Filesharers Want To Build Weather-Balloon-Hosted Download Site
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s an anarchic, copyright infringing peer-to-peer filesharing site hosted from a high-altitude balloon.
That, at least, is the vision of some members of Pirate Party International, the intellectual-property-flouting political organization loosely tied to the Swedish peer-to-peer site the Pirate Bay and whistle-blower organization Wikileaks. Last weekend, a group of Pirate Party members on the group’s mailing list began discussing plans for a high-altitude balloon that would host a filesharing site in the sky, ideally out of the legal reach of any authorities whose intellectual property regulations could have it shut down.
“We plan to use some kind of balloon and try to keep it up in the air for as long as possible,” writes a Swedish engineer named Erik Lönroth, “Hopefully irritating the crap out of authorities in as many countries as possible.” The spirited–if somewhat unfocused–discussion that followed included ideas for an onboard computer from open-source hardware maker Gumstix, solar panels, and a weather balloon.
