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."

Arrr!

Pirates and the sea! Aye, this be a perfect match if ever there be one.

Re:Arrr!

How true. A simple single torpedo from a sub on a "training mission" would mean the end of Sealand. Anonymous and deadly. In reality though, people would find out. It's not like Sealand will have "weapons of mass destruction", and no history to suggest it ever did or ever will (unlike Iraq.)

On the other hand, I think the consequences would be rather severe, as now all small countries who have done nothing wrong will feel that they are targeted. Remember: if your country doesn't have copyright laws, it's not wrong to copy stuff. Many many many things that are illegal in the US are legal elsewhere, and vice versa. Political pressure is not the same as military action.

Re:Arrr!

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!

Hmmm...

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.

Account number?

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?

Theres a problems with this.

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.

Re:Theres a problems with this.

You don't have to have the gear located inside your country. You find a friendly third world country (ie they will accept you bribe) to set up an embasy. The embasy is now considered your soil under your laws. I don't think there is anything in international law that says you can't have an embasy that is larger than your native country. Now you can just make a deal to tie into the main fiber for the country your embasy resides in. Tell them you need a direct connections for reasons of national security.

Think of the extended benifits. Under the guideline set by the US, no one should have problems with you kidnapping the head of the RIAA and using waterboarding techniques to extract information about how they are planning to shutdown your network, thus causing the complete economic colapse of your country as well as threatening (ie terrorizing) all your honorary citizens.

Re:Theres a problems with this.

Wow, What a great plan. That only leaves one question... Do you work for the government or the Mafia? Either way I think you have the right mindset..... And I like the way you think :)

Re:Theres a problems with this.

One little problem...
The country where you put your embassy has to recognize you as a nation

Re:Theres a problems with this.

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)

500 Million ??

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.

Re:500 Million ??

Sealand claims some sort of special status, and has indeed seen off a couple of half-hearted attempts to get rid of it.

However, let's be serious for a minute. The UK does not recognise the independence of Sealand, which is entirely contained within UK national waters under international law. Seeing off the navy is a cute joke, but if anyone who "bought" the "nation" started seriously impeding UK interests, for example by flagrantly violating UK law, then the "nation" could cease to exist rather abruptly. More realistically, the government would probably just ship a few police officers over there, arrest everyone, and throw them in jail. You'd hear their cries of "You have no jurisdiction!" all the way to the police helicopter, of course. :-)

dumb idea.

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.

The National Anthem of Sealand

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

Citizenship?!?

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 ;)

500 million for that? Why not launch a satellite?

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.

Isn't this a book?

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.

Bad Idea...

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.

They'll never get enough money

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.
 

Re:Hmm . A bit slow thought.

They will need to upgrade a bit, not so much though as AFAIK they mainly only host the trackers. Seeders do all the actual sharing. Apparently telling a friend where to get ____ illegal material is just as illegal as actually giving it to them, hence the need for Seaworld.

Re:Hmm . A bit slow thought.

Seaworld? Are they going to use TCP/IP over dolphin carrier?

TCP/IP Over Dolphon

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 [ietf.org] (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..

Re:hmmm

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.

Re:problem...

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 [wikipedia.org], now did it? And I'm pretty sure that French Intelligence are pussies compared to the **AA.

Re:Perfect!

Ironically enough, there is one! It's called Steal This Film [wikipedia.org]. Here's a torrent [thepiratebay.org]. Maybe this new stuff about Sealand will be in Part 2.