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Napster's sort-of reprieve on the blocking issue may make it moot, at least for now, but Matt Goyer, a 21-year-old Waterloo, Ont. student, is planning to circumvent any Napster demise by setting up a Napster clone server on Sealand, a man-made platform off the coast of Britain that has declared itself the worlds smallest principality.

"I am sad to see Napster bending to the record labels' will," Goyer, a computer science student at the University of Waterloo, told the Toronto Globe & Mail. "Let's preserve it and we'll move it offshore where the record industry can't touch it."

HavenCo Ltd. rents computer power and Internet data storage space on Sealand, which has operated for 30 years as a sovereign territory off the coast of England.

Goyer hopes to collect an estimated $15,000 US yearly HavenCo rental fee from music fans. "There's enough irate people out there I think I can get many to chip in $10 each," Goyer told the globe.

Sealand was founded as a sovereign Principality in 1967 in international waters, six miles off the eastern shores of Britain. The island fortess is conveniently situated from 65 to 100 miles from the coasts of France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. The official language of Sealand is English and the Sealand Dollar has a fixed exchange rate of one U.S. dollar. Passports and stamps have been in circulation since 1969, but are not for sale. Within a radius of 500 miles of Sealand live more than 200 million people who enjoy some of the highest standards of living in the world.

Sealand casts its history as a struggle for liberty. Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity. The location chosen was Roughs Tower, a 6,000-square-foot island fortress created in World War II by Britain and subsequently abandoned to the jurisdiction of the High Seas. The independence of Sealand was upheld in a 1968 British court decision where the judge held that Roughs Tower stood in international waters and did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This gave birth to Sealand's national motto of E Mare Libertas, or "From the Sea, Freedom".

The Sealand royal family are Prince Roy, 79, his wife Princess Joan, 71, and his son, Michael, 48. Michael of Sealand, wrote the following statement in relation to a recent incident involving a fake Sealand passport.

"We would like to make it clear that after 32 years of pioneering work, and the blood sweat and tears that have been part of the rich adventure in the formation and establishment of the Principality of Sealand, our web site is the only official web site of the Principality of Sealand. It has come to our attention that others are claiming to represent us on the Internet and in the press, even showing photographs of my family and offering membership of business foundations, fake Sealand passports, and other services. Some of these people, it seems, were involved in the terrorist attack on Sealand in the 1970s that nearly resulted in loss of life, and did involve an international incident with the British, Dutch and German governments."

    ~ Michael of Sealand

The Principality of Sealand is the world's smallest sovereign territory. Its total land mass consists of a single man made island fortress in the North Sea. It also claims territorial waters of 12.5 nautical miles in all directions, except where that overlaps the territorial waters claimed by its nearest neighbor Britain, in which case it claims half the distance to the British shore.

Sealand has now maintained its independence for over 30 years, and although no other nation has formally exchanged ambassadors or signed any treaties with Sealand, several other nations have shown Sealand various levels of recognition. Most notably, a British court has fully vindicated Sealand's claim to independence by ruling that British authorities have no jurisdiction in Sealand, and Germany once sent a diplomat to negotiate directly with the Prince of Sealand for the release of a German criminal being held in a Sealand prison.

Sealand is a man-made island fortress in the North Sea. It is constructed of two hollow concrete cylinders, with heavily reinforced, 12-24" thick concrete, and a steel platform, on top of which is additional accomodation, lifting gear, and a helideck. Currently, the legs of Sealand are being used by HavenCo as a secure colocation facility for Internet servers; the remainder of space is used for power generation, maintenance, and housing.

HavenCo allows gambling, pyramid schemes, adult porn, subpoena-proof email, and untraceable bank accounts, but spam, cyper-sabotage, money laundering, and child-porn are banned. One HavenCo. client is Tibet Online, the Net presence of the exiled government of Tibet, which is eager to escape the reach of communist China.

Sealand was founded by Roy Bates, a former British army major who fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy In 1965, the Bates family Roy set up a pirate radio station on Fort Knock John, one of the abandoned WWII sea forts, and started broadcasting music and advertisements. The 5-kilowatt Radio Essex could reach roughly a quarter of England, but was forced to shut down because it was just within Britain's 3 mile territorial limit..

Undaunted, Roy and his son Michael, 15 at the time dismantled their station and hauled everything to Roughs Tower, which was 6 miles out and beyond the then existing territorial limit. In response, theBritish military blew up another fort that stood beyond the 3-mile boundary to prevent a similar takeover there.

On September 2, 1967, Roy proclaimed the independence of Sealand. Britain basically ignored the "country" In 1968, Michael and Roy were arrested in Britain for weapons violations, but a British court acquitted them, ruling that since Sealand was "about 3 miles outside territorial waters," the Crown's firearms laws didn't apply there.

The British government extended its territorial limit to 12 miles in 1987, but Sealand remains in operation although the government's stance is still nonrecognition. In 1984, the British Department of Health and Social Security ruled that Michael Bates did not have to pay national health insurance for the periods he resided on Sealand.

Sean Hastings, HavenCo's American CEO. approached the Bateses in 1999, with a deal in which the Bateses would receive an initial payment of $250,000 in cash and stock for leasing Sealand to HavenCo. Included in the deal was an option to purchase the platform at some point in the future. With more than a million dollars in first-round funding Sealand has been transformed into a high tech facility.

Fiber, microwave, and satellite links will carry data from Sealand to London's Telehouse and the Amsterdam Internet Exchange where HavenCo has rented several racks of equipment space and installed high-powered routers from Juniper Networks.

Sealand's Net connection will consist three high-speed data pipes: a satellite link; a pair of 155-Mbps microwave links; and a ring of high-speed fiber-optic cables. HavenCo's customers, who are responsible for their own actions.

If one mode of transmission is interfered with, Sealand will be rigged to instantly reroute the data. "With three satellite connections, many transit providers, and lots of peering," a spokesman old Wired News, "it's going to be very hard to shut HavenCo down."

Sealand will be protected with 50-caliber heavy machine guns, 5.56-mm automatic rifles, and 12-gauge shotguns. Can Sealand pull it off? According to international jus gentium, there are no minimum requirements as to the size and population of a sovereign state. Especially in the case of the Principality of Sealand, the current size of the national territory is of no significance: At the Principal of Sealand location, the North Sea is only 2 to 4 metres deep and therefore provides the means for significantly increasing the national territory by reclamation of land in an economically justifiable manner by exploiting the principality's territorial waters. Projects to this end have already been launched. Wired's Simson Garfinkel, who visited Sealand, notes that:

"If the UK doesn't enforce laws or collect taxes on the platform, Sealand's residents can basically do as they wish as long as they don't overly anger their nearest neighbor. On the other hand, if China, Russia, or whoever sends a destroyer to shut the place down, that boat (or at least its weapons) would have to enter British territorial waters, which would likely set off a military response from the UK."

Caroline Bradley, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law is quoted by Wired saying "So the question is whether other countries are going to be able to exercise any jurisdiction over Sealand to shut it down. Countries don't like data havens. They don't like any sort of secrecy, because people who want to take advantage of such secrecy must be up to no good."

Personally, I'm encouraged that a place like Sealand and the vision behind it exists. I wish the Sealanders well in their project.

For more information, visit:
http://www.sealandgov.com/
http://www.principality-sealand.net/
http://www.havenco.com
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html

Charles W. Moore

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