Data Havens and Intellectual Property

[Timothy C. May]

Ahh, a meaty subject at long last!

At 9:59 PM 7/19/95, Ray Arachelian wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Jul 1995, Jon Lasser wrote:
>
>> How about "not respecting international copyright law, and not having
>> extradition treaties with the US" ... set up a data haven, we now know
>> why we need it soon... charge by the Kbyte, automate the billing, and relax.
>
>Seriously bad for my financial health.  I write code for a living (though
>I'm a Netware LAN Admin in this incarnation of a job.)  Going somewhere
>where I can't make money writing code because 10 billion folks will have
>it after one pays is my idea of jumping out of the microwave oven into
>the boiling lobster stew.  :-)

Agreed, things may be rough for the folks profiting from the current
intellectual property laws. But many nations don't agree with our notions
of what is one's intellectual property.

("Galombosians" believe one's _ideas_ are one's property, subject to
collection of fees. "You mentioned "remailers"...please remit $1.33
to....")

>If such systems would be maintenance free, it would be cool going around
>place to place installing data heaven servers all over the place.
>
>Hell a 1Gb hard drive is only $350 or so.  A cheap XT, or lap top hooked
>upto such a drive, say 4Mb of RAM and a 28.8Kbps modem would be good enough.
>Say some junky assed machine no more than $500 a pop...

I think you're making the point: machines on the Net are getting much, much
cheaper, which will make "Mom and Pop remailers" much more common.

Importantly, these remailers will be common--someday, if not this year--in
non-U.S. jurisdictions.

The growth of Net and Web services has been astounding, even to me (someone
whose first Arpanet account was in 1973). This will put Cypherpunks
services into many more places.

--Tim May

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