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The other day, I asked Christian Engström, a Swede who just this week was elected to the European Parliament, why his political party called themselves the Pirate Party. After all, his party doesn't actually advocate wanton lawbreaking, file-sharing or keel-hauling – but rather consumer rights and intellectual property reform. Why not just call it the Patent Law Abolition Party?

“Because if that had been the name, you wouldn't be talking to me,” Mr. Engström said.

He had an excellent point.

These are good days for the Jolly Roger. It was hard not to sit up and take notice when such a provocatively named party winds up in parliament. The Pirate Party garnered 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden, enough to land it a seat in the European parliament. (Sweden has 18 seats available in the continental parliament, which are divvied up between parties by proportional representation).

For all the waving of the skull and crossbones, though, the party's link to piracy is tenuous. In fact, the party would be better described as a user-rights front, a grassroots push-back in an era where European governments are mooting laws that variously threaten to search out file-sharers, identify them, and even cut off their Internet access.

“We're basically a civil rights movement,” says Mr. Engström. “The Internet is not a toy that the politicians can take away from children when we're being naughty. It's an important part of the infrastructure of society.”

To that end, the Pirate Party advocates a few simple ideas. It wants a radical overhaul of copyright law that would reduce the period of copyright protection to five years, legalize all “non-commercial” file-sharing and all but ban the digital locks (or “DRM”) that hamper the process of copying data.

It also pushes for much stricter privacy legislation that would protect what it views as a right to user anonymity.

And underneath it all, the party is fuelled by core beliefs about the nature of intellectual property and Internet access. They argue that copyright infringement is not the same as theft, and that the two need to be disentangled – legally and morally.

The zeitgeist appears to be on their side. The Pirate Party was only founded in 2006, and fared poorly in national elections that year. But events since then have conspired in its favour. Most recently, the Swedish owners of the Pirate Bay – a globally notorious file-sharing site, and no relation to the party – were tried and convicted, elevating them to near-martyr status in some corners of the Web.

“ We're basically a civil rights movement. The Internet is not a toy that the politicians can take away from children when we're being naughty. It's an important part of the infrastructure of society. ”— Christian Engström, newly elected member of the European Parliament

On one hand, you have to hand it to them for naming a serious political party after something that's not only illegal, but that – in theory, anyway – rejects the idea of statehood altogether. Pirates belong on the high seas, flying the skull and crossbones instead of their country's flag. By hitching themselves to this particular star, the Pirate Party's founders have tapped into a timely anti-authority protest vote, and an unlimited supply of nautically themed newspaper stories.

On the other hand, it's dicey to hitch a serious-thinking party to piracy, since it's hard to take piracy seriously as any kind of coherent philosophy. In fact, it's become less of an activity, or even an idea, and more of a brand – the Nike swoosh of digital libertarianism.

The fact of the matter is that we're living in an age of pirate chic. They're just bad enough to be contrary, but not so bad as to actually scare anyone. Everybody wants to be a pirate these days. Kids want to be pirates. File-swappers want to be pirates. Politicians want to be pirates. The only people who don't want to be called pirates are actual pirates, the ones running around in skiffs off the coast of Puntland, bagging cargo ships and insisting that they're really the “coast guard.”

And what does pirate chic mean? The high-minded pirate might say something about personal agency and excessive record label profits. But here's a more prosaic hint: During the fooferaw over the Pirate Bay trials, online commenters would occasionally quote rallying lyrics from a song that originated on an Icelandic kids show, and later went viral online. It's a song about pirates. On YouTube, it's been viewed upward of 7 million times, which is a lot, even if you attribute half of those to general cuteness and the adorable Nordic singing pirate.

Its chorus: “Yar har, fiddle dee dee! Being a pirate is alright to be! Do what you want ‘cause a pirate is free! You are pirate!”

As protest songs go, Bob Dylan it ain't. But it captures the spirit that underlies pirate chic. And the singing Nordic pirate has a point: odds are, you are a pirate. Or, at least, you're someone who gets free stuff on the Internet that, in a different time and place, you might have paid for. And as long as you're doing that, you might as well identify yourself with a rebellious band of free-spirited outlaws. Nobody ever cast Johnny Depp in a movie about freeloaders.

Intellectual property reform is a critical cause, and the presence of a political party devoted to it is going to turn heads and influence policy, even if it got there on the wings of a protest vote. It's important that citizens push back on this issue.

But rallying around a brand that's become a byword for half-baked, self-serving rebellion will do more harm than good in the long run. That way lies an ocean of dubious supporters, jokey news coverage, and a parliament full of people who will giggle every time you vote “aye.”

Anchors aweigh, I say.