The Pirate Bay, the world's largest file sharing site, is going to experiment with turning GPS-controlled drones into floating servers to evade law enforcement on land.

If this isn't an early April Fool's joke, the idea is that unmanned Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) will be sent into airspace miles above ground and will be aided by the growing availability of cheap radio equipment and tiny computers.

"This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war," wrote one of the administrators MrSpock.

The Pirate Bay uses a proxy server system, which diverts IP addresses to protect the identities of those using the the site. Apparently no one but the site's administrators knows location of those servers, except that they're not in the U.S. where most of the site's copyright infringement notices come from. The admins say they've hidden less important machines in various places with Easter eggs in case someone is intrepid enough to find one.

Their aerial plan is half-baked at the moment, but it seems safe to say that using drones to escape authority on the ground isn't exactly foolproof, particularly if these drones end up inadvertently breaking air traffic laws. So the site may end up reeled in by law enforcement anyway.

And The Aviationist points out:

"Drones are subject to specific rules and restrictions and can only fly along reserved corridors to deconflict them from civilian and military air traffic. And they have to land every now and then, unless someone thinks these pirate robots can be air-to-air refueled."

Drones are no match for the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System if they don't keep clear. Raytheon If military force had to get involved, it wouldn't be difficult for an air force to knock an unidentified flying object out of the sky. Militaries spend plenty of money developing their own unmanned aerial vehicles and the weaponry to detect and destroy offending UAVS, like the Phalanx radar-controlled gun system designed to destroy airborne targets like missiles or drones should they descend into range. The U.S. itself will likely spend $7.1 million on surveillance functions next year.

The Swedish organization is an extremely popular BitTorrent tracker, a filesharing protocol that enables simultaneous data transfers between many people. Users can freely download bits and pieces of a large file, like a movie, from a multitude of contributing users making the process very fast and much more appealing than spending money on original products.

The admins confidently defend their actions saying illegal material is not stored on servers. The only thing that's stored are torrents, bits of code which enables files from one person's computer to transfer to another via an internet connection. It's a rather stealthy innovation that's proving difficult to shut down. Microsoft, Apple, Warner Bros, and Electronic Arts have all sent infringement notices, along with DreamWorks, Sega, governments and many other people.

"Experiencing raids, espionage and death threats, we're still here. We've been through hell and back and it has made us tougher than ever," said the admins earlier this year.