayable fines is all worth it in the broader context of effecting change to the political, and later legal landscape around file sharing.

As I’ve noted before, one of the key elements of strategy is the terrain that you operate in, and in intellectual property strategy, you can affect the terrain, not only by lobbying, but perhaps by getting into parliament (Riksdag)…

Even more interesting is the prospect of Pirate parties in other countries as well.

(Photo credit: **Maurice**)