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Pirate Bay to Purchase Sealand?
paulraps writes "Notorious Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to get around troublesome international copyright laws. The organization, the world's largest bit torrent tracker, has set its sights on Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation' and claims to be outside UK jurisdiction. With a target price of £500m it won't be cheap, but Pirate Bay says contributors will become honorary citizens."
At that price surely it would be cheaper to build your own platform and if they truly are pirates it would be much cheaper to buy a pirate ship and take it by force.
As long as **aa talks, terrorist have won.
there is no issue with my network
Safer using a fraction of that amount to spread the site across the nordic countries + netherlands or some eastern european country.
1) I bet some data centers are bigger than Sealand.
2) Easier to cut Sealand off from the rest of the internet.
Dude, forget the whole bittorrent part, I'd donate just so I can get citizenship. That'd be a sweet novelty item, a Sealand Passport! Just as long as they don't have laws against dual citizenship that is ;)
With that price, couldn't they do something better with the money?
For that amount of cash they could probably launch a satellite. Now that's an idea -- how about trackers in the sky people can connect to by pointing an antenna to it? Since you'd have to aim at the satellite, it'd be very unlikely that somebody could snoop on the communication, and the precise location of the users could be unknown.
At least, unlike with Sealand, anybody with the right equipment could connect to it, without having to rely on other countries not cutting the connection to it.
That would be a waste of money. As much as I support piratebay, they are much more secure within Sweden than they ever will be at Sealand.
First, Sealand is not a real country, it is a part of Britain. The fact that some people who are good at manipulating media claims otherwise, doesn't make it so.
Secondly, even if Sealand was a real country, it's not a country any other country needs to maintain relations with. If they find out that they dislike you, they will be perfectly happy to shut down your Internet connection. That the server remains out of their reach is not important. More important is the fact that unless you agree to be e.g. British, you will not have the protection of e.g. British law against service providers who decide to shut you down.
Finally, it's a waste of money. If you really believe Sealand is a country, and that owning it will somehow help you avoiding legalities when hosting torrents, then you should just do the same as the current owner did: occupy it. At this time, there is only one person on Sealand (a security guard). I'm sure the cost of renting a small ship or a helicopter and sufficient crews to fight him will be well below the prize the current "owners" ask for.
As pointed out in the previous Sealand article, you have to connect to someone. So you get your fiber run out to.... who? England? France? India? Look what the Russians are doing with their oil.
Pirate Bay would get cut off in a heart beat.
Cutting some cables might not fix the problem, though, since there are other options (satellite communications; connecting through a proxy, say a ship in international waters; etc.). So, if this went through, most likely the young nation would quickly be 'liberated'.
(But we all know it won't succeed, it's just a publicity stunt by TPB, and an amusing one at that; they do know their PR, those people)
They don't steal anything, copyright infringement isn't theft. You been listening to too much **AA babble.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Better yet, with that kind of money you can start PACs (Political Action Committees) all over the place and buy off, oops, I mean influence politicians until the laws are all in your favor or at least more neutral.
Also, with that kind of money, I'm sure you can buy an small island in a nice warm place and have the country who currently owns that small island recognize it as a sovereign country (a nice fat contribution to "ME fun" of the President/leader would secure that deal and take out the sting of losing a worthless chunk of land).
The problem with Sealand is that England can take it over anytime, it's sovereignty is recognized by no one country except by the owners. Buying it is a scam. You get nothing. And if worse comes to worse (in terms of laws), Piratebay will have to host servers in their country, who says England and the neighboring countries won't just cut the connection?
This idea is beyond stupid. Stick with the Pirate Party - the name is great with this generation. Get buzz on college campuses, go on the Daily Show and Colbert Report (am waiting to see if the parent companies would permit this, as well as Jon himself), and profit!
One little problem...
The country where you put your embassy has to recognize you as a nation
500 million pounds? That won't pay for many legal copies of anything... wasn't the RIAA charging 175,000 dollars per copyrighted song? Better to buy Sealand... As for not being able to make a living... I see Metallica is doing just fine, despite all those songs of theirs being available for free off P2P networks. I won't say piracy is stealing... but piracy doesn't mean people would have bought it otherwise. So, no sale or ... no sale. How does that affect your ability to make a living?
Julie Moult is an idiot.
"I will make this song, pay money to record it, pay money to make a disc out of my recording, pay money to distribute it, but as I will have X thousands people listening to my song, I will sell X thousand discs and be able to pay my fees and have a living." was a valid thinking but is not anymore. I would not call it stupidity because changing old thinking habits is a feat few people achieve but now this is it :
Stop thinking you can force someone to buy a physical support for information (this is hard for a lot of people)
Stop thinking you can get money for transmission of information (this is hard for most people I know)
The only solution I see is that people should be able to be paid at the production step, not at the distribution step.
Also I am getting tired of the "respect my artist lifestyle, I expect to get money when I distribute music" tirade because it is not an argument, I could easily tell "respect my computer scientist lifestyle, I expect to be able to share, upload and download informations without constraints" that is true and that is not an argument either.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
> It's not like Sealand will have "weapons of mass destruction"
No, they will accuse it of trafficking in kiddie porn.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Did you actually remove anything from the "theft victim"? Nope. That's a key part of theft that isn't met with copyright infringement. You are not depriving the owner of the thing you are taking, hence it is not a theft. Just at taking a picture of your house isn't stealing your house.
Most. perhaps only many, people who copy electronic media would not have purchased the item anyway, at lest that's the claim. I tend to think it true. In the day's of dial-up modems at 1200 baud, there was piracy. There were also music and movies on physical media.
Today we have broadband internet and digital music which allows almost instant copying over the Internet. Are music, video and software sales up or down over the last 10 years?
Yup. And by more than simply the growth rate of computers.
On a related tangent... software developers: please stop calling your demo software "shareware". If you put out crippled software and require payment to unlock it (time or feature restrictions), then that is a DEMO. Shareware is when you put out a full version of software and ask people to pay you voluntarily. Freeware is fully functional software with no payment strings attached at all.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Going into Home Depot and putting a screwdriver in your bag and leaving is stealing. A screwdriver was manufactured. Materials and labor went into the process, ones that are no longer available after the product is purchased. You can't endlessly copy a single screwdriver at no cost.
/. mmmk?
On the other hand, you can copy music again and again and again, just like software, at no cost. Monetarily, that means if I copy my friend's CD, or grab it off of the net, the loss you incur because of that is zero. You don't profit off of it. But you don't lose anything either. Unlike if I steal a screwdriver, which costs money to be manufactured again.
And that, succinctly, is the reason why it's called copyright infringement, rather than stealing. Both are against the law, but the word stealing is more emotionally charged, so the *AA are pushing it. Just like they call musicians "artists." And then stab them in the back. If you're so pissed about people stealing from you, you should first examine them. As "fraud" and "predatory tactics" are closer to "stealing" than "copyright infringement." That or examine your navel and stop posting to
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
Rubbish. You are arguably/potentially depriving someone of their rightful income - since we do not and can never know whether <any/some/most/all> of the people who pirated the <software/music/movie/etc> would have bought it if pirate channels did not exist.
You can dismiss that admittedly subtle distinction as "mumbojumbo" or "newspeak" as well if you like. No skin off my nose; those of us who realise that the real world IS full of subtle distinctions can continue to have an appropriate nuanced debate, you can carry on boiling things down to oversimplified soundbites that sound better when chanted by a lynch mob ;-)
GP post is absolutely correct. The two things (theft of physical objects vs copyright infringement of non-physical content) are very different; they may very well both be wrong, but if so they are wrong in different ways, and a proper adult discussion on the subject will necessarily make this distinction and treat them accordingly.
FWIW, I'm heavily involved in music of many forms. I've sold my music via record labels; I've also sold stuff without labels, selling direct from artist to fans; I've produced music on commission. I've given away music as a form of promotion in order to earn money from live gigs; I've done live gigs for free in order to earn money from CD sales. I'm confident I've done most any permutation of "create content" and "make money" you can care to name.
As opposed to the people who immediately sidetrack, at the first possible opportunity, to the overcomplicating and oversoftening semantic argument of whether or not copyright infringement is "theft", completely distracting everyone from the more important question of whether it's "wrong" or "harmful".
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
If you don't want your idea to get out, don't tell anyone about it. Otherwise, work for your money and put on a performance for people.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Why do people even argue about whether or not it is OK to call "copyright infringement" "stealing"? Just call it the globally acceptable phrase "copyright infringement" and save us all the huge argument already!
Thanks!
(Something tells me that my calm and reason is not on this occasion going to be enough to single-handedly stop the flame-war...)
I'll probably be modded down for this...