Offshore Piracy

The moderately - at least - wealthy pirates of The Pirate Bay, the one-stop bittorrent destination for all manner of (pirated) games, movies, music, and more, have come up with another in a long line of stupid ideas seemingly generated to generate publicity, and milk their visitors for money.

This time around, they want to buy “Sealand”, the “independant principality” micro-nation in the North Sea whose status as an independant political body is not formally recognized by any nation. Admittedly, lack of nationhood might not be terribly important to TPB, as it’s generally agreed the gun platform-cum-country is in international waters, but, still…

Estimated cost? Somewhere in the eight-figure range, in USD (i.e. tens of millions) or greater. All, theoretically, and ironically, to be raised by donations from people who don’t want to pay for copyrighted music, movies, and games. Yeah, good luck on that, guys…

Apparently “Plan B” is to buy an actual island somewhere; they claim prices start around 50,000 USD - though I’d guess the expenses of providing power, internet connectivity, and basic mod cons to an uninhabited island could well exceed that price.

There is discussion on the site of using full-duplex satellite links for internet connectivity in place of physical connectivity. Yeah, let’s see how well a popular, high-traffic site like The Pirate Bay does on a high-latency, high-packet-loss link, shall we? And how much of the world’s most expensive bandwidth are they really going to shell out for, anyway?

I’d call this a horribly unrealistic pipe dream, at best. If they want to tilt at windmills, let them do it on their own dime (of which reports generally agree they have many indeed), rather than trying to get their skinflint “community” to fill their personal coffers.

It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of Sealand, though. I’d be afraid of rocking the boat, so to speak, when living in a country small enough to be basically obliterated by one conventional bomb.

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