There is an understood rule amongst most of those who establish or favour data havens that they should not be used to facilitate spam, terrorism, or child pornography.
HavenCo (centralized) and Freenet (decentralized) would be two examples of modern-day data havens.
This use of the term was coined by Bruce Sterling in his 1989 novel Islands in the Net[?], and further expanded upon by Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon.
See also: anonymity, pseudonymity, crypto-anarchism
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump