From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 18:02:04 +0800
To: EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU
Subject: Re:  Why does the state still stand:
Message-ID: <199605161419.HAA05109@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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