Sealand

In a past life I debunked geek enthusiasm for Sealand (the dinky cyberhaven cum microstate in the North Sea) as a garbage can on stilts, recognised by no one other than digital romantics or journalists in search of an easy headline and rendered powerless by restrictions on the delivery of fuel, pizza, Red Bull and other necessities of life ... no more impressive than the evanescent kingdoms of spotty teenagers who declare that they are monarchs of all they survey (ie their bedroom) and like the 'Duke of Avram' award themselves impressive titles that aren't recognised by the United Nations, the Australian government or anyone with much suasion.

'Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law' by James Grimmelmann in 2012(2) University of Illinois Law Review 405-484 notes that -

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II antiaircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast. There, they launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo’s founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a “data haven” for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other country. This Article tells the full story of Sealand and HavenCo — and examines what they have to tell us about the nature of the rule of law in the age of the Internet.

Grimmelmann's article complements Adrian Johns' lucid Death Of A Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (New York: Norton 2011). He comments that

The story itself is fascinating enough: it includes pirate radio, shotguns, rampant copyright infringement, a Red Bull skateboarding special, perpetual motion machines, and the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of State. But its implications for the rule of law are even more remarkable. Previous scholars have seen HavenCo as a straightforward challenge to the rule of law: by threatening to undermine national authority, HavenCo was opposed to all law. As the fuller history shows, this story is too simplistic. HavenCo also depended on international law to recognize and protect Sealand, and on Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself. Where others have seen HavenCo’s failure as the triumph of traditional regulatory authorities over HavenCo, this Article argues that in a very real sense, HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little. The “law” that was supposed to keep HavenCo safe was law only in a thin, formalistic sense, disconnected from the human institutions that make and enforce law. But without those institutions, law does not work, as HavenCo discovered.