In Sweden, a new political party is gaining support, based on what it calls people's "human rights" to download content illegally from the Internet. Man, those wacky Swedes. Hollywood movies, patented medical pills, editorial content - members of the Pirate Party don't care. They want, no, demand that patent and copyright laws be ignored because "the people's rights" cannot be held back by such legal nonsense. Owners of copyrights, under this worldview, are to have no rights. It's very much what Google is doing by taking the world's entire published output for its own use.

The Pirate Party has its roots in a website called Pirate Bay, which allowed anyone to steal anything that was on the web. Called "peer-to-peer sharing", an example of how the process works goes roughly like this: (1) People buy a DVD and then make copies on their computers; (2) They advise the world somehow (I don't know how, not being a total geek and anyway, it doesn't matter) that copies are available; (3) Anyone wanting a copy visits a site such as Pirate Bay, selects the DVD copy from a menu, and downloads it in pieces from the many computers on which it is stored.

The act of copying for distribution in (1) above is illegal, as anyone who has read the FBI warning on DVDs would know. The act of downloading in (3) above is also illegal in most places, as some subscribers to Pirate Bay have discovered when the Blue Meanies show up at their door. DVD content is almost always copyrighted. Copying it, or receiving an unauthorised copy of it, is illegal.

Tiresome though it is, I now have to make personal disclosure before continuing. I may have downloaded copyrighted material and I may have received downloaded material from others. I can't remember. I'm a busy man and I have other things on my mind. But I may have. I am also a contributor to the Internet, via articles that I write for newspapers and magazines. With rare exceptions, I am not paid extra for writing an article that is republished online. I am therefore, probably, both a villain and a victim in this matter. That may explain why I may have somewhat unclear feelings about Internet piracy. One thing is clear, however. If a movie costs $200 million to make, why should its legal owner, often a studio or the company that finances the making of the movie, not be allowed to charge customers to see it? If seeing the movie for free were a "human right", no one would ever make another movie, would they? The Swedes in question are what's known as "micro-brains". They haven't thought through their views on things. They have merely asked themselves: "Do I want free stuff?", answered "Yes, such is my right", and then gone ahead and stolen things (paying their ISP for the privilege).

Unfortunately, we live in a time when the views of the man in the street trump those of people who know anything. Expect there not to be too many new movies, CDs or newspaper articles if the Pirate Party sweeps to power across the world.

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Hi. My name is Roger. I'm a utilitarian. I've been free of other views for more than 20 years.

Utilitarianism, by one definition, is a system of ethics that proposes that an action is good in proportion to the number of people it makes happy, and in proportion to how much happiness it produces in them.

The greatest good for the greatest number of people is, therefore, the best action. Another definition was offered by Vulcan Star Fleet Officer Spock, as he slumped dying from radiation poisoning he had brought on himself to save his 429 fellow crew members (one of the many occasions on which he died): "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few".

Dammit, Jim, I'm a writer, not a doctor, but utilitarianism is, I believe, the best prescription for a healthy society. I attended a school founded by Jeremy Bentham, an early promoter of utilitarianism. I was for all my student life in the quarter of the school named for the man.

Lacking a better basis on which to run society, I adhere to Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Spock's noble concept.

I mention this because, on Thursday afternoon in Devonshire, at a little after 4 p.m., I witnessed the greatest sequence of synchronised selfishness any person could ever expect to see, if he lived 100 lifetimes.

One after another, a parade of drivers behaved in a manner so breath-takingly selfish that, on an accumulated basis, they almost destroyed my faith in human nature. They would have destroyed my faith in Bermudian drivers, but that was destroyed a long time ago.

Angry letter writers, pens at ready: Bermuda residents are, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst drivers outside of Portugal, and that's saying something. (I love both Bermuda and Portugal, but their drivers...OMG). The slo-mo selfishness I witnessed at the Piggly Wiggly on South Shore Road (or whatever less attractive name it goes by these days) would have made the Guinness Book of Records' entry for selfishness. It was the Mount Everest of selfishness. One after another, people inconvenienced themselves so that others might not move ahead. In so doing, they inconvenienced themselves much more than would have been the case had any of them let the other guy go first.

I feel privileged to have seen all this, especially the two final chapters.

In the penultimate example, a man wagged his finger at an innocent by-driver to indicate that under no circumstances should he consider moving forward first, even though the interests of all concerned would have been greatly improved had he done so.

And finally, the taxi driver behind the finger-wagger pulled into the yellow hatched box but could go no further, blocking the poor by-driver's means of joining the traffic on the main road.

Thanks to all concerned for their part in this display.

Now I have something to tell my grandchildren - which means that I must pop out now and find someone to have my children, so that I'll have grandchildren to tell.