Over here in Australia, we don't need a virus rining an emergency number.. our emergency number is '000' - in a recent article, they mentioned that a significant (but not excessive) percentage of calls are from people with mobiles that keep bumping the '0' key.;-)
I draw people's attention to another Slashdot article I read recently (sorry I can't remember the details) where a judge in the US ruled that he did have jurisdiction to hear charges against a site-maintainer, even though he maintained his site off-shore, since "he had uploaded information to the site from the US, and thus had published the information in the US".
If other judges around the world reach the same conclusion, or are backed up by laws passed, then it may not matter how independant the servers are at Sealand - the lawyers would simply go after the site maintainers, whatever country they happen to be in, since they'd have to upload information to the Sealand servers from their own respective countries.
From what I've seen in previous threads on the issue of Fan-faction [on Usenet], the question of ownership seems to be split between the characters themselves, and the environment in which they occupy. That is, Paramount can have a Copyright on the characters Captain Kirk, Spock, etc. but they can't actually Copyright/Trademark the concept of a "United Federation of Planets" environment. In general this means that fan-fic writers can legally be getting into hot water if they use the characters from the show, but if they invent their own characters that just happen to be in the same "universe", then they're fine.
So I could write a great story about a Federation starship crew that gets flung into another galaxy, and so long as I'm not stealing material from existing Star Trek Voyager episodes I'm fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Over here in Australia, we don't need a virus rining an emergency number.. our emergency number is '000' - in a recent article, they mentioned that a significant (but not excessive) percentage of calls are from people with mobiles that keep bumping the '0' key. ;-)
If other judges around the world reach the same conclusion, or are backed up by laws passed, then it may not matter how independant the servers are at Sealand - the lawyers would simply go after the site maintainers, whatever country they happen to be in, since they'd have to upload information to the Sealand servers from their own respective countries.
So I could write a great story about a Federation starship crew that gets flung into another galaxy, and so long as I'm not stealing material from existing Star Trek Voyager episodes I'm fine.