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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.
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.
this is an important part of Swedish and technology history, it belongs in a museum.
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.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
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"?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
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.
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.