Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a The Principality of Sealand and HavenCo
The Principality of Sealand is the world’s smallest sovereign territory and lies six miles off the East coast of Britain, and has no laws governing data traffic. This makes it the ideal place for HavenCo to set up shop, providing a ‘data haven’ from the constraints placed by governments on electronic data storage and transfer with legislation like the RIP bill in the UK and the DMCA in the US.
Aside from the fact that everything about Sealand is intrinsically cool - it’s a man-made fortress just North of the Thames estuary declared independent of the UK in 1967 by Major Paddy Roy Bates, now known as Prince Roy of Sealand! - completely unregulated servers 3 fibre-optic milliseconds from London sound good to me.
- Web rebels profit from net controls, BBC News, 9 July 2002
- Americans turn a tin-pot state into world capital of computer anarchy, The Independent, 5th June 2000
The Principality of Sealand:
Just thought id mention that sealand isnt recognised as a soverign state, in a 1990 court case involving sealand a US federal court ruled that no such principality has ever existed as it is in UK waters and the ‘leader’ is a british citizen. The UK Crown Estate claims ownership of the land that its on and the people there are considered squatters. They claim the area 12 miles around the structure but actually have no legal ownership of it, as they will find out when construction of the planned off-shore wind farms begins there in the near future. these constructions will go ahead within the so called ‘sealand territory’ and i suspect any attempt to halt such developments will be dealt with seriously as they are in UK waters. personally it think that if they wish to live in a run down ex military building we should let them, but opening fire on passing vessels is unacceptable.
Posted by Lewis Elliott at 5am on 26.01.06