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Pirates have infiltrated the European Parliament.

Sweden's Pirate Party is off to Brussels after winning at least one seat in the European Parliament by securing more than 7 per cent of the Swedish votes in the election.

Founded on a platform dedicated to reforming copyright law, eradicating the patent system and strengthening online privacy, the Pirate Party has garnered a sizable following among young voters pushing for more freedom on the Internet. About 19 per cent of Swedish voters under the age of 30 voted for the Pirate Party on Sunday, according to the Swedish newspaper The Local.

“This is the first major political acknowledgment that we've had as a movement and it didn't come from the establishment,” Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge said in an interview. “It didn't come from the existing political parties, it came from below in the form of political trust and votes from the citizens and I think that's pretty big.”

The party could be in line for a second seat if the Lisbon treaty is ratified and Sweden is granted an additional two seats in the 785-seat European Parliament.

Mr. Falkvinge said membership in the Swedish Pirate Party tripled in April after the four men behind the Pirate Bay file-sharing website were convicted of copyright infringement by a Swedish court, thrusting the issues of online file sharing and copyright in the digital age into the spotlight.

Although the Pirate Party and the members of the Pirate Bay, which bills itself as an activist group, both hail from Sweden and share similar ideals, they are distinct entities, similar to the difference between green political parties and Greenpeace, Mr. Falkvinge said.

Founded in January of 2006, the Pirate Party failed to pick up a seat in Swedish elections later that year despite attracting a large following after the Swedish government adopted contentious legislation that criminalized file sharing and allowed the monitoring of e-mails.

“We're the next generation civil-liberties movement,” Mr. Falkvinge said. “Like the workers movement in the 1930s, the green movement in the 1960s and 70s, and this movement for digital rights. The problem is that today's politicians are dismantling civil liberties at an alarming rate and they don't understand that they're doing that because they're mainly digital illiterates.”

Although Germany's Pirate Party failed to win a seat in Sunday's election, the party received enough votes to qualify for government funding, Mr. Falkvinge said.