Above The Law: What If You Could Buy A Country?

(Intellectual) Piracy Returns To The High Seas?

Photo by Jan Tik. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

You probably haven't thought about it, but chances are that you're intimately familiar with one of the most crucial and defining issues of international trade in the 21^st Century. If you've ever downloaded a video game over BitTorrent, pirated an MP3 from Napster, or snagged a movie off of Kazaa you've broken international copyright law. While the music and film industries are frantically trying to stop people like you from getting their content for free, their lobbyists are leaning hard on the United States Government and other Western powers to tighten the enforcement of copyright laws around the world.

It's this issue that's at the heart of the negotiations between the various factions and alliances in the World Trade Organization. Developing¹ countries, like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa² want the United States and Europe to stop subsidizing agriculture. They reason that, absent these subsidies, the higher cost of agricultural production in the United States and Europe will give a comparative³ edge to farmers and agribusinesses based in the developing world. In exchange, the United States and Europe want a crack-down on pirated drugs, movies, software, music, and other "intellectual properties."

But the talks are stalled; and from the looks of things, the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization, where all of this was being debated, is going nowhere fast. Though the complexities of international trade negotiations are daunting, the reason Doha is stalled couldn't be simpler: not everyone likes the deal.

Though it is the Western Agribusinesses, with so much to loose in Governmental subsidies, that are largely to blame for the derailing of the talks, another far less influential group has taken notice and is moving to protect its interests: Pirates.

More specifically, Western Intellectual Property Pirates - the likes of which are responsible, not for the majority of the pirated movies, music, and software sold every day, but the majority given away for free, every hour of every day, online. Globalization⁴ and Liberalization⁵ are changing the world and lowering trade barriers; and as it does so the peculiar confluences of I.T. infrastructure and lax I.P. laws that give rise to websites like The Pirate Bay and grey-market enterprises like AllOfMp3.com are becoming increasingly scarce. Countries like Russia and even Sweden, once havens from the strict I.P. laws of the United States and Europe are coming under increasing pressure to conform to stricter standards or face the consequences of exclusion from the World Trade Organization.

With fewer and fewer countries receptive to the legal ambiguities of their activities, Internet Pirates are asking themselves a curious question, and one that has some troubling implications for the established order of international trade.

What if you could buy a country?

The notion itself throws a wrench into the workings of the international trade system. Corporations exist, either independent of sovereign countries or within them; they do not, as a rule, own them outright. Yet just such a possibility presents itself in the form a little known Ocean Defence Platform off the coast of Britain called - appropriately -Sealand.

The Principality of Sealand is a man-made off-shore installation named HM Fort Roughs, a former Maunsell Sea Fort located in the North Sea 10 kilometers (six miles) off the coast of Suffolk, England, as well as territorial waters in a twelve-nautical-mile radius.⁶ Constructed during the Second World War as a permanent guard-post for the Port of Harwich , the structure, then called HM Fort Roughs was abandoned by the British government after the cessation of hostilities. Roy Bates took control of the fort in 1967 with the intent of using it to broadcast an illegal radio signal into the United Kingdom and, after fighting off the Royal Navy, received a British Court ruling which abdicated British claims to the station.

Free of any existing government, Mr Bates declared the Principality of Sealand as a Constitutional Monarchy, commissioned a flag, and issues currency and passports. Though Sealand's sovereignty is challenged by the United States and Germany, the Principality continues to claim the privilege based upon its location in international waters at the time of its declaration, its interactions with the United States and Germany, and the aforementioned British Court decision.

And today that sovereignty⁷ is up for sale.

Admittedly the asking price is steep, 750,000,000 €, but the implications are staggering. The ownership of a sovereign nation would place the entities that exist there outside of the reach of any other government. It is that immunity that The Pirate Bay, one of the highest profile BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, wants to purchase. Should the deal go through, The Pirate Bay would constitute at once a corporation and the de facto government of a sovereign nation-state -- a sort of rogue state in the system of international trade.

Outside of the reach of any other national government, the Pirate Bay would have little to fear save for the possibility of military conquest. While Sealand's defenses are sufficient to ward off even the most curious of explorers, they pale in comparison to the bristling armaments of the United States Navy. Military action against Sealand caries with it, however, the most curious of complications. If Sealand is unrecognized by the offending power, any attacks would be targeted against the territory of the United Kingdom. If recognized by the offending power, war would require an appropriate casus belli and would, moreover, constitute a declaration of war against both a sovereign nation and a corporation.

Regardless, Sealand remains as it has been for the last forty years: outside of the reach of the world's governments and just off the shore of England, home to pirates and informational-anarchists, a haven of libertarianism in the grey waters of the North Sea.

Can you buy sovereignty? Who knows, the idea might just be crazy enough to work.

1. Generally countries are divided into "Developed Countries," "Developing Countries," and "Highly Indebted Poor Countries." Examples might be the United States, China, and Somalia respectively.
2. Collectively these four countries are the "G4." They enjoy a leadership role in a broader group of undeveloped or developing countries call the "G20" or the "G20 Plus."
3. "Comparative Advantage" refers to an advantage gained by greater abundance of or access to some component of production, like labor or electricity.
4. Globalization, in this context, refers to the decrease in relevance of geographic location. For Internet based business a URL matters far more than the street address of a server.
5. Liberalization refers to the lowering of trade barriers like tariffs and other protectionist laws. It often includes the increasing uniformity of certain regulations including those relating to intellectual property rights.
6. Wikipedia: Sealand
7. Only sort of. Since a Principality can not technically be "sold" the current "owners" of Sealand plan to transfer its custodianship in exchange for some lump sum of money.

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