Rick Falkvinge

Rick Falkvinge (born Dick Greger Augustsson on 21 January 1972) is a Swedish information technology entrepreneur and founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. He is currently an activist for the Pirate Party.

Youth and early career
Falkvinge grew up in Ruddalen, Gothenburg, and studied Natural Sciences at Göteborgs Högre Samskola. During his high school years, he was active in Moderat Skolungdom and Moderata Ungdomsförbundet, the youth wings of the Moderaterna party in Sweden. He reportedly had an interest in technology from an early age and is reported to have spent time as a toddler pressing doorbell buttons in electronics stores.

He created his first company, Infoteknik (literally Infotechnology), in 1988 at the age of 16.

From 1994 to 1998, he was active as an entrepreneur with five employees in software development in Gothenburg, Kalmar and Strömsund. He changed his first name in 2004 from Dick to Rickard, with just Rick for short, and his last name from Augustsson to the current Falkvinge (literally Falconwing).

The Pirate Party
In the Fall of 2005, Rick Falkvinge started to consider creating a political party focused on the issues of file sharing, copyright, and patents. The dominating Swedish organization in the copyright debate at this time was the Pirate Bureau, which was not affiliated with any party. On 16 December 2005, Falkvinge registered the domain name piratpartiet.se (literally The Pirate Party), and on 1 January 2006, the party's website was launched through a message on a Direct Connect hub, signaling the start of the petition to register a new political party in Sweden. According to the party, the site was viewed three million times in the first two days, and in the morning of 2 January, the newspaper Dagens Industri published a notice about the initiative, followed by a longer article in the tabloid Aftonbladet. Falkvinge took out a large bank loan, quit his job at Cypak, and started working in the Pirate Party full-time.

Raid against The Pirate Bay
Following the police raid on The Pirate Bay on 31 May 2006 protests erupted on June 3, and he held his first widely translated speech, "Nothing new under the Sun".

In the week that followed the raid, Falkvinge was on the TV news daily, and Pirate Party membership tripled from 2,200 to 6,600.

General elections in 2006
In the general elections in 2006, the Pirate Party achieved 0.63%.

He chaired the Pirate Party while living off of donations and charity from supporters for 18 months, until he was elected to the European Parliament.

Success in European Elections
The Pirate Party achieved 7.13% in the 2009 European Parliament election. Media described the party after the election as ecstatic and the Pirate Party became the most popular party for voters under 30, with 25% of those votes.

Not long after the European Elections, media predicted that the Pirate Party would also be elected to the Swedish Parliament, and it was supported by 3.9% of the voters in the polls. The threshold for entry is 4.0%. This support did not materialize in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

Controversies
In the launch of the party's election manifesto in 2010, Falkvinge stated that freedom of speech and freedom of the press should take precedence over the current ban on possession of drawings potentially depicting Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM), and that the party intended to repeal current legislation on the topic. This followed a Swedish court case where a manga researcher and translator was indicted for possession of a handful of drawings as part of a very large manga collection. The Swedish Union of Journalists immediately proclaimed their support for this stance. Despite this, the stance created internal controversy in the Pirate Party and Falkvinge initially backed away from his position, before reiterating it in 2012.

Stepping down as party leader
On 1 January 2011, five years after the party's foundation, Falkvinge announced that he was stepping down as party leader, and that deputy party leader Anna Troberg would step into the role. This announcement was made on a live broadcast.

In February 2016, it was announced that Falkvinge had accepted a full-time role as head of privacy for Private Internet Access, a US-based personal VPN service.

Personal life
Falkvinge lives in Sollentuna, a suburb north of Stockholm.

Awards and recognition
Falkvinge was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in Sweden by Fokus magazine in 2009. Falkvinge was awarded the Swedish Guldmusen award as IT person of the year in 2010.

In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Falkvinge as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2012, TIME Magazine listed Falkvinge as one of the world's most influential people. And in 2013, The Guardian listed Falkvinge as one of the world's Top 20 Internet Freedom Fighters.