Back in January when The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, they caused quite a stir. Sealand and its native hosting company HavenCo have no copyright regulations making it an attractive target location for the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

A site set up to take donations for the cause (buysealand.com, currently moving servers) announced: “With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizen and nobleman. It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets access, no copyright laws and vip accounts to The Pirate Bay”

Sadly, His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand said in a ‘CBC The Hour’ interview that he would not be allowing The Pirate Bay to buy Sealand.

During a Computer Sweden ‘Hot Seat’ interview, Anton put it to brokep: You will probably not be able to buy the “country” Sealand. What will you do with all the money you have received in donations? Will you keep them now?” brokep replied: “No. We will buy an island with them if we can’t buy Sealand.” So, it turns out that The Pirate Bay has to find an other “micronation” to set up their headquarters.

But what happened to all the donations so far? We spoke to The Pirate Bay’s brokep to find out, and he told us: “Well, we’re going to do something, lately has just been so stressed out and we have had no time. The Sealand project took all of our time and we couldn’t do anything else basically.” However, brokep assured us: “The money will be spent on an island, but first of all we need to focus on the upcoming court cases we have.”

Indeed, The Pirate Bay guys still have an on-going dispute with the Swedish police who despite over 1 year of investigations, still can’t find anything against them, however the great LAN parties the police could be having with the servers could encourage them to hold them for years to come. In the meantime TPB will be pursuing legal action of their own as they take on 10 major media companies, holding them to account for their part in the attempted sabotage of Pirate Bay’s trackers.

brokep adds: “We still love the idea and so on, but being this small team has a price in what we have to prioritise, which right now is the court cases. But be assured, the project WILL reappear as soon as we’re on top of things time-wise.”

Stay Tuned!

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Unfortunately, Sealand is not an option anymore, because His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand does not want to sell it to the Pirate Bay. But most of the Sealand alternatives would probably not even have the capacity to keep a site like The Pirate Bay in the air, so it’s wise to stay in Sweden.

At this point The Pirate Bay has raised $25,000 in donations with their successful “buy Sealand” campaign. Luckily, there are other islands out there that could be named “The Pirate Bay”.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Firefighters attacked the fire from a ship, but it is unknown if they succeeded and what the damage is.

Sealand and it’s hosting company havenco have no regulations concerning copyright, patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, non-disclosure agreements, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records, tax or mandatory licensing, DMCA, music sharing services, or other issues; child pornography is the only content explicitly prohibited.

BBC

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.