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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."
Pirates and the sea! Aye, this be a perfect match if ever there be one.
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256kbit over point to point radio last time I checked.
I think they might need an upgrade to do file sharing.
WOuldn't this be even more dangerous though? Now, MPAA and RIAA would actually be lobbying for military action against the Sealand nation... Imagine that, sorry our servers are down due to an air strike... Please donate to purchase more airplanes and subs.
Pirate Bay would get cut off in a heart beat.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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.
We download, we copy, we share and loot
No more DRM me hearties, yo ho
We file swap and upload and don't give a hoot
No more MPAA me hearties, yo ho
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
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 ;)
I want to watch that movie! Anyone have a .torrent?
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They wouldn't be buying just a platform. Sealand has a complex history; it was in international waters when built in WW2, and still was when its owner/leader declared it an independent nation. Since then international maritime laws have changed, and if a similar platform was built today it would be a part of the nation closest to it. There was actually a confrontation between Sealand and the Royal Navy in the 70s, IIRC, a standoff which ended with the withdrawal of the RN, supposedly cementing Sealand's place as a sovereign nation. So, that's what The Pirate Bay would be buying: not just an offshore platform, but a true data haven, a sort of modern-day Tortuga, a port from which to set sail on the high seas of the internet with blatant disregard for copyright law.
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.
This reminds me of the plot to Cryptonomican, by Neal Stephenson. If this really is a micronation, and the pirate file sharing thing works out, I wonder if they will expand to hosting other files for money in return for a promise of absolute privacy, i.e., no court orders to turn files over. I think they would make up the money spent buying the 'country' rather quickly. Of course, their servers would be a target for the NSA and every equivalent hunting for files from terrorist and criminal organizations.
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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.
- Claim it, and back up the claim with a strong enough economy or military that the international community decides that it's in their best interests to play along.
- Get a strong nation to recognise your claim, and put pressure on other nations to do the same.
Sealand failed the first one; they have no military, and almost no economy, and they haven't tried the second.Being a citizen of somewhere like Vatican City, which is internationally recognised, might be useful. Being a citizen of Sealand isn't; even if they did issue you a passport (the current administration doesn't), you can't use it anywhere. Similarly, infringing UK law on Sealand isn't a good idea. When Sealand caught fire last year, they called out the British fire brigade. I suspect the police have at least as long a reach, and the claim that you are not guilty because you committed the crimes in a nation that is not recognised by the UK government would not hold up in a British court any more than declaring your house to be its own jurisdiction would.
A better bet might be Luxembourg. According to the CIA factbook, the population is just under half a million. The number of registered Slashdot users is about a million. Unlike Sealand, Luxembourg is already recognised as a nation. Monaco, with only 32K people might be an even better bet. Failing that, I suspect that there are a number of third-world countries that would sell a segment of themselves and recognise its independent status in exchange for a few million dollars...
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At current exchange rates, they would need very close to 1 billion dollars to buy Sealand at a price of a little more than 500 million pounds. That would mean that 1 million people would need to donate 1000 dollars each to get the money. I'm not sure they could raise enough cash if all they needed was 1 million to buy it.
Errr, the same thing stopping them doing that sort of thing with the current pirate bay servers. Terrorism and murder is pretty much illegal everywhere.
That didn't stop French Intelligence from blowing up a Greenpeace ship, now did it? And I'm pretty sure that French Intelligence are pussies compared to the **AA.
Oh no... it's the future.
Please donate to purchase more airplanes and subs.
You mean we actually get to fire live ammo on the MPAA/RIAA lawyers? Can you repost the account number accepting these donations?
My other OS is the MCP!
If what they claim is true, i.e. that they aren't doing anything illegal now, why do they need to escape to anywhere ?
Ironically enough, there is one! It's called Steal This Film. Here's a torrent. Maybe this new stuff about Sealand will be in Part 2.
The only problem I see right now is that right now the Pirate Bay is operating inside a real country. If they move to sealand, what's to stop the MPAA/RIAA from buying an old Russian Bomber / Diesel Sub / whatever and just destroying the whole platform? Or hiring someone to plant C-4 on the base of hte structure and blowing it up? Further, Sealand only exists because the British have decided it's more trouble than it's worth to just invade it. What if the Brits get pressured into eliminating this grave threat to the international recording industry?
One thing any island nation that is not self sufficient needs to remember is that a blockade can strangle them without a shot being fired. In Sealand's case, all it would take is to cutoff their internet connection to the outside world and their data center is down. If it is a hardwired line the terminating point can kill it; if it is satellite the satellite company can no doubt be pressured into dropping them.
If they really piss people off step two is cutting all sea and air traffic; plus countries could issue arrest warrants for the owners and wait until they left and simply grab them once they are within reach - who wants to spend their entire life on a floating platform simply to pirate movies and songs?
Finally, if they raised the money they'd have the clout to negotiate licenses with many, if not all of the copyright holders - or simply buy whole catalogs. If they could pull off enough donations they'd have people begging to partner with them. then again, your MPAA/RIAA diesel boat scenario is more probable then them raising the cash.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
So if the **aa stops talking, terrorists will no longer have won? Would they lose retroactively?
Are they going to use TCP/IP over dolphin carrier?
TCP/IP over Aquatic Mammal carriers, as it is more officially known, is simply an modification of
RFC1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).
The above spec has been "embraced and extended" for Aquatic Mammal use; (much) larger packet sizes are supported, as well as a separate optional High Frequency Audio command channel, which is sometimes used for Relay transmission of packets, and the possibility of dynamic packet routing..
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I think it's worth it.
Just to be able to pose for a famous painting, from a lo-angle perspective, with the flag waving in the background against a bright blue sky, and each pirate facing in a different direction, chins up brimming with the confidence that this piece of land is now truly theirs, is always the first official act of the governing body of any new sovereign nation, smoldering ruin or not.
Do it for us, guys. Us.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
You must be new here...
Copyright infringement is not theft. The most obvious and conspicuous difference is that the former is civil and the latter criminal law. This has vast implications vis-a-vis the manner in which suit is brought, the possible penalties for the defendant, and the burden on the plaintiff. Another huge difference is that the latter involves denying the owner the use of an asset whereas the former involves unlawfully creating/distributing copies of a work. Copyright infringement and theft are not even closely related issues, and it's impossible to discuss them usefully without realizing that.
Now, these are obvious, relevant, basic facts about a topic which is important and much-discussed on Slashdot. And yet there a largish population (maybe 15% of those who express an interest) on Slashdot of people who just physically cannot learn them. Whence, then, this 'fool reserve'?
Originally I theorized that it relates to sunspot activity but later I came to feel that El Nino, peak oil, the war in Iraq, and the new 'gritty' James Bond may all play a role. And maybe chupacabra. Chupacabra's a pretty sinister beast... think about it, it's a monster named after a lollipop... what could possibly be spookier?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The problem is that there aren't any islands that aren't already claimed by a country. You might be able to buy property rights to an island, but no country would ever sell you sovereignty. Sealand, on the other hand, has an arguable claim to sovereignty.
That part's easy - just leave.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
> 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
the MPAA and RIAA have announced that they have jointly purchased the USS Iowa with plans to full refurbish the decommissioned battleship to full fighting capability...
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...