Can Web Sites Go Offshore For Free Speech?

invoke asks: "All the recent stories about Web pages being yanked for various supposed violations of DMCA make me worry that I may inadvertently irritate some large corporation. What I am seeing now in America and the EU suggests that I would most likely find my Internet connection terminated with no real recourse, causing me no end of hassle. I can't afford to lose my connectivity, as I run several domains off my static IP. Therefore, I'm looking for a safe-harbor solution for hosting a 'vanilla' free speech site. I'm not intending to host warez or serialz, just stuff that might irritate people-with-money. Any suggestions?"

Comments

well, actually..

[mcc]

yes, they were in there, but not in the manner they're used today.

The Congress shall have power.. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

In other words, the constitution only includes patents and copyright to a reasonable, non-unlimited extent, and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". This isn't what we're complaining about. This is a good thing. What we're complaining about is patents and copyrights used as weapons for corporations to silence individuals, something that was added much, much later, far after the first amendment bits.

What was originally there is more or less to _protect_ people-- i.e. to stop someone from taking the work of others at the expense of the original creator, such as burning 3000 copies of "Dre 2001" and selling them on the street, in which case Dre is in a very real way failing to recieve money that was his due, because 3000 people who would otherwise have bought the album from Dre bought them from the guy on the street. Making the case that the patent/copyright stuff in the constitution was intended to prevent people from taking ideas and concepts from a work and using those ideas and concepts to create a new, independent work, as is done in the case of a parody or the music of Negativland.. well, that doesn't seem to use the same spirit as the parts of the U.S. constitution, seeing as a new work as such would be progress of useful art, and the original creator suffers no loss.

You'll also notice the bits in the original constitution do not contradict free speech, really, and i see NOTHING in there to support the idea of preventing the spread of information-- i.e. preventing information about a technology from being spread. The idea behind the patents was originally to encourage the spread of information-- that in order to convince someone to allow science to progress, they would tell the world how their process worked, and in return would be granted a limited-time monopoly on that process. The idea that something like the DMCA could prevent someone from spreading information they found independantly about a process-- say, cyberpatrol's encryption scheme-- is completely antithetical to the original idea of a patent and what the constitution says, even if the information about said process is in a language other than English (say, C++..)

You'll also note the "for limited times" bit. Current copyright/patent laws extend far, far past the useful lifespan of the ideas they encompass, and the lifespan of a copyright seems to get longer every time that the date of the expiration of Mickey Mouse's copyright comes within the forseeable future. You think it will _ever_ be legal for me to distribute a Legend of Zelda 1 ROM, no matter how long i live and no matter how many years have passed since Nintendo has gotten a penny from that game? Ha.

So yeh, copyrights and patents do predate free speech in U.S. law to an extent, but not in any manner that is antithetical to the idea of free speech.

Ideas for anonymous publishing

[jonathanclark]

I wrote a discussion on how one might do anonymous/untraceable publishing on the internet:

http://jonathanclark.com/diary/anonpub/

I wasn't aware of freedom net at the time, but they use many of the same ideas. They do not do publishing (i.e. only outgoing connections) mainly for fear of legal problems.

Another method I've seen tossed around is to use redirecting proxy servers where URLs look like this:

http://site1.com/XXX
where XXX decrypts to -> http://site2.com/YYY and
YYY decrypts to http://site3.com/actual_content.html

The only trouble is getting people to run the proxy servers.

One other idea I have played around with is to use spoofied ping packets to transfer content semi-anonymously. It work by the connecting party somehow requesting the content and the posting their IP address. Then you, the server, send it to some random machine on the internet inside of a ping packet with a spoofed return address to them. This can be used to make the chain of computers between you and them very long - also making it travel through countries that are hard to get search warrents.
The main problem is making the initial request, but that could be done with a Gnutella like network.
The other problem here is the receiving computer needs to somehow specifiy which packets weren't received (because ping is lossy).

food for thought...

Depends on content.

[guran]

Most smaller countries would probably bend over if you posted something that really bothered some big enough company.

Your best bet is to find a host who agrees with your views.
Second best, find someone who might not agree with you, but likes to be trouble to the same guys who might not like your content.

Anti-MS: Post it on /.
Anti-Linux: Go MSN
Anti-[generic US company]: Post it in France
Anti-$cientology: Germany
etc.

Remember that *your* powerful enemies has *their* enemies too. They might not be your friends, but they could be your allies. Just be prepared to move when the wind changes...

Offshore ISP?

[AngrySpud]

I wonder if setting up a satellite-based ISP on a boat or something in international waters would work. Basically a big floating server farm, with high-speed satellite links.

If the Simpsons has taught me anything (and it has), it's that anything is legal in international waters :)

But seriously. It would have the benefits of being mobile and outside the jurisdiction of everyone. Of course, you would probably have some weather-related problems, plus the fact that you might have to "go down with the server"