Buongiorno a Milano e al teatro Smeraldo. { Good day to you in Milan and in the Smeraldo theatre.} I am Rick Falkvinge, founder and leader of the Swedish pirate party.
Hello and thank you particularly to Beppe Grillo for inviting me although I wasn’t able to come, at least allowing me to send a greeting. We live in very interesting times. Power in society always lies with us with the information advantage.
If a particular group of people know more about another group than they know about them, the people with the information advantage will gradually rise to power in society. This has always been the case and the people with the information advantage have always struggled to maintain it, to maintain control of information to maintain control of our culture and knowledge.
In mediaeval times the Catholic Church had a monopoly on culture and knowledge. The village preacher could tell the villagers everything they needed to know so when the printing press arrived in the 1450s, in 1453, the Catholic Church actually tried to ban it because it threatened their monopoly and stranglehold over culture and knowledge and they succeeded in France in 1535.
United Kingdom took a different approach. They realized you couldn’t ban the printing press outright since the demand for the technology was sky rocketing. Everybody wanted to print and publish and share, so they tried a different approach, they gave a monopoly to a certain printing guild. Only they were allowed to print books and pamphlets. In return the king’s censor – or the queen’s censor as it were – would be allowed to determine what could and what could not get printed - what kind of ideas would be allowed to fall down to the public. This mechanism was instituted on May 4 1557. It was called copyright and it is still around.
Fast forward a bit to modern media. You could see that this trend has kept on. Everywhere, someone has been in control of our information. They have struggled to maintain that. When newspapers arrived, the people who controlled newspapers controlled people’s view of the world. And socialist movement and workers movement arrived and grew stronger early last century. The printing presses actually wouldn’t print newspapers for the working class and the workers’ movement. In Sweden, they had to get the newspapers printed in Denmark and ferry them across the waters here, because no Swedish newspaper printers would print them. Those ideas were far too dangerous to be let out into the hands of the public.
Then came broadcast radio 1930s – same thing there – government immediately responded with “this is dangerous – everybody can share ideas. We must have a monopoly of this technology” – and so there were radio monopolies all over Europe. Every country had its own national radio. Same thing with television - in the 1950s - monopoly – immediately – control the information – control culture – control knowledge. When satellite TV arrived, some countries were actually banning satellite receivers as they broke the monopoly on information, however the bar to entry on transmitting was astronomical so the danger of ordinary people actually sharing thoughts and ideas was practically zero.
So something interesting, something extremely interesting, has happened in the last 10 years. All of a sudden, if you take part in information, you are automatically also a publisher, you can also transmit to anybody else who can receive information. This has never before been the case in recorded history, perhaps before the written language. If you are connected to the internet, you can receive, but you can also transmit. You can publish your ideas to the entire world and this is extremely dangerous for the people currently having the information advantage.

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