Piracy as a Business Force
2009; Open Humanities Press; Volume: 10; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1465-4121
Autores Tópico(s)Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies
ResumoIIn early 2007, the Swedish bit-torrent site The Pirate Bay launched a public appeal for funds to buy its own nation. The target of the proposed acquisition was a self-proclaimed independent state named Sealand. Perched atop an old World War II anti-aircraft gun emplacement long since abandoned by the British military, Sealand had been inaugurated by an Essex fisherman and part-time pirate radio entrepreneur, Roy Bates, in the late 1960s. Bates had originally intended to use the platform as a base for a revived pirate broadcasting effort, but in the end that plan had fizzled, and successive efforts to come up with some other way of making the ‘principality’ a going concern had been little more successful. The latest scheme had been to make it a data haven. In 2000, Westminster seemed set to legislate for all ISPs to be brought under the purview of official investigators. Sealand saw an opportunity in the move, and announced that it would offer a venue for anyone wanting to issue material to the Internet beyond the reach of any such state oversight. Its London-based commercial arm, named HavenCo, invited applications. Rather breathless press coverage seized on the prospect, trumpeting the massive bandwidth shortly to be brought onstream by banks of state-of-the-art servers housed in the fort’s two massive concrete legs. Evoking as it did the world of Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988), Sealand was soon itself being evoked by academic extensions of this coverage such as Peter Ludlow’s Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, published in mid-2001. Commentators made much of the role in the venture of Ryan Lackey, a young cipherpunk and economic libertarian devoted to using cryptography in the service of online free-market systems. Lackey had taken on the HavenCo position only two years after dropping out of MIT. With him on board, it looked like the first pirate utopia was about to be created.
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