By Adrian Johns
In early 2007, the Swedish bit-torrent site The Pirate Bay launched a public appeal for funds to buy its own nation. The target of the proposed acquisition was a self-proclaimed independent state named Sealand. Perched atop an old World War II anti-aircraft gun emplacement long since abandoned by the British military, Sealand had been inaugurated by an Essex fisherman and part-time pirate radio entrepreneur, Roy Bates, in the late 1960s. Bates had originally intended to use the platform as a base for a revived pirate broadcasting effort, but in the end that plan had fizzled, and successive efforts to come up with some other way of making the ‘principality’ a going concern had been little more successful. Read on/ Download.
