Swedish Museum Puts Pirate Bay Server On Display

The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology has put the server from The Pirate Bay on display. The server was confiscated in a police raid last year. The museum bought the server for 2,000 kronor ($240) from a member of the Bureau of Piracy, a Swedish group seeking the decriminalization of filesharing. "This is an object of contemporary society and a museum collects such items, and it is a part of our mission as a museum not to avoid complicated questions," curator Nils Olander said. The display is 98% complete and the museum staff has been waiting on a seeder since Thursday.

Comments

End of an era?

[Z00L00K]

Maybe this and the outcome will mark the end of an era, much like Napster once.

We are just waiting for the next big thing in file sharing.

Re:End of an era?

[nametaken]

Someday someone will figure out how to do untraceable swarm downloading that works at an acceptable speed, it will be easy to use, it will gain critical mass, and then it's all over.

That will be the deathblow.

Re:End of an era?

[geekoid]

That can't work for the same reason DRM can't work.
Everything is traceable if it is going some where that needs to have someone read it.

Re:End of an era?

[nametaken]

Oh, and here's to hoping that it not need a tracker, port forwarding of any kind, and appears completely indistinguishable from regular web usage.

I swear, someone come up with something that meets all these criteria and I'll pay them outright.

Re:End of an era?

[interkin3tic]

Napster counted as an end to an era? Wasn't the thing only around (in the form anyone used) for about a year? I remember using it for only a few months before it was down. Wiki says it was technically operational from June 1999 and July 2001, still...

Re:End of an era?

[DangerFace]

Yeah, for those few of us that get decent upload speeds and an unlimited quantity of transfer. The main problem with filesharing isn't really the protocols or the legal rubbish, since they can't fit millions of people into a courtroom without taking so long the original ones are back out and have had kids that are now also seeding. The problem is that most people have rubbish internet connections and don't really grasp how torrenting et al work - most people just don't get that the more you upload the faster your download will be. Anyways, that's my two cents.

Re:End of an era?

[abigor]

Well, there are trackerless torrents - that's been around for years - and peer exchange. Those plus encryption should give most of what you're after, right? I guess there's no way around the port forwarding though.

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

No, it will be the deathblow when people start to openly defy copyright, instead of doing the equivalent today what used to be sneaking into the whites only area back then for a black person. We need people to oppose copyright the way Rosa Parks sat on the bus.

(I do consider the current copyright regime bad on almost the same level as apartheid used to be. Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age, but causes the very real retardation of our culture. How could we have an open and enlightened society with artificial monopolies in place and patent law retarding scientific progress?)

Re:End of an era?

[houstonbofh]

Napster wasn't an era, it was a tool. It was replaced by a series of other tools, none of which came close to the ease and ubiquity of The Pirate Bay. And if it folds, (Still a big "if" right now) it will be replaced.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gonna throw some things out here..

You don't have to achieve tor/freenet level anonymity. You just have to make the connections useless as evidence so, say you have 5 connections and 4 are relays and dummies or whatnot. You can't convict on 1 in 5 odds.

Another angle is that tor actually works very well for small files. Perhaps this could be utilized to share some kind of key and then have an "ownerless filesystem" for the backend.

Or any method where the participants don't know what they are sharing, and that knowledge is communicated only over tor.

Or maybe MPAA and RIAA could create a service with all the content in it and offer unlimited access for a reasonable monthly fee. ..nah, I think the first idea is the way forward.

Re:End of an era?

[MaxwellEdison]

Out of curiosity, how much would you pay? Also, are you looking for super anonymity when downloading the next update to your favorite distro, or would you rather pay for tools to commit copyright infringement rather than pay for the copyrighted content outright?

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age, but causes the very real retardation of our culture. How could we have an open and enlightened society with artificial monopolies in place and patent law retarding scientific progress?

<tinfoilHat>Re. the retardation of culture. Where would you put that on the 'continuum':
 

1. (a) a direct goal
2. (b) a nice side-effect
3. (c) an unfortunate side-effect which shouldn't deter 'us' from seeking the other benefits of the copyright system

</tinfoilHat>

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

DMZ

Re:End of an era?

[PotatoFarmer]

Everything is traceable if it is going some where that needs to have someone read it.

That depends greatly on whether or not an external entity can detect the act of reading. There could be a NIC running in promiscuous node on your network right now, and you wouldn't know.

Of course, the real trick is basing a protocol on that general idea, but it's theoretically possible.

Re:End of an era?

[abuelos84]

I would SO pay for tools to disrupt the absurdity of locking out art.
It's funny how you are FREE to pick and obtain ANY copyrighted work IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY... well... what if I don't? Why my access to a product of a collective creation (&#194;&#191;or you think present musicians invented music?) must be fixed to the monetary interests of a individual/corportation? How does anyone justifies the mercantilisation of knowledge, something that belongs to all of us?

Re:End of an era?

[Stile 65]

I2P. It works well as long as *enough* people port-forward, but it doesn't require port-forwarding from any specific individual.

Re:End of an era?

[ksd1337]

Well, they can use UPnP if their router and software support it. But I can't vouch for it, as I don't use it myself.

Re:End of an era?

[LordLimecat]

Im rather curious if you think that noone should be able to make money off of inventions either, should everything be "open source"? I dont think society would progress very far if you had your way.

Re:End of an era?

[Narnie]

<tinfoilHat>Re. the retardation of culture. Where would you put that on the 'continuum':

(large, full-body tinfoil hat): The answer is obviously A... they're out to destroy and control society. You will have to pay the monopoly to enjoy and participate in life.
(small tinfoil hat) Hmm... I like B. Don't want the dirty communists/fascist/democrats/hippies/war mongers to get away with corrupting our youth.
(that's aluminum foil you're using) You've got to be kidding, C is the only viable option for protecting creative works from outright theft. You have to support and protect the artists if you want our culture to advance.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also depends on whether or not you know what you're relaying... in freenet, I couldn't tell what my system was hosting to save my own life... I know I was relaying content with a specific hash, and that the requesting party *probably* had a key to decrypt whatever it was... But really all nodes are nothing more than glorified relays.

Re:End of an era?

[flonker]

I've been wondering for a long time, what's to stop someone from using UDP packets with a forged source IP? You can even stick the IP on the same /24 or /25 or whatever, and give credit to the /24 or /25 in a bit torrent like tit-for-tat scheme. Uploading would then be "semi-anonymous". The main issues I see are: ISPs may not like it, and egress filtering may be an issue, although I think that limiting it to /24 would minimize that.

Re:End of an era?

[zach297]

Really? I have expirenced the exact opposite. I can upload at about 60 KBytes/s but my downloads are extremely slow unless I limit the uploads to around 20 KBytes/s. Maybe there is some part of torrents that I am mistaken about.

Re:End of an era?

[clarkkent09]

Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age

If by "information" you mean things commonly shared through pirate bay, then did it ever occur to you that the production of such material would essentially grind to a halt without that monopoly?

Re:End of an era?

[aliquis]

Of course it won't, TPB will remain, lots of other trackers will remain, nothing ends.

But of course there will also be new things for sharing files.

Re:End of an era?

[aliquis]

And then they just criminalize the use of that technology as is and that would be the end of that.

And I guess using said service at all would be just as much of an "assistance" in committing a crime.

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

Would it? Without copyright, it is not only commercially viable to create* content, but would lead to a much healthier, competitive environment aswell.

Not much would change from the author-publisher relation's perspective, since people still want to read books, listen to music, etc. and are willing to pay for that, but the author would be free to work with whatever idea he/she has and the end-user wouldn't be restricted.

*Most things are incremental improvements over some older content, this is an often missed point. Pretty much everything is a derivative work of the culture the author lives in. Focusing on the soletary author is missing the forest from the tree.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. You want to limit your upload speed under your line cap. I have mine set to a limit of 25K up and I can saturate my downstream with a good torrent. Setting your upload rate too high will actually make your downloads slower, not faster.

Re:End of an era?

[B1oodAnge1]

You need to limit your upload to allow for overhead, usually about 80% of your max upload speed works well.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

usenet?

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your system was hosting kiddy porn. Hope that helps.

Re:End of an era?

[clarkkent09]

Without copyright, it is not only commercially viable to create* content, but would lead to a much healthier, competitive environment aswell.

Care to elaborate? Let's take an example: some entrepreneurial guy puts up freeamazon.com - same as amazon.com except that all the content (well, at least books, movies, software and music - thinks that can be copied easily) is free. The way it's done is simple, each new release is bought and a free copy is posted so that anybody can download it for free. Perhaps the owner of the site doesn't even need to buy it, simply provide a place for someone to upload. Surely without copyright this would happen very quickly since the site would receive enormous traffic and the owners would get rich. How exactly would this make it "commercially viable to create content" since only one copy will be sold? How would it lead to a "healthier, competitive environment"?

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

sneakernet

Re:End of an era?

[slack_prad]

would you rather pay for tools to commit copyright infringement rather than pay for the copyrighted content outright?

whichever is less?

Re:End of an era?

[geekboy642]

Many consumer network links operate such that if you saturate traffic flowing one direction, you'll be unable to pass much traffic the opposite direction. I suspect that 60 KBps is near the maximum for your uplink, and limiting that is the only way to receive the benefit of the torrent.
What keeps people from limiting their uploads to absurdly low numbers is the "quid-pro-quo" aspect of torrents. If you don't upload, the swarm adjusts and refuses to upload back to you at any reasonable spead.

Re:End of an era?

[Grishnakh]

Simple: that won't ever happen, because buying all the books on Amazon would cost a lot of money (even just 1 copy each), and then scanning the books in, and then running the website and maintaining it would also cost a lot of money. People would have to pay something for membership to that website, just like people currently pay for membership to certain websites such as porn sites.

Of course, this would vastly degrade the value of many items, but technology has been doing that for a long time.

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

How exactly would this make it "commercially viable to create content" since only one copy will be sold?

Simple: authors would stop trying to sell copies, and instead focus on selling their labor.

In the digital era, copies are not valuable. A copy of an e-book is worth little more than the media it's stored on. The act of writing, however, still has value -- you can't make authors write for free, so if you want to read anything new, you're gonna have to pay someone to write it. And the same technology that makes it easy to distribute free copies to lots of people can also make it easy for lots of people to pool their money and fund production of new works.

Re:End of an era?

[theheadlessrabbit]

because the 99% of artists who don't manage to sell enough to make a living would now be on equal footing with the 1% who have major advertising dollars behind them. throw on a Slashdot style moderation system to bury the crap and promote the gems, and you've got a viable system for promoting your ideas.

your failure to monetize content in a digital marketplace is not my problem. if media can be copied perfectly, and for free, no artificial limitations will be successful. content creators will be forced to make money on things that are not infinitely reproducible.

record sales are crashing, yet i can still go to nearly any bar and see a local band play.
TV ratings are down, I can still go on youtube and find some great content (ted talks come to mind)

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

Depending on the medium, if it is digital then Amazon is pretty much on the right track already with the Kindle and an online subscription/content delivery based service.

If it is deadtree, the author's publisher would still have the advantage of first to market. Keep in mind that by abolishing copyright, legal restrictions on copying a work would be removed, but the technical challenges of formatting, printing one will still remain. As anyone could tell you, the one who is first in a market has a very strong foothold, even if the product isn't all that great in comparison to later rivals.

With copyright abolished, the author's publisher still has a headstart and the advantage of being able to publish the "official" version, with the support of the author. There are contemporary examples showing this works, for example when books or documents are published for the US government (like in the case of the 9/11 commission report) usually a publisher buys the right to be able to release the book first and turns a decent profit, despite having no copyright protection. The free market, beautiful thing, is it not?

Re:End of an era?

[russotto]

No, it will be the deathblow when people start to openly defy copyright, instead of doing the equivalent today what used to be sneaking into the whites only area back then for a black person. We need people to oppose copyright the way Rosa Parks sat on the bus.

Open defiance of copyright simply leads to anonymous bankruptcy, or if you try hard enough, perhaps an anonymous jail cell. The maximum extent of the publicity gained will be a story on Slashdot. Few will hear about it, and fewer will give a shit. Civil disobedience will not work for copyright.

Re:End of an era?

[clarkkent09]

because the 99% of artists who don't manage to sell enough to make a living would now be on equal footing with the 1% who have major advertising dollars behind them.

By making those 1% not make any money either? What good does that do? In any case, I think that 99% is a huge exaggeration but even if it wasn't it doesn't change anything. Why should those who don't sell enough to make a living be on equal footing with those who do?

your failure to monetize content in a digital marketplace is not my problem. if media can be copied perfectly, and for free, no artificial limitations will be successful. content creators will be forced to make money on things that are not infinitely reproducible.

Aha, this is the point of the whole argument, isn't it. It can be done, so people will do it, no way to stop it. Well, first of all it hasn't been conclusively proven that that's the case. Secondly, even if it was, that still doesn't address the basic problem of rights of authors to be paid for their work, and the lack of a viable alternative system that will retain that incentive. You mention your local band, but I bet they are only playing in your local bar because they are hoping that they will some day be able to get a bigger audience and more money, and this, until a better alternative is found, still involves copyright. If you want to reduce every musician to the level of that band, living on tips and at the mercy of musically illiterate bar owners, there won't be much music left.

Re:End of an era?

[clarkkent09]

Your entire posts makes a lot of sense in the context of the current copyright based system, but it doesn't make any sense with copyright gone.

What's the advantage of being first to market when your competitor is offering exactly the same copy for free the very next day or even hour. Remember, there is no DRM, no barriers whatsoever to making as many copies as you want and distributing as far and wide if you like. In theory the first person to buy it will post a copy of it online so everybody else can download it for free. How do you get the endorsement from the author? You pay them for it? How, if you don't have any expectation of profit?

Your example of what happens in deadtree world (such as with 911 report) just proves my point. The only reason that works is exactly what you say, obstacles in copying, formatting etc. If making copying difficult is what you want, then you should be in favor of some flavor of copy protection software (gasp DRM?) that makes copying difficult or impossible, right? But aren't those obstacles exactly what you want to remove?

Re:End of an era?

[clarkkent09]

You don't really think that's a viable alternative to the current system? So every writer, musician, film studio etc will set up a little fund and will only start working once it fills up, right? Until then, they will just sit around and keep that masterpiece they have in mind on the shelf somewhere until enough people have paid? How will you persuade sufficient numbers of people to pay even though they know that what they are paying for won't come to fruition until years from now, if ever? Someone has to keep track of who paid what, so that in case the artist changes his mind (or gets sick, or dies) everything can be paid back. Do you have any concept of the scale and inefficiency of that system given the huge numbers of content creators out there?

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

What's the advantage of being first to market when your competitor is offering exactly the same copy for free the very next day or even hour. Remember, there is no DRM, no barriers whatsoever to making as many copies as you want and distributing as far and wide if you like. In theory the first person to buy it will post a copy of it online so everybody else can download it for free. How do you get the endorsement from the author? You pay them for it? How, if you don't have any expectation of profit?

Once again, digital and deadtree has to be separated. In the digital world you don't care if things get distributed or not. Convenience rules. Subscription/deviced based services rule. Take the Kindle or the Apple iPod + iStore. There are copies available for free within minutes of anything that has been produced in a digital form. Apple seems to be doing just fine with the iStore though. Abolishing copyright would decriminalize the masses, while stores like that would still work based on the convenience factor. You're not paying for the music, you're paying for the convenience of having an easily accessible online repository of music you can sync to your iPod easily.

Your example of what happens in deadtree world (such as with 911 report) just proves my point. The only reason that works is exactly what you say, obstacles in copying, formatting etc. If making copying difficult is what you want, then you should be in favor of some flavor of copy protection software (gasp DRM?) that makes copying difficult or impossible, right? But aren't those obstacles exactly what you want to remove?

In a world without copyright, DRM would be mostly pointless aswell. Sure, you can try to make your competitor's job harder, but you can't make it impossible and it costs you to do so. I didn't say that making copying difficult is a goal. Even without the advantage of being first on the market and being the official publisher, it would still be worth it for publishers to publish books and pay the authors for it. Publishers don't need the artificial and destructive monopoly copyright creates. Competition is good.

Re:End of an era?

[Kadmos]

Just to add a data point to the discussion: When I owned and operated a bookstore some of the most commonly purchased books were the classics. These newly printed books are out of copyright and were bought and sold cheaply ($5) despite being available for free elsewhere (Project Gutenburg). For works that are not protected by copyright there is still a viable market for those works to be reproduced, bought and sold.

Re:End of an era?

[PachmanP]

ou mention your local band, but I bet they are only playing in your local bar because they are hoping that they will some day be able to get a bigger audience and more money, and this, until a better alternative is found, still involves copyright.

Well they get a bigger audience and play bigger shows. We currently lack the ability to really reproduce the experience of being at a concert with out said band. Now once we get VR/holodeck then the bands are probably straight out of luck, but I am of the opinion that society will collapse shortly after the invention of the holodeck/matrix. You'd never get a guy out of "Buxom Women Who Want To Please You" program, and humanity would die off.

Re:End of an era?

[Pentium100]

Except that patents expire quite fast (compared to copyrights) or we would still be paying Tesla for AC generator and Edison for the light bulb. I don't think that society would progress very far if it was like that.

Re:End of an era?

[digitalchinky]

Really? I mostly use transmission, sometimes bittorrent-curses, though in either case, I always set the max upload rate to around 3 kilobytes per second and get download speeds in the 1 to 2 megabyte range depending on what the content actually is. What is this quid-pro-quo you speak of?

Re:End of an era?

[thebigbadme]

I would be willing to put up money as well, just for a tool to be made, regardless of what anyone does with it. Heck, I probably won't even end up using the tool(s) myself at all.

Here's the catch: there is no way to eliminate all pinch points as far as having parties unauthorized being unable to determine content. Some sort of key and or addressing information exchange will have to happen somewhere. A system has to be made to allow certain people in and keep other people out. However, that sort of negates the whole free information thing.

At a minimum, in order to facilitate anything useful being made, a safe harbor must be found in a location where the vast masses will be able to access it. In order for such to happen there has got to be a vested interest for capitalists to keep the place otherwise connected (despite anything that happens), but not having so much interest therein vested that laws are created to stop such things.

Where-ever people are congregated, organization will commence, structure will be formed, power/authority will be assumed, laws will be created, currency will be minted, corruption will ensue, and, for the most part, unless enough sympathy can be generated on behalf of a cause, persons found to be without adequate funding will find themselves unable to alter the situation.

I just don't see that happening around the cause of file-sharing. And attempts to monetize the traffic generated, as means to provide resources, will be seen in a negative light by those who assumed authority under whatever pretext (democracy or dictatorship), so long as laws and regulations in those same jurisdictions remain at odds with the goals and desires of the entities participating. Cases abound where legal uses of such technology are wide-spread, but writ large, not happening.

Re:End of an era?

[cyborch]

Of course it would happen. The site owner wouldn't need to buy one copy of each book himself. Others could upload the books they like. Do you think one single person seeded everything on TPB?

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there would probably be all kinds of inefficiency in the system. But give it a few decades, and people would figure out ways to make it work. The advantage is that we don't have to take draconian measures to control every digital device out there. That's where the current system is failing and ends up spending huge amounts of money unproductively. On the balance, it might be that the current approach of draconian control is economically more efficient, but it sure as hell is not preferable in terms of civil liberties.

Re:End of an era?

[pkphilip]

Simple: authors would stop trying to sell copies, and instead focus on selling their labor.

What is the result of an author's labour if it is not books/literature? and if he is not allowed to benefit from his labour, what else can he do?

Re:End of an era?

[Vintermann]

If by "information" you mean things commonly shared through pirate bay, then did it ever occur to you that the production of such material would essentially grind to a halt without that monopoly?

What if it would? Let's say 999 out of 1000 small hobby bands, losing the promise of a buck every time their music is played, decide to quit. So what?

Maybe that last band, which kept playing because of commissioned pieces, live performances or (gasp!) just the pleasure of it, can go a way to replace those 999 others. Considering we can make as many copies of their music as we want.

But quality will suffer, you might say, since there is so much less talent to choose from.

And maybe that would be true, if in today's environment, the most talented always floated to the top. But of course it doesn't work like that. A successful band might like to think that they've succeeded on their own artistic merits - after all, they've practised so much, right? But plenty of bands that are good don't succeed, and more succeed that haven't invested as much in their music (as opposed to their looks, image and so on).

But let's imagine it did anyway, and the pool of talent was actually reduced thousandfold. Well, the pool of talent would still be vastly larger than it was, say, at Mozart's time - and he didn't collect any recording royalties either!

The copyright regime probably isn't going to change, it's too entrenched. But the world wouldn't go under if it did.

Re:End of an era?

[Sippan]

It is your belief that nobody would buy books from Amazon if they could get free digital books from a user-friendly file sharing website? And as a result, people would stop writing books? That must be why iTunes Music Store is such a failure, and why Amazon has had to abandon their film sections because of The Pirate Bay. And as a result, people have stopped making music and films.

Re:End of an era?

[palegray.net]

But I can't vouch for it, as I don't use it myself.

I've heard some people use drugs, but you couldn't vouch for that either, could you? ;)

Re:End of an era?

[arkhan_jg]

Your analogy is flawed somewhat, as most people still prefer paper books to ebooks, but lets ignore that for the moment.

Look at the Baen Free Library - the authors themselves put up books for free download, in a variety of DRM-free formats. Every time an author does this, they see massive spikes in sales of their other books, *including* the book they put up for free. They also sell ebooks via webscriptions - and you know what? Those *also* see spikes in sales. They like libraries, and they like people lending their books around - they'd rather be read than forgotten, and getting someone to like your existing work makes them more likely to buy future works. Compare and contrast to the games industry, for example, which treats legal 2nd hand sales like copyright infringement, with DRM etc to prevent it if at all possible (steam, I'm looking at you too)

The truth is with publishing is there's very little long-tail. Unless you're a mega author, The sales you get in the first year are pretty much the vast majority of the money you'll ever make from that title. The trick is to get more people interested in your work in the first place, so that they go on to buy your back catalog.

Free illegal online stuff suffers from this too. The latest and greatest is where all the seeders are; try getting old or obscure stuff on the pirate bay, and you'll see that the field is littered with dead torrents, the seeders long having since gone away. That's somewhere that sellers have a niche; use the latest free stuff (which you don't even have to pay bandwidth for!) as a loss leader for your other works, which you sell, easily and DRM free. Convenience has value too - itunes thrives in a world where they're competiting with free, because it's more easily available, better catalogued, and because people are generally good and want to pay artists if they can. Those that won't pay, were *never your customers in the first place* so worrying about them is simply wasting your effort.

Hell, radio and TV has survived a good long time giving it all away for free, and doing adverts alongside it. the BBC iplayer (paid for by existing TV licences) and Hulu (adverts) are two examples of taking their existing model and doing it online. OK, you might be able to go and get the ad-free version online too, but if it's right *there* and fast and convenient, loads of people will put up with ads and go to the original source.

But ultimately, this is all irrelevent. lets imagine this freemazon, a giant library of all the published works of mankind, from the banal comedy to the greatest works of visual and written arts of history. Every book, film, TV, piece of music ever written available free to be enjoyed and to enlighten the public for all time, for them to draw inspiration from and create their own works.

I have a better name for it. The Public Domain. What copyright is FOR. We want this wonderful, amazing Public Domain for the benefit of the public. Lets create an incentive for people to create works and put them out there for everyone to enjoy. Copying is hard since you need a printing press, so we'll put the incentive there - you can be the only one allowed to print your works for a limited time, make some money, then it goes in the public domain. The public give something up (copyright is a limit on free speech; without copyright I'd just be using my free speech rights to say what I like, even if it is sharing something you wrote) and they get something back in return.

Copyright is supposed to be about the richness of the public domain; it's an incentive mechanism to get works into it. Now though, it's like a feudal system; serfs do all the work, and the barons take all the works themselves, and the serfs if they're lucky get to keep a fraction for their own benefit, while the general public only get what the barons allow them to have.

Copyright is the new feudal system; artists slave away for virtually no gain, and the public is robbed of its public domain with

Re:End of an era?

[tingeber]

So, for example, Amazon could pay x thousand dollars to, let's say, Stephen King for a new novel, give it away for free on their website and make money off of ads and other purchases, like hard copies of the book, merchandising et al.

It actually seems like a good plan.

Re:End of an era?

[Vintermann]

We don't need half the "content creators" out there. The inefficiency of their fighting for our attention dwarfs the inefficiency of any alternative collection system (when you think about it, trying to collect payment for _every single performance_ of a work is pretty bloody inefficient too).

This alternative system that you disparage also exists already. Check out fundable.org. Granted, most people don't get it, and try to use it for simple begging instead, but there are some progressive individuals who fund their "content" this way. So far it's mostly role playing modules and indie computer game expansions, but I see no reason to think it would work any worse for larger works.

Re:End of an era?

[Hugonz]

Care to elaborate?

Yes:

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-Boldrin/dp/0521879280
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

Hugo G.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, I wondered where I put that.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering if some kind of pragmatic solution (rather than hoping for a perfect solution) is the answer to the growing wide spread monitoring of everyones data communications. By pragmatic I mean we don't need to stop all monitoring of data. What we need to do, is make it much harder to monitor communications, so that manpower limitations prevent wide spread monitoring of data. I have no problem with them doing law enforcement in the few cases that really warrant monitoring, but what we are moving towards these days is mercilessly tracking of everyone private data for the financial gain of the rich and powerful (not least with companies like Phorm etc..). So this issue is growing wider than just P2P communications. (P2P only became popular as a next step in the arms race to avoid what they were doing to web sites).

Also any call for privacy seems to be totally ignored by the minority in power, in their rush towards creating a police state level of monitoring (so the solution needs to be purely technological as the growing merciless tracking shows they are not interested in any kind of fairness).

Something like Freenet looks like a likely next step in returning some balance to this growing police state attitude. Although at the moment, as its not a totally widespread used solution by everyone online, then anyone caught using freenet is instantly going to be a target for greater paranoia from the police state.

One thing we've really got to do is move towards a way to encrypt nearly all data for everyone through all ISPs as none of them can now be fully trusted. As so many ISPs have now shown they want to monitor all data through their system and then mercilessly sell that to anyone who wants to exploit our privacy. (Its like the post offices opening every letter and photocopying every document and then selling the photocopies to as many people as they can). They can argue its a summary not a photocopy but thats just a smoke screen spliting of hairs. They are utterly mercilessly in their goal to exploit everyone for their finacial gain.

Maybe if something like freenet was then placed on top of a general encryption of all data through all ISPs, then it would obfuscate data enough to prevent widespread monitoring.

Whatever solution is used, it will be yet another step in this arms race. We need to do something fast as the rush towards totally merciless exploitation of everyone's private data isn't going to stop, its just going to get ever worse. Soon we won't be able to even voice any opinion online without the minority in power monitoring us all. Even what we say here would be seen as totally wrong by them as they want a police state. They don't want democracy, they keep showing they want to dictate their will to us all. So any pragmatic widespread used solution is going to help a lot. The growing abuses of power need to be reined in before the police state grows so powerful, it becomes nearly impossible to speak out against their goal of dictating to everyone.

No solution is going to be perfect, but we don't need a perfect solution, we just need to make it much harder to monitor communications, so that manpower limitations prevent wide spread monitoring of data.

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no are you suggesting we go back to the pre-publishing house dark ages and live like the Romans where authors/artists have patron and works are copied by hand, or specifically commissioned.

That is just ridiculous.... it makes too much sense

Re:End of an era?

[mrphoton]

I see what you are saying. As a scientist it iterates me a lot when a journal paper with a very important contribution to human knowledge is behind a subscription service I do not have access to. And why should I have to cough up 30$ for research which was probably funded by my government anyway?

However, on a slightly different idea... Have you ever wondered what would happen to windows market share if cracked copies of windows and key gens could not be download from the internet. (i.e. a world where windows piracy was impossible or at least very hard) I doubt that all those people with hookie copies of windows would rush out and buy vista at the bargain price of 200$ or what ever it is these days. I expect it would give a huge competitive advantage to Linux and the other free OSes. So is piracy band for Linux? I think so.

Re:End of an era?

[ChienAndalu]

I see

1. Stephen King writes novel
2. People download free ebooks
3. ???
4. Profit

Re:End of an era?

[ZERO1ZERO]

Me Too! I have 2Meg line (240K/sec / 20Ksec up) and I don't see any difference in torrent speeds when I put it at 18K or 4K for the upload. The difference is one makes my internet connection unusable, and the other makes the connection fully usuable, even remote connection in. Who gives a crap anyway.

Re:End of an era?

[ssintercept]

i agree with your first paragraph there and would like to add that w/o all the money grubbers/opportunists and such, the people who love to create/explore (music, literature, science etc) will always create. sort of separating the wheat from the chaff.

i may be overgeneralizing(or naive) but dont most advancements in knowledge come from those who pursue out of love of a given subject than those with dollar signs in their eyes...

just a thought...

Re:End of an era?

[Matrix2110]

...Someday someone will figure out how to do untraceable swarm downloading that works at an acceptable speed, it will be easy to use, it will gain critical mass, and then it's all over.

That will be the deathblow.

Ahh, but you forget past nuclear standoffs between superpowers.

I am sad about the verdict but the sheer controversy over the implications to the likes of Google and any other search engine out there being liable for an errant link to gosh knows where?

I don't know about you all, but I predict that social media (Twitter Et all) will triumph over folk that want to hijack culture.

Look at what happened when Microsoft tried to bundle its dialup service to the OS Win95.

Yes it was new and exciting at the time.

Three months later you are calling tech support trying to get out of an agreement that you did not read the fine print.

Shame they got your credit card info in the transaction. :P

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age, but causes the very real retardation of our culture.

And yet, somehow, the rate of scientific and cultural progress has increased exponentially since the introduction of copyrights and patents.

I'm not claiming that's cause-and-effect, but it certainly doesn't look like IP law has retarded progress.

Re:End of an era?

[TheRaven64]

Set your router to prioritise TCP ACKs (it's a single line with pf, I presume it's similarly simple with whatever you run). TCP rate limiting works based on the round trip time from sending the original packet to getting back the reply, and on packet loss. The longer the round trip time, the more the sender will throttle back. If you are saturating your upstream link, then packets you send to other peers will be increasing the latency of the replies to packets you receive as part of download connections.

Also, be aware that BitTorrent is an ugly, badly-designed, bloated, and generally worthless protocol. In some cases I've observed, you can be using more bandwidth on the protocol overhead than on the data transfer. A lot of clients only apply rate-limiting to the data transfer, not the metadata. Watch your network monitor and see how much data you are really sending; 20KB/s reported by the client may well be 30-40KB/s of transmitted packets.

Re:End of an era?

[TheRaven64]

That market ceases to exist when you add in good eBook readers. I own a pretty good eInk device, but I'd still rather read a dead-tree edition. The experience is better. It's not much better though, so given the choice between paying for a Penguin Classic or downloading it from PG, I'll download it. If I happen to see a friend has a copy of the dead-tree version, I'll borrow that instead.

Fast forward a few years, and the eInk devices weigh less than paper books, have 200ms refresh times or better, and roll up to fit more easily in a pocket, and I'd probably not choose the dead-tree version even if it cost less. If both cost zero, I'll take the electronic one.

The same is true for films. Would you pay for a DVD of Night of the Living Dead, or would you download the MPEG-2 version from archive.org? Both versions contain the same content, and will be viewed on the same screen, with the same speakers, so what is the incentive to buy the DVD?

The most interesting thing about the last bit, is that there is still a market for providing access to these films. I downloaded Night of the Living Dead, and a few other films, from archive.org, but I deleted them afterwards. Why? Because if I want to watch them again, I can easily redownload them. I stopped buying DVDs (with a few infrequent exceptions) a couple of years ago, but I still pay a DVD rental service to ship me films and TV shows on a regular basis - I don't even own a TV anymore, I watch shows I like on rented DVDs a complete season at a time, which seems much more enjoyable. I would happily pay for a service that let me download any films or TV shows I wanted (maybe with a monthly restriction so I didn't overtax their servers) if it provided a comprehensive and well-indexed selection. And, as with archive.org now, there would be no reason for me to keep copies locally, because I could always get them again if I particularly wanted to. More importantly, there would be an incentive for me to keep paying, because I could keep watching new things that had just been produced.

Re:End of an era?

[TheRaven64]

That only allows for unidirectional transfer. For a download, you still need some way of requesting that the sender starts transmitting. You could do that via intermediaries though, which would mean that a downloader would not necessarily know the address of the uploaders. You could also use a protocol like SwarmCast, which used something like reed-solomon correction codes so that you only needed n unique blocks to recreate the file, rather than all of them, so that dropped packets wouldn't matter so much. Of course, this would require the software to be able to open raw packets, which is limited to root / administrator on most modern operating systems, and would require the firewalls to explicitly allow packets with invalid source addresses, so it would be difficult in practice, even if it works in theory.

Re:End of an era?

[bentcd]

I swear, someone come up with something that meets all these criteria and I'll pay them outright.

You mean you /would/ pay them, if only you could find them.

Re:End of an era?

[legirons]

Also, are you looking for super anonymity when downloading the next update to your favorite distro, or would you rather pay for tools to commit copyright infringement rather than pay for the copyrighted content outright?

I expect some people will be motivated by principle, which might skew what they are willing to pay beyond the cost of alternative methods of downloading whatevr they want.

Getting some GPL software via costly anonymous connection sounds crazy unless you think of the VPNs and TOR and mesh networking as a great big 'fuck you' to people attempting to monitor every conversation taking place in their countries.

Re:End of an era?

[Grishnakh]

Good luck with that. While it does happen, scanning in a book page-by-page is an arduous and time-consuming process, and a lot more trouble than, for instance, ripping a DVD. What you'll end up is a site with a small number of very popular books, but nowhere near the full catalog of Amazon. A lot like BitTorrent, actually, where I can download many popular TV shows like "Lost", but anything unpopular like "Days of our Lives" (unpopular with the BT crowd that is) probably won't be on there.

Re:End of an era?

[DavoMan]

This is what was meant by the 'shit connections'. The more you upload, the more you can download. Specifics about your ADSL connection are irrelevant.

Re:End of an era?

[DinDaddy]

Then why hasn't it?

A large number of movies today are targeted at the teen and twenty something crowd (hence the stress on maintaining PG-13 movies). This is the largest demographic in movie attendance. Yet this is also alleged to be the demographic doing the most downloading. So why are any of these people going to the theater at all?

Re:End of an era?

[DinDaddy]

Didn't work out so well here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plant

But I think King went about it wrong. He should have set a target amount before writing it, not percentage of paying downloaders.

He puts a certain value on his work, then base it off that value, not the number of people who actually pay. Does he really think 75% of the people who have read his published books bought the original full price hard back, not borrowed a friend's or the library's, or waited for a cheaper paperback?

Re:End of an era?

[DinDaddy]

Come to my house and read it?

Re:End of an era?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You'd never get a guy out of "Buxom Women Who Want To Please You" program, and humanity would die off."

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

What is the result of an author's labour if it is not books/literature? and if he is not allowed to benefit from his labour, what else can he do?

I'm not sure what you mean. He is allowed to benefit from his labor, and in fact that's exactly what I'm suggesting. (Today, authors only benefit indirectly from their labor: their income depends on how many copies they sell, not how much work they put in.)

An author's labor results in books, sure. But that doesn't mean an author has to sell books in order to make money. He can sell his labor directly by saying "if you promise to pay me $10,000 for my effort, I will write a book, and then you can make all the copies you want".

This business model is used by billions of people every day, in countless fields, and it's not nearly as fragile as the copyright-based business model (which requires a complicated set of restrictions on speech, which are expensive and ultimately impossible to enforce).

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

Didn't think very hard about this, did you?

1. Stephen King announces intention to write a new novel, posts a brief description, and sets his price at $X.

2. People contribute money totaling $X (into an escrow account, if people don't trust Stephen King).

3. Stephen King writes novel. (Money is released from escrow. Profit!)

4. People download free ebooks.

5. Stephen King gets an idea for his next novel. Go to step 1.

Re:End of an era?

[Kjella]

It's not possible to hide a connection, it's point to point. But it is it possible to hide whether you're the start/endpoint or if you're just bouncing data around. Maybe not perfectly but certainly well, but of course that has a cost in that you need plenty bandwidth to hide in, but if people had say 100Mbit connections and could get 10Mbit effectively I think that'd be plenty. Of course noone knows what the courts would think of that, if you want to be nasty it'd be the world's biggest conspiracy charge.

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

You don't really think that's a viable alternative to the current system?

I absolutely do.

So every writer, musician, film studio etc will set up a little fund and will only start working once it fills up, right? Until then, they will just sit around and keep that masterpiece they have in mind on the shelf somewhere until enough people have paid?

Yup. They won't necessarily have to manage the fund themselves, of course -- they can get a middleman to do that. And there's nothing stopping them from writing down notes or drafts or whatever before they're been funded, as long as they realize that there's a chance they won't get paid for doing it.

How will you persuade sufficient numbers of people to pay even though they know that what they are paying for won't come to fruition until years from now, if ever?

The same way anyone persuades people to pay for his services: building a reputation by showing a portfolio of past work, lowering his prices if he's new on the scene, offering refunds if the work is never done or doesn't meet the terms that were agreed upon beforehand, etc.

Someone has to keep track of who paid what, so that in case the artist changes his mind (or gets sick, or dies) everything can be paid back. Do you have any concept of the scale and inefficiency of that system given the huge numbers of content creators out there?

Yes, and I really don't think it's much to worry about. Keeping track of data isn't inefficient, it's something computers are very good at.

The scale is nothing unusual compared to the scale of, say, Amazon or eBay or The Pirate Bay. Those are big sites, but the technology to support a large number of transactions (and the associated support requests) is well understood.

Furthermore, look at the scale and inefficiency of the things we need to support the current business model: copyright enforcement, royalty distribution, etc. Every time a song is played on any radio station, someone has to catalog that and keep track of royalties... but it still gets done, even though it requires a lot more human effort than an automated clearinghouse for funding production would. And copyright enforcement has to take place on a massive scale because it's everyone's problem: every web host from YouTube to crappy local ISPs need to deal with takedown notices and enforce other people's copyrights on their own customers, every hardware manufacturer needs to worry about DRM, every bar or restaurant has to worry about whether their TV/radio is audible to enough people that they'll have to pay royalties, and so on.

Re:End of an era?

[ChienAndalu]

So people have to know in *advance* how good the novel will be.

Better yet, unknown authors have no way to charge money after they publish a book. They have to rely on charity.

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

So people have to know in *advance* how good the novel will be.

Do you have to know in advance how good a haircut is going to be, how well a mechanic will fix your car, how well a CEO will run your company, and so on?

Agreeing to pay someone for a service they'll perform in the future is hardly new. Billions of people earn a living that way.

Better yet, unknown authors have no way to charge money after they publish a book. They have to rely on charity.

Charity? No, they'll just have a harder time convincing people to pay them to write -- just like anyone else who's new in any field of work. They can compensate for their unknown status by lowering their prices, or releasing a portfolio of past work to build their reputation.

Re:End of an era?

[ChienAndalu]

So people have to know in *advance* how good the novel will be.

Do you have to know in advance how good a haircut is going to be, how well a mechanic will fix your car, how well a CEO will run your company, and so on?

If haircuts were something I could read a review on, flip through, and resell, I would be delighted. I would love to keep it that way. Buying haircuts and mechanical repair sucks, why on earth would I like books to be sold in that manner?

Agreeing to pay someone for a service they'll perform in the future is hardly new. Billions of people earn a living that way.

Just because many people (certainly not billions) do it, doesn't mean it's superior. The concept that the guy who made an album that 1000 people enjoyed should earn ~1000 more than the guy who made an album that one person enjoyed seems rational and intuitive to me.

I'm not saying that the industries are doing it right, but the filesharer mythology about being trapped in this unfair system they want to destroy, so that their post-riaa piratebay-powered utopia will rise where indy-bands will flourish and get paid by flying unicords smells like bullshit to me.

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

Just because many people (certainly not billions) do it, doesn't mean it's superior.

Perhaps not, but it does mean it's feasible, and that most potential problems you might bring up have already been solved, because people have been facing them for centuries.

And actually, I think "billions" is accurate... certainly hundreds of millions, in any case. More people earn a living by selling their labor than by selling objects.

The concept that the guy who made an album that 1000 people enjoyed should earn ~1000 more than the guy who made an album that one person enjoyed seems rational and intuitive to me.

Fair enough. It doesn't seem rational and intuitive to me, though, and I'm not alone. I don't see the sense in encouraging all artists and authors to treat their careers as a lottery, where most will lose money or barely break even, and only a few stars will turn a profit. I think it makes a lot more sense for them to know ahead of time whether they're going to get paid for their work, like almost everyone else does, so that the ones whose services aren't in demand can do something more profitable and productive.

Whatever else you can say

[Presto Vivace]

this is an important part of Swedish and technology history, it belongs in a museum.

Re:Whatever else you can say

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm all for its preservation, although boxing it up in a museum isn't exactly what I had in mind...

Re:Whatever else you can say

[illumastorm]

So do you, Dr Jones.

Re:Whatever else you can say

[Sidshow]

I would compare this to having the weapon that fired the first shot in a civil war. Though the object itself has no true value, it is a symbol of the events that are taking place. No matter how this battle turns out or who win's it is important to remember that the fight took place so we don't repeat the conflict over and over in the future.

Re:Whatever else you can say

[clarkkent09]

I think it's an overkill to put it in a museum. It might be in the news now (and even then only nerds seem to be even aware of the law suit in question) but it will be forgotten in a year or two. "Important part of Swedish history" ... people have lost all sense of proportion

Re:Whatever else you can say

[Anonymous Coward]

You might not understand how big this thing is in Sweden, the mentality is so far reached that even museums do what they can to help the Cause in battle. This time its done by bringing more significance to TPB in form of storing it as an important cultural piece in a museum.

Re:Whatever else you can say

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, farmboy.

No specs and/or pictures...

[__aaclcg7560]

I was kinda of hoping that the article had specs and/or pictures on the server hardware. I think a real computer pirate would have one the best hardware money can buy or a knock-off server from the old Soviet Union.

Re:No specs and/or pictures...

[Presto Vivace]

The museum should put photos, specs, and the particulars online.

Re:No specs and/or pictures...

[sznupi]

There's a picture in BBC article abiut the outcome of trial:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8003799.stm

Re:No specs and/or pictures...

[roc97007]

> or a knock-off server from the old Soviet Union.

With vacuum tubes. Powered by turbines salvaged from a MIG 15.

Re:No specs and/or pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping they'd turn it on and serve up some torrents.

Re:No specs and/or pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this:http://legacyeditorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/FrameSet.aspx?s=ImagesSearchState%7C0%7C0%7C-1%7C28%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C1%7C%7C%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C1%7C%7Cpirate+bay%7C9220978876245603319%7C0%7C0%7C0%7C0&p=1&tag=1

I get it!

[Anonymous Coward]

The display is 98% complete and the museum staff has been waiting on a seeder since Thursday.

How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[KW802]

The article says that the server was confiscated by the police; with that in mind, and the fact that the trial was still going underway today, then how did the server leave the possession of the police and wind up with the Bureau of Piracy?

Re:How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[Anonymous Coward]

They cloned all the disks and decided they don't need the server anymore. Somebody with authority signed the release. The information is important, the hardware is not.

Re:How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[roseblood]

It's my understanding that narcotics sniffing dogs have been allowed to use the narcotics they're supposed to be sniffing for and thus having felt the effects of those narcotics are motivated to find them in the future. Perhaps this is a similar case where an agency is rewarded with the confiscated possessions of their victims...errr...customers.

Re:How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[Anonymous Coward]

They cloned all the disks and decided they don't need the server anymore. Somebody with authority signed the release. The information is important, the hardware is not.

If only they could understand this in the USA. It takes years to get your crap back, if you ever do, from what I hear.

Re:How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[houstonbofh]

If only they could understand this in the USA. It takes years to get your crap back, if you ever do, from what I hear.

Ummm... It has been 3 years.

Re:How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm... It has been 3 years.

According to the article the server was seized last year. In the US, as noted above, if often takes years to get seized assets back (and sometimes, never at all).

Re:How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[TheRaven64]

More to the point, how are they allowed to sell it? Shouldn't property which is not illegal to own be returned to the owner at the end of an investigation? Or are the police allowed to take anything that might be relevant to their investigation and then sell it on later? If so, this seems like it has a massive potential for abuse.

Awesome summary

[erroneus]

"The display is 98% complete and the museum staff has been waiting on a seeder since Thursday. "

THAT is classic.

Re:Awesome summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping i wasn't the only one that thougt that was funny

Indy?

[antdude]

Indiana Jones, is that you? :P

I call First Antique to whomever gets insurance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is willing to run the server and file database look-up on a highly-insured antique computer just to get it seized by the Shweeds? It would be pretty cool to have your name next to a typewriter that was found responsible for keeping the FreeNET back-end going in someway over Sneakernet Protocol, and collect on your insurance for it being seized too!

*W*E*L*C*O*M*E* to der Swedish Anti-Piracy Salvage Depot Museum.
 
Here sits Private Q. Public's typwriter.goatserver.ru, responsible for distributing monthly directories of redundant gateways and their rotation heuristics for $SOMEFILENETWORK.

Bring back the Vic, Commodore64, and HP 21364 Alpha 2U server.

Better yet

[Wrexs0ul]

I was actually hoping they'd slap an internet connection to the server and run it LIVE as a museum piece. Purchased by government grant of course.

Come-on... if they can buy a strip of tape across a room or soft porn as art in Canada these Europeans should be light-years ahead of the game!

-Matt

Re:Better yet

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd be pretty fun.

"And now for our next exhibit, the Pirate Bay server. We left it running, and you may find it coincidental that we have WiFi around here. Pull out your laptops and start downloading people. I suggest the latest Hannah Montana CD, lots of seeders."

Next best thing...

[VinylRecords]

Like usenet, rapidshare, yousendit, IRC, ftp, soulseek, isohunt?

I use Pirate Bay often but if it were to go down for the count there are literally thousands of other places that would become just as excellent at hosting torrents or full files themselves.

Re:I call First Antique to whomever gets insurance

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring back the Vic, Commodore64, and HP 21364 Alpha 2U server.

Would FreeBSD-2.2.8 on an AST Bravo 486 be OK?

So wheres the picture?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read all 60 or so lines of the article, yet no picture of said legendary server were posted?

technology and futuristic possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should authors go to publishing houses at all in the first place when the internet is there and the kindle is there?

Why not allow distributed printing - like distributed source code control?

Why not ask authors to allow people to make second life storylines based on the books?

why not offer the authors web sites for free where they can directly ask for money from the audience and where they can be requested to produce works of art?

why not get back the good thing about the medieval times - patronization of artists and their works?

why not on-demand performances or stories with a pre-decided price made by people contributing pledges in an escrow?

Why not explicitly request the authors to make plays and storylines based on news items?

why should only JK Rowling get all the millions when there are indeed other talented writers who have not been lucky to get the attention of the publishing businesses?

why have record labels and publishing houses decide which story is great and which is not? Why not the people?

Why do you think that a story that is not catchy for one society will be so for every other society or age group all over the world?

How many of the failed authors have even got a chance to test their works on remote markets?

Many would be more than willing to write a story that people would love to see.

For example, I would love to see a scifi story where animals unite and fight against corporations and bees and ants sneak into the CEO's office and buzz the living daylights out of him and force him to cancel the forest clearing that he is planning to order.

I would love a romantic novel whose unique concept is that couples can love each other deeply without ever touching each other, forget mush and slop.

I would love a futuristic model where happiness is the currency and not metal.

I would love a political satire on the current world leaders by means of a story of rats or cats and how the godo rats beat the crap out of the bad rats. Slashdot junkies, familiar with basements will love this.

Second life, anyone?
why not Second life enactment of stories written so far? Where the author can repair mistakes and learn about his mistakes from educated audiences?

So many possibilities are available and nobody wants to use them and instead you have people here waiting to sermon others on copyright law and justice.

If it is technology that caused the problem, then it is technology that will provide the solution. so simple a thing is not understood by so many intelligent people, even here on slashdot !?!

Re:technology and futuristic possibilities

[clarkkent09]

Some interesting points, some horrible. I'll reply to one that I actually find offensive.

Why not get back the good thing about the medieval times - patronization of artists and their works?

Many of the greatest musical geniuses in history spent their life in a demeaning position of house entertainers for their rich patrons, because there was no other way to make a living. Some of the greatest painters in history spent their life painting scenes from the Bible because the catholic church was their patron. Soviet artists wrote, painted and composed art that glorified communism because a communist state was their patron. This is one thing I do NOT want to see ever again.

Re:technology and futuristic possibilities

[Vintermann]

Oh, this is just nonsense. Artists in the middle ages had a choice of patrons, just as artists today have a choice in what audience they will try to appeal to. The choice may have been smaller, but that was mostly because it was a society with far smaller surplus for such luxuries as professional musical entertainment. Today or yesterday, "There ain't no such thing as a free artist", to paraphrase Henry Ford.

Comparing either patronage or our current system with communist censorship is just ridiculous.

Re:technology and futuristic possibilities

[clarkkent09]

Artists in the middle ages had a choice of patrons

The point is that allowing their ideas to compete with others in a free market is obviously much better and fairer system for the artist than giving the ideas for free and then competing to find a rich patron who will support them.

Comparing either patronage or our current system with communist censorship is just ridiculous.

You are missing the point again. The point is not censorship, the point is that when artist's livelihood depends on a particular patron, be it state or business or individual, they have every incentive to produce content that will be pleasing to their patron.

Re:technology and futuristic possibilities

[Vintermann]

When there are enough patrons to choose from, there is just as much a free market as there is under the current regime. If you choose the catholic church as your patron, you may find that "Piss Christ" gets your deal terminated. If you choose a teenage audience, you may find they don't buy your records anymore when you suddenly switch to calm, folksy accordeon music. No difference.

It's only your first work you may need to give away for free. It's only fair, the audience has no reason to believe that your new rock album has any value whatsoever - there are hundreds of thousands already! But if they like it, they can make sure you make more with tools like fundable.org.

You take a big economic risk in the beginning, but you do that today, too.

Finnish museum of technology also...

[Ux64]

Finnish museum of technology also bought one of those servers and is going to put it on display in Helsinki. I suppose that many other servers were also sold to museums.

I would laugh my ass off if...

[RogueWarrior65]

They plugged it in to the net and let it do it's job.

Printing press again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi folks, hope all are well today. As a legal student in the USA dealing with ISP cutoff notices and the like and growing steadily furious with the "legal" system's response, not to mention the MAFIAA etc, I must say that all of the discussions here are very astute, some of the best I've found on the web in fact. My only question to you all is this: What similarities are there between this landmark case and the torrent technology, and the Gutenburg printing press making mass information production a reality, and if banned, is that akin to banning a bible/art of war etc in every home? Discuss.

Re:Printing press again?

[Anonymous Coward]

My only question to you all is this: [...]? Discuss.

Sounds too much like you want your homework done for free. You should really post with an account and look like you're contributing something. Also don't expect many replies this late in the thread.

make it a living museum!

[jollyreaper]

I'd give the museum props if it was still plugged in and serving data.

Price

[Anonymous Coward]

only $240, from what i hear it was quite a rig, i'd give them $300 for it, format the drives and i'd run my own server