Many of these ships taken by pirates have very valuable cargoes. It might be sufficient to track and follow a pirate captured ship and broadcast worldwide its position with the legal reward of a reasonable portion of its cargo to spur legal freebooters to dispose of the crew in any manner they desire and return a reasonable portion of the cargo to the rightful owners. It might result in a free-for-all of very nasty types but the process would relieve legal forces of the expense and danger of recapture and also discourage piracy in general. If all ships were required to contain some sort of satellite tracking mechanism placed in such as way as to be unavailable to pirates it might facilitate the process.

They don't want to risk losing the cargo. The pirates usually leave the cargo and ship completely undamaged if the ransom is paid. The ship owners figure that it is cheaper to pay the pirates than lose the ship or cargo. Sand's suggestion would encourage other pirates to attack the pirates already aboard. This would drastically increase the likelyhood of the ship or cargo being damaged or lost.

I've thought for a long time that the most practical solution would be to have armed guards ride on the ships that pass near Somalia. It wouldn't take very many men per ship to be effective. Pirate raiding parties are usually quite small, less than a dozen men. Just three or four soldiers on the ship, keeping 24 hour watch, would be enough to stop any boarding effort. They just need night vision equipment, radios and rifles.

For the future, on-board self defense would drop insurance rates. Local coast guards probably will not be happy about cannon toting merchant ships, so maybe we could market arms that reliably broadcast their "disarmed" status, that would occur as they approach a coast & have the local ships take over security.

wizard, there are pirate groups that try to appear to be local coast-guard when they board, and there are coast-guards from poor countries that look so shabby, people have mistaken them for pirates (or pretenders) and run from them. The open seas are a dangerous place.I think it's more important to get rid of pirates and to make it too dangerous so no one will want to try it again.

I agree to some extent with the safety measures that Dwane recomends,but security won't end the piracy, it will only move it to less-protected ships, so the poorer shippers will be put out of business.

The pirates need to be found and stopped. I think sand's bounty-hunter proposal might stop some of it, but it would end up in a free-for-all with the opportunity to give good money to bad people. They'd use your money to kill their competitors, but there could still be pirates (??).

As for satellite tracking, as I understand it, that isn't necessary--we already know where they're going. So just go in there and kill these guys and take the ships back.

I have a feeling most of the ships worth money, worth pirating, are dealing with nations who have more solid coastal defenses... but either way I would not drop my guard to an unknown coast guard nor to one that could not provide security.

I've wondered myself if the nations of the world put together a fund to compensate the ship owners, then undertook a no-negotiation, "sink the ship" policy . . . how many hijacked vessels would have to be sunk before the pirates slinked off in favor of less lethal schemes? They are, after all, sitting ducks.