Tobacco, Gambling and Piracy?

Since the beginning of digital copyright enforcement, proponents of copyleft have searched for somewhere to place servers full of pirated material. In 1999, at the height of the bubble, Ryan Lackey tried to transform the questionably autonomous sea platform of Sealand into a "data haven." More recently, the torrent site The Pirate Bay tried to purchase the platform off the coast of England. The plan failed, but the hope lives on.

Wired's Epicenter blog brings the story of entrepreneurial individuals hoping to transform Native American Reservations into modern day "data havens."

Jim Griffin found a legal precedent indicating that "Congress hadn't intended Indian tribes to be covered by copyright law, and that the exemption extends to their off-reservation commercial endeavors."

As Lessig pointed out in his first book, Code, and Tim Wu did in his recent book, Who Controls the Internet, cyberspace is very much under the control of real space. Were tribes to begin such businesses, the RIAA and MPAA would just lobby for increased control which would probably limit gambling and tobacco sales -- something the Native Americans definitely don't want.