Sealand to become a haven for Pirates?
January 22nd 2007 04:48
As you may or may not recall (let's face it, you probably don't), I wrote an article of Sealand a while back.
You can find it here - Sealand.
Anyway, to sum it up briefly, Sealand is a self-declared independent nation based on an abandoned world-war 2 outpost off the coast of England. It's very tiny and has seen it's fair share of drama in the form of courtcases and attempted coups. Anyway, the principle and original owner, Prince Roy, is getting on a bit these days and the place is up for sale.
Technically, you can't buy Sealand outright, as it's a principality and principalities can't be bought (yet they can be declared on any old pair of rusty silos, go figure!) A Spanish real estate company called ImmoNaranja is offering tenancy for the micronation, aiming for a price between 65 million and 504 million pounds (that's roughly 150 million and 1.3 billion dollars Australian). Permanant custody of Sealand is included as a condition of sale, so you'd pretty much own the place anyway, as much an anyone can 'own' a country.
Now, that might seem a bit excessive for a piece of real estate that pretty much consists of some wind turbines and a helicopter pad, but the business opportunities are beyond lucrative. As Sealand is not tied to any mother country it is able to do whatever it likes, more or less. Sealand has been attacked and invaded in the past due to financial greed, and citizenship of Sealand (along with Sealand passports) has become a valuable international commodity amongst dodgy businessmen.
One group attempting to buy Sealand is the organisation that runs The Pirate Bay website, a Scandanavian site that deals primarily with torrents technology and the distribution of pirated materials. With the help of their many patrons, they hope to raise enough money to purchase the principality. This would mean they could host their website there and be exempt from native piracy laws elsewhere in the world. They could also host other websites of a dodgy nature there, and they would make quite the fast buck I imagine.
I doubt they will raise enough money to get that far though. 500 million pounds is a hell of a lot.
But the question that comes to my mind is - would the rest of the world stand by and let it happen? With an organisation like the Pirate Bay running Sealand it could mean that all sorts of otherwise illegal websites would become internationally legitimate. Would the Pirate Bay have a charter? Would they have a code of ethics that would rule out websites dealing with pedophilic or terrorist materials? It could be quite the proverbial can of worms.
Either way, it will be interesting to see whose hands Sealand falls into, and what they plan to use it for. If one thing is for sure, it's that the new would-be owners of Sealand will be doing something big with their new property - no one spends that much just to be eccentric.
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Comment by Brenton
Dr Spin
Tales From The Other Side
Downwrite
Blip Blog
Gadget Museum
I'm really interested to see what comes of this. I guess micronations in general fascinate me. I'll do a post on them.
But for now; ten points for the post.
Comment by Luke
Book Club
Old Movies
Cane Toad Warrior
you might want to check out this book too
http://www.bookclub9.com/micronations/
I've also written a zine that focuses on the Hutt River Province too - www.canetoadwarrior.blogspot.com, it's in Issue 15.