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Pirate Parties Plan To Shoot Site Into Orbit
palmerj3 writes "It is almost four years ago that The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, so they could host their site without having to bother about copyright law — an ambitious plan that turned out to be unaffordable. This week, Pirate Parties worldwide started brainstorming about a similarly ambitious plan. Instead of founding their own nation, they want to shoot a torrent site into orbit."
Isn't this all just ignoring the real problem? It doesn't matter if you buy a nation, or buy an island, or buy a satellite. You have to get your internet pipe from some external source of which isn't in your "bubble of safety". You could setup a pirate planet, but if you want to connect back to earth you still need a transceiver based in a country not owned and operated by you. Great! You can't be prosecuted for doing what you want to do, but no one can access it.
The location of the hardware where the data is stored is only a part of the challenge they face. Whether you put it on a platform in international waters, on a seagoing vessel, in orbit, or even on a sovereign planetoid, for it to be of use to terra-bound, law-bound consumers you need a communications link to that site, and one end of that link is going to be subject to the laws of whatever state the consumer is in.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The proprietors of Sealand continue to live in fantasy land. All it is is an abandoned platform out in the ocean under British rule. Sure, they say it's independent, but the only reason they're allowed to carry on thinking that is because they aren't doing anything illegal enough for the Brits to make the effort to enforce their rule. If something like the Pirate Bay moved in, they would find the British reasserting themselves over that hunk of concrete pretty quick. Hell, the Brits traveled 8,000 miles to go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, and the only thing worth anything there is a bunch of sheep. They'll have no problems sending a ship (or a cruise missile) a few miles out to sea to take out a platform.
The only reason anyone would buy that pile of crap for a billion dollars is because they wanted to do some heavily illegal shit on it, otherwise they'd go buy some tropical private island for 1% of the cost. Since Britain would never allow that sort of thing to go down within their territorial waters, any potential buyer is essentially spending a metric assload of money for a fairy tale.
Here's the thing: every territory is under the rule of whomever shows up with the most guns.
Laws are only tangentially relevant.
A satelite, or a territory is dumb anyway, because to be any use, either one would need a link to the rest of the internet -- and they'd need to get that from some nation -- at which point the LINK is subject to the jurisdiction of that nation.