Weather-Balloons and Sea-Based Platforms to Host File-Sharing Sites in the Future?

October 20, 2010 by Yonah
Filed under: Announcements & Events

Not only art flourishes in times of struggle but ingenuity as well. The battle for intellectual reform is getting fierier than ever and file-sharing advocates are forced to come up with ideas like this one that follows to achieve their purpose.

Some members of Pirate Parties International (PPI) have set their eyes on a new virgin safer territory where file-sharing can go untroubled – the sky; that’s right, for these members a viable solution to copyright issues today would be a high-altitude balloon hosting file-sharing sites, says Forbes.

As you’ve guessed already, the purpose is being out of the legal reach of any authorities who could take down the file-sharing site on grounds of copyright infringement.

Says Swedish engineer Erik Lönroth: “We plan to use some kind of balloon and try to keep it up in the air for as long as possible. Hopefully irritating the crap out of authorities in as many countries as possible.”

Similar ideas were also discussed but despite their creativity most probably lack the potential for turning into real applicable solutions.

Suggestions came also from Francisco George, a member of the Pirate Party’s Spanish national committee who said reading the airborne signal with Skygrabber software (the same program hackers used to intercept satellite Internet signals and Iraqi rebels to hijack military drones’ video feeds) would be also worthy of consideration. George also suggested a way to raise money for the project using the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.

While quite daring, these ideas would be also quite difficult to apply. This is what made other like Pirate Party co-chairman Gregory Engels direct their attention to easier alternatives such as a low-Earth-orbit satellite whose launch would involve indeed more factors but which would be at the same time easier to keep airborne than a balloon.

PPI serves as an umbrella organization for intellectual property reform-focused ”Pirate Parties” across the world. Check out the Pirate Parties’ discussion on the group’s mailing list here (log-in requested).

Tags: file sharing sites, file-sharing, legal, p2p