If you haven’t heard, Dr. Richard Florida of the University of Toronto has been positing that the creative class – a social class consisting of creative, cultural and intellectual professionals – is a natural outgrowth of the latter industrial era’s need for connection and communication.

However, are those who are involved in the distribution of the information which serves as the main drive for the media-centric industries and professions, including the pirates (as in "The Pirate Bay", "Pirate Party", etc.) forming a part of the creative class, or forming an increasingly-vital component for such a class? It is an interesting thought, to think that the folks who assist in the distribution of information play a role in the empowerment of such a class.

Plus, I think that the pirates and distributors measure the value of information based upon the context and depth which the information may contain, not to mention the hyperlinks to and from the information. Money and financial empowerment plays far less of a role in the worry of the information distributors compared to the worry of information management and distribution.

But what if "pirates" and other information distributors are a distinct subclass of the creative class, not being primarily creators but living in a symbiotic relationship with the full-time creators? The creators make the information, the distributors channel the information to a wide audience, other creators make modifications, additional contributions and remixes of that same information, the distributors channel that information to a wide audience, and so on.

The methods of information distribution and management have gotten as complex and illustrious as the methods by which the media is created or captured, if not more than the latter. I think that freer distribution, however, will come to play the greater role in the years to come, where the "creative class" will have to become dependent upon it for the ups and downs in the value of created information.

So maybe the pirates are in a class of their own.