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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."
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.
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
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.