Slashdot Mirror
Ex-Pirate Bay Admin Launches Micropayment Service
spyrochaete writes "Peter Sunde, formerly 'brokep' of The Pirate Bay, recently launched a beta version of Flattr — a micropayment service enabling internet users to tender cash payments to any participating content publisher. Its model enables users to divvy monthly subscription fees as donations awarded to the musicians, bloggers, photographers, or other publisher of their choice.
Sunde tells the BBC, 'We want to encourage people to share money as well as content,' and asserts, 'people love things and they want to pay.'"
Sounds pretty nice as long as it doesn't commercialize things that are already free. I like it because you wouldn't think about each individual transaction since you pay a flat rate.
""We're not really in this for becoming rich," he said. "We're doing it to change things and making people get money they never got before."
"I know that people are nice enough," he said. "People love things and they want to pay." "
Well three things. One the guy has trust issues. Two the history of micro payment is a troubled one. And three the shear irony of that man saying "people want to pay" considering his original customers is black hole awesome.
The good thing about this arrangement is that it will make it easier to donate money. It doesn't matter how many Flattr I click I still have the same cost, I do not have to keep track just to know I have the money on my account. I also don't have to take so many decisions, like how much to I think this song/game/application/book is worth or do I really going to enjoy it so it is worth anything at all, I just click.
So there are clear advantages of this arrangement. And I do not see it as a way to charge for a product, but as an alternative to the PayPal donate button.
Hi,
As far as I know Sunde has never been accused of pirating anything. ThePiratebay was and still is legal in Sweden.
Just because you can use their service to illegal distribute content does not make the creator a pirate. This would be the equivalent of calling the city a 'drunk driver' because it builds the streets that can be used to facilitate drunk driving.
This.
If an actual media producer decided to distribute via BT, they could even get paid for it. Combine it with a market system where the punters decide what to (micro)pay for their torrent, and some extensions to BT software (perhaps similar to the rate selector, you have a $ selector), and you've got a brilliant means of distributed media distribution that can completely bypass big media.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The whole point of it is that it's flat rate, so it doesn't matter how many things you click you'll still pay the same, and this encourages people to spread their fixed fee around to all the places they like.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
For example: If you have 5000 people a month visiting you and you get Flattr revenues from 1/4 of them between the amounts of $0.01 and $2, with the average being $0,25 you would net $312,5 each month. That's a decent help with the server & hosting bills. How many sites with Paypal donate buttons can claim similar figures? (I agree, my figures are just random figures, but not entirely unrealistic, given the proposed system)
Another counter argument I guess is "Will people use it?" .. that is anyone's guess, but I would totally put some money into the account and whenever I saw something interesting or worth supporting, I could put my money where my mouth is. This instead of saying "If only paypal wasn't so much of a hassle and require so big an investment to donate, I would help these guys". Imagine what this'll do to small pieces of free software, many of which die of neglect because of lack of incentive.
Lots of popular sites right now run on good will of the owner, some individual donations and ads. And in many cases ads that are not very benign in nature. This Flattr system seems to offer a way out of this. Hell, it could probably be expanded to be a payment system for fixed-size payments.. like "Click here to pay $1.99" -> Goto Flattr site to confirm -> Get authenticated as paid customer.
I guess it remains to be seen if this system is any good. But I don't expect it to fail on the willingness of people to pay.. if it fails it probably fails on lack of participating sites or problems on making a deposit. I will sure as hell give it a whirl.
I get that, but it seems arbitrary to me. I don't want to pay X$ for the sake of it, perhaps to ease the admin/banking hassle, or because the punters see it as a donation rather than a fee. Mostly though, I value some sites more than others, and I also don't want sites to get Y$ for 1 visit this month while getting the same for 200 visits next month.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Yes. I completely agree. Except similar services through the years have not succeeded. The reality is, unfortunately, the masses want to feel part of the heard and this is managed through select media outlets and well-trodden marketting techniques. We are where we are at because it works so well. It would be fantastic if struggling/new artists could push their work onto the masses for approval and find their work is reciprocated financially. But they cannot compete with the big music lables in terms of quality and, lets face it, listeners would just be continually bombarded with thousands of spamming musicians trying to get thier song on mp3 players. Sheeple need some way of simplifying the world and the big labels do just that. Flattr is a nice idea, but like a lot of nice ideas it'll be scuppered on the rocks of herd mentality.
Some other criminals of note: Sparticus; Jesus of Nazareth; Nelson Mandela.
F..ck major content producers, they have other revenue sources. Being able to support small FOSS projects financially in an easy way and expressing appreciation for thinghs like XKCD is whats its about.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
"Copying of information", yeah right. At least take the stand and speak about things on their correct terms. It's file sharing. It's copyright infringement. On TPB's part, it was massive aiding of copyright infringement.
You see, our legal system actually looks at ones purpose on things, instead of going on merely technical terms. This means the stupid "but .torrent file itself isn't illegal!" doesn't hold much water and you can't just mess around going against laws with such stupid technical excuses. If you look at the legal letters and responses to them, or 99.9% of the content of the side, or the freaking The Pirate Bay name, I think it's pretty clear TPB knew what they were doing.
If they would had just played it cool, responded and acted to copyright infringement notices and, for fucks sake, chosen a little bit more neutral name they could had have a better change. But not like this.
I can sort of understand it now. Just imagine the Slashdot bandwidth cost for him now, and the maintained costs to run that service with the media attention, with a minimal number of actual users. I think he's thinking of this when making that statement, and that's why he's saying the costs may be lowered in the future. He quite obviously realizes it is a high percentage, but how is he otherwise going to get it on its feet?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"I downloaded this film, I liked it, *click*"
'We want to encourage people to share money as well as content'
I'm done working that side of the fence. Now I'll work this one and make a mint here too.
'people love things and they want to pay'.
I want people's money.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
More to the point, the "piracy" term refers to the commercial distribution of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's explicit authorization. If you download an album for your personal use or even if you upload it without getting any currency out of it you are not "pirating" anything. But the media companies sure want to tack that nasty term to everything they don't approve. After all, "unauthorized distribution for personal use" doesn't quite have that negative image associated with it. You need an image of some bearded, blood thirsty thief and murderer with a parrot on his shoulder to make believe that copying a file is somehow a terribly wrong thing to do.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
The key here is to eliminate the role of the recording industry execs. In the digital age, the only real service they provide is marketing, and if you're already interested in paying money for someone's music, then those marketing services don't really add any value to the product you're paying for.
I disagree. I think that if the "recording industry" has a chance of survival, it needs to convert to pure marketing. Along the way it needs to convert to becoming a service where their customer is the artist - not the end-user. That means abandoning their weakening grip on distribution where the value they provide is solely the result of the artificial scarcity they create in controlling distribution channels.
As a music buyer, I need marketing even for bands that I know about. I need to be informed in a timely fashion when they have new music or are on tour or do things like spin-off projects and collobrations. I would really like to be able to subscribe to the equivalent of an RSS feed for each artist that I already like (and that's not limited to musicians either - it can just as easily apply to writers, directors, actors, even painters and artists that work in less digital mediums like say fireworks crews).
What I don't need is hype - which I'm sure is the last thing those marketing execs will ever be able to let go of. And to be honest - a lot of the hoi polloi DO need hype - in the same way that the majority of the population are content to be lead rather than think independently for themselves in terms of politics or even the way they live their lives (go to college, get a job, get married, raise a family, die - the great american dream).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And three the shear irony of that man saying "people want to pay" considering his original customers is black hole awesome.
Not necessarily.
You often hear "There are no (or at most, little) losses of profit from piracy because people wouldn't have bought the music/games/software/movies/etc. anyways". That is only partially true, however: People wouldn't have bought the products for the price they would have had to pay. A college student might want to try out some nice game that people are talking about but he usually only has two options: "Pay 70 dollars (the PC games cost about 50 euros where I live) or nothing". Now, it might well be that they don't have the 70 dollars so they can pay nothing for the game. At that point the situation is "I can't pay anything, so the authors/developers/artists gain nothing and lose nothing based on what I do. The question of whether I download the product is entirely irrelevant to their profits. I have thus feel no moral obligation to not download" and then they download. It's the same thing with paying 30 dollars for a CD, especially when you know that most of the money wouldn't go to the artist you want to support even if you paid for the product.
Now, micropayments offer you the possibility to give less but still something. Perhaps you can't afford to give a few dozen dollars for a CD, but can afford to give a few. So you can act just like you did before, except now the artist gets what little you can pay instead of the "all or nothing" policy. I think it is awesome idea but like all concepts like this one, it needs a critical mass of people to succeed and I'm not sure if it can achieve that. But in theory, it's great. Now, as for your other things...
One the guy has trust issues.
That's irrelevant to everything. I don't care if he is there out of love towards creative commons or to become rich. If he offers a great service, awesome. If he earns something in the progress, I don't mind.
Two the history of micro payment is a troubled one.
True, but this might be able to circumwent that. In Flattr you (apparently, I haven't RTFA yet) pay flat rate each month and then your donations are just divided to artists in the form of micropayments. It has some problems of it's own but still, it might well be the solution for many problems concerning micropayments.
-AC
You think maybe if they receive 10000 complaints that end users' funds went to some site they don't recognize wouldn't be enough to initiate a freeze on the site's account, pending an investigation that would probably take all of 15 minutes before refunding all the money?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Here's the thing about spammers, they don't play nice. They'll happily give some fake clicks to legitimate sites, causing a support nightmare trying to figure out which are legitimate and which are not. Then there's be some false positives and people will howl over lost money and frozen accounts and either they'll have to create too many cracks for the spammers to slip through or they'll kill themselves on support overhead and bad reputation. Ad companies can live with a certain level of clickfraud, I'm not sure a micro payment company can.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you're genuinely comparing someone who offered free movies and music via his website and was smacked down for it to NELSON FUCKING MANDELA and you're not high, you need to sort your fucking priorities out.
You do know Nelson Mandela blew up trains? He was a terrorist.
Personally, I'll stay with the copyright infringers.
How about clicking 2 times on the sites you like the most?
What?
I think your response to me was very well thought out, and I'm sorry to see that you got modded "troll". With that said, I disagree with pretty much everything :)
Imagine somebody turned up at your front door and say .. And you say, wait, didn't I read about you being found guilty of something, and he says "yes but don't worry, I'm appealing!" - is that going to reassure you?
I'd take the trouble of finding out what he was convicted of. If he was an American citizen convicted of legally obtaining a handgun, I'd call the ruling preposterous and would disregard it. Likewise, a Swedish citizen found guilty of violating a law which does not exist is more likely to receive my business BECAUSE of his bullshit conviction.
The Pirate Bay deliberately antagonized the people he is now trying to help. He ignored DMCA takedowns and told anyone who would listen why he was right and the rest of the world was wrong.
Why is that a problem? He WAS right, and they were wrong.
If some twit from Saudi Arabia insisted that I take down a picture of Mohammed because it violates Sharia Law, I'd tell him to get fucked. The Pirates Bay folks did exactly the same thing.
And his business partners have a history of harassment, like the "ddo$" scheme against the opposition law firm.
Their "DDOS scheme" was perfectly legal, unlike the DDOS attack which "The Biz" was planning on using on them. Last I checked, there was no law prohibiting people from giving money to a law firm, while there certainly are laws which prohibit hiring hackers to flood someones servers.
Of course, they're walking a fine line there, and if I were them I certainly wouldn't have stooped to that. On the other hand, considering what they've had to put up with, I can certainly understand their response.
Like all the of the guys who ran the pirate bay, they have spent the last few years proving the world that they're stupid and untrustworthy.
That's your opinion. As far as I'm concerned, they've shown themselves to be a lot more reasonable and intelligent than anyone at the MPAA or RIA.