The sky’s the limit for the Pirate Party International, or maybe space. It hasn’t decided yet.
If you’re aggressively involved in grass roots activism to reform copyright law – or to put it more plainly, if you run file sharing servers – the threat of someone seizing your equipment and throwing you in jail is always a possibility. In an effort to prevent that from happening, the Pirate Party International, an umbrella organization of various national pirate parties, has started to brainstorm the idea of putting its servers where only birds would be able to get to them.
The plan calls for a high-altitude balloon, either a solar powered blimp or even just a weather balloon, that would host file sharing servers, but be outside the jurisdiction of any government that might want to shut it down. PPI suggests that the floating server could use open source technology and software, and be funded by donations from crowdsourcing site Kickstarter. The group acknowledges that it wouldn’t be a permanent solution, but hopes to aggravate as many governments as possible for as long as possible.
The balloon isn’t the only idea that PPI is kicking around however; some members have put forward the more costly, but possibly more effective, idea of obtaining and launching a satellite. In fact, a member of the German Pirate Party started making notes on the idea in a wiki back in June, but apparently concluded at the time that there were better ways to spend the money it would take to get a satellite into orbit.
As entertaining as they are, it’s incredibly unlikely that either of these plans will ever come to fruition. They’re both too expensive and too difficult to ever be feasible, not to mention that it the PPI really wanted to host file sharing servers outside of any country’s jurisdiction, a boat in international waters seems a much easier way of doing it, especially as no specific law prohibits it yet.
