In Stockholm, a man waves a pirate flag in support of file-sharing while Pirate Party founder Rickard Falkvinge talks in the background.

In my last entry, I wrote about how the president of France, Sarkozy, wants stricter laws in his country to crack down on Internet piracy. Today, I find myself confounded by news from another European nation, where a group is taking a polar opposite view.

Sweden has a new political party, the Pirate Party, founded in 2006, that seeks to “fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.”

This “pro-file-sharing” Pirate Party won 7.1 percent of the Swedish vote recently and by doing so claimed one of the country’s 18 seats in the European Parliament. Party members say they are champions against the copyright system; they, according to their Web site, see themselves as “the next generation of the civil liberties movement.”

Is this news significant beyond the devious irony of the party’s name? Seven percent of the voting Swedish public is not a share one can readily dismiss. Could the copyright system be so disagreeable to so many people that it will be overhauled or replaced in our lifetime?

In the United States, National Public Radio reports that many of the Swedish voters supporting the Pirate Party are younger people. Will public opinion toward protecting copyright issues erode as the next generation comes of age?

I often talk to industry and government experts about what they call “the copyright crisis.” I spend more time than most people thinking about intellectual property issues, but even to me, news about an emerging political party that focuses exclusively on file-sharing is odd. During the past decade, I have worked with organizations that believe economic growth occurs when a nation’s citizens are encouraged to create and innovate. The premise being this: People need incentives to develop new products; historically, individuals have created and innovated when there was personal gain associated with their action. No drug company, for example, will invest a billion dollars to research and develop a new drug if there is no financial incentive for it to do so.

Economic growth cannot occur if everything suddenly becomes open source.

I find the Swedish development newsworthy, if troubling. Artists, software developers, pharmaceutical researchers, etc., need protection from pirates.

I am surprised that there are so many people in Sweden who would put file-sharing so high on their list of priorities and cast precious votes to back a measure focused on the single issue of Internet content. Shouldn’t more Swedes be backing a party that supports something like, say, surviving the current economic global crisis, containing nuclear proliferation in North Korea, feeding people in Africa or securing peace in the Middle East? Is downloading free songs off the Internet that important to the people of Sweden?