From: "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
I did not include offshore.com.ai in Anguilla due to its high cost; I consider anything over 25$ a month to be impractical.
_Country/Area_ _Name_ _Email_ Anguilla Cable & Wireless webmaster@candw.com.ai [...]
Thanks very much for making this list. However I would not be so quick to reject http://offshore.com.ai. It is run by long-time Cypherpunk Vince Cate, apparently specifically for the kinds of purposes we are discussing. His project was discussed in a recent issue of Wired, I think the May issue. (I have no contact with Cate, and have never met him as far as I can recall.) For doing something like running a remailer which will post material which is illegal and/or copyrighted in the U.S., you are going to need a service which can stand up to pressure. Presumably some monetary incentive is going to be a necessity. Of course by this standard $25 a month is pretty inconsequential. One issue is whether these banking-secrecy countries like Anguilla are followers of the Berne convention or other international copyright regulations. Banking secrecy and software piracy don't necessarily go hand in hand. I hear a lot about copyright violations in China but not in the Caribbean. So actually it isn't clear that this country is the right location for a remailer that can post arbitrary material. As for the costs to the remailer operator, he simply passes those on to his customers. I think in the long run onshore remailers will be forced to take measures to restrict copyright-violating posts. So if your choice is between paying nothing and not getting your whistle-blowing message posted, or paying $10 and getting it out on the nets, then hopefully it is worth that much to you. We have discussed for-pay remailers and the consensus has been that no one would use them when others run for free. However now I think the false premise is being exposed, that free remailers simply will not be able to run in the current mode for much longer. Once a single remailer operator has been fined thousands of dollars because somebody posted some copyrighted message, I don't think you will find many people eager to sign up as operators. So this dream of a volatile collection of remailers popping up and going away just doesn't work in my view. Why would anyone offer a service knowing that he was exposing himself to liability like this? It would be just a game of Russian roulette, waiting to see whether it is your remailer which gets the bullet in the form of a post which violates the copyright of someone with deep pockets. Hal