In short, Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and a traveling evangelist for digital rights and sensible information policy. He writes and speaks a lot. Also, he likes cooking, whisky, and really fast motorcycles. He used to own a Suzuki Hayabusa and still misses it.

Here are a couple of bios of varying lengths for copying to your conference program:

15 words — Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and campaigns for sensible information policy.

50 words — Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and a campaigner for next-generation civil liberties and sensible information policy. In particular, he stresses how the copyright industries work in collusion with Big Brother hawks to erode or eliminate the parts of Internet that guarantee our civil liberties.

100 words — Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and a campaigner for next-generation civil liberties. In particular, he stresses how the copyright industry works with security hawks to erode the parts of Internet that guarantee civil liberties. On this platform, one of privacy and digital rights, his party became the largest in the below-30 demographic in the 2009 European Elections, and his nascent party has now spread to 70 countries. He has been named a Top Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine and shortlisted as one of the world’s most influential people by TIME Magazine.

200 words — Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party, and a political evangelist for its ideas of freedoms of speech and expression. In particular, he stresses how industrial interests of the 1900s are fighting the net’s core values, the ability for everybody to publish their ideas and creations, and how these industries drive us towards a Big Brother society. On this platform of civil liberties, his party became the largest in the below-30 demographic in the 2009 European Elections, beating the political competition on less than one percent of their campaign budget. This can be largely attributed to new ways of organizing large numbers of people that he created and applied while leading the party. An entrepreneur at heart, he founded his first company at 16, and has remained a trailblazer since. Because of his successes in cost-effective management and changing policy, he has been named a Top Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine, as well as shortlisted as one of the world’s most influential people by TIME Magazine. When not making policy, keynoting about cost-effective management, or exploring technical subjects in detail, Mr. Falkvinge can usually be seen cooking, sampling a scotch whisky, or riding a fast motorcycle.

Pronunciation of Rick Falkvinge: My first name, “Rick”, is straightforward and can be pronounced with any of the three international R:s (French, Scottish, or American) with a slight preference for the Scottish R. My last name is a Scandinavian name: the “Falk” part is straightforward, with a hard A as in utter or usher, and the second “vinge” part starts with a toned V (as in vicar) and is pronounced to rhyme with the English singer (and not finger). The two parts are stressed as a compound word with compound stress, like the three syllables of the compound English old-fashioned. Falk-vinge. In IPA, it’s [rik ˌfalk’viŋɛ].

Publicity photos: All of these are free for any publication. Some require that the photographer is credited (the CC-BY mark). All the relevant credit information is in the respective photo filename —