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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.'"
The way Flattr is set up, your monthly payment is divided up among the sites you Flattr that month... so if you Flattr 5 sites it will be divided by 5, if you Flattr 100 sites it will be divided by 100. I am not sure I like that arrangement.
Connect the micro payment system to the torrents and any registered individual human parties that can prove identity and/or copyright ownership and is not big media.
This could give opportunity to actually pay the actual artists who want to get paid for the sharing that is going on. This should really serve to piss off the big media publishers who are essentially pimping the work of others for huge personal gain.
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.
Aside from that, recording industry execs hinder creativity by stamping out cookie-cutter artists who are forced down the public's throat until they burn out in a blaze of drugs and/or stupidity. Music wants to be free (as in speech), and the recording industry is the single biggest obstacle to that.
This might explain why he was working with AES:
http://twitter.com/brokep/status/7915813818
"@niczar I clocked 12.8Gbps using AES 128 ECB on a dual quad 2.26ghz xeon with HT (= 16 cores). Not cost efficient."
http://twitter.com/brokep/status/7905751784
Is there a fast solution with a graphics card to do #AES within #Linux? I need 10Gbps or so realtime.
This is so beautiful. It might be the first web service I truly, really like. It's in the right place at the right time. People, me included, love clicking "upvote" buttons all day long, because they like to show appreciation and it gives them a feeling of power. How much more meaningful this becomes when there's money attached! It will feel great to "flatter" people with some of your money, while never bothering to keep track of "how much you spend" (stressful, anyone will tell you), as it's a constant that you've decided you want to give out to the world for a month.
I don't know about you guys, but this fits my mental model of donations better than anything before. I think it'll catch on, because both providers and consumers will love it. We will move to a web with less crap. Maybe even reverse Sturgeon's law.
Pity that it's unlikely that anyone contracted to the major content distributors will be taking it up - I suspect the studios and publishers would bang that on the head. They (sic) like total control over the money flow.
Earlier this year when "well known musicians" came out to damn piracy - and it was covered by bbc, abc (Oz) and others I posted the suggestion (on those sites) that artists create a blog with a paypal account, so that people who download music and movies illegally (like me) could directly send the artists money. The posts were immediately pulled.
I (for one) welcome a New World Publishing Order - where the consumer determines the rewards for the artist/author/whatever, instead of the existing model where the studios/publishers tell the artist/author and the consumer "what market wants".
Just saying...
They can't always appeal. The appeal process has to be requested and it's possible it's denied if the defendants can't create valid reasons for it. But since this was a large case and they could provide valid enough reasons for it, they were allowed to appeal.
They are in no way "innocent until proven guilty" now as the parent put it. They are guilty already, but they still have a possibility to turn that around.
As soon as it's up and running, you can bet that there will be trojans, worms, evil javascript, and so forth all vying to exploit it. Setting up artificial flattr clicks to a scammer's site will probably be possible in many ways, even if you never consciously visit that site. Collecting flattr cash from a handful of victims is hardly worth the effort, but if you can infect enough unwitting donors, then it should be worth a bit.
Before long, infected PCs will just be sending floods of flattr clicks to a swarm of scammer sites, and the few clicks sent to intended sites will be effectively worthless. I expect flattr will fall by the wayside, unless security measures are added for each flattr click (password or other interactive authentication). It will certainly collapse after it adopts sufficient security to properly inhibit exploits.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Instead of constantly creating slices and diluting the amount equally between everyone, I want to be able to edit my Flatter profile the following way:
I log in and see all the sites I've Flattr'd in the last 30 days.
The site list is accompanied by sliders that are hooked into a bar graph or pie chart.
I slide the settings around until I'm satisfied with the split based on the content that I think has the most worth.
I can edit the sliders right up to payout day. That way if someone impresses me at the beginning of the month, but then pulls a bait-and-switch with trash for the following weeks (or it turned out they plagiarized another content producer) I can put that money elsewhere.
Another reason is the people who decide to become economists.
Just look at what passes for rockstar economists, like Levitt and Dubner who wrote the smash hits "Freakonomics" and "Superfreakonomics". Both dismal intellects who couldn't pass a 300 level class in any other science.
Economics is even "softer" than psychology, and it's even more rife with conclusions that are little more than flabby apologetics for their own emotional reactions to other people.
I think of how much better off our world might be today if Milton Friedman had just gone to a goddamn psychiatrist.
You are welcome on my lawn.