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BREIN Gives Up on Dutch Pirate Bay Blockade
The anti-piracy organization BREIN managed to force major Dutch ISPs to block the Pirate Bay two years ago. XS4all and Ziggo mounted an appeal, and two weeks ago the courts ruled in favor of Ziggo and XS4all with BREIN vowing to appeal. Now it looks like they might have given up on the appeal: BREIN agreed to let the 2nd largest ISP, UPC, lift their blockade of the Pirate Bay pending a possible appeal to the Supreme Court. From the article: "Starting today subscribers of the second largest ISP in the Netherlands will be able to freely access The Pirate Bay once again. According to UPC, anti-piracy group BREIN agreed to a lifting of the ban pending the outcome of a possible appeal in a case against two other Dutch Internet providers. ... In a surprise announcement today, this situation changed. UPC Netherlands, the second largest ISP in the country, said it has decided to lift the Pirate Bay blockade. This is a significant move since the court has yet to decide on the appeal in UPC’s case, a decision which isn’t expected before April this year."
Regardless of the court rulings, ISP blocking was bound to fail. Too many other p2p sites exist or are created and mirrors pop up all the time. ISP blocking is essentially IP whack-a-mole. To many people this result was a foregone conclusion.
It should be clear by now that the productive forces have outgrown the capitalist mode of production, that capitalism is now a fetter on them. But capitalism has created its own gravediggers, the modern proletariat, who whith their revolutionary ascent will clear the way for the socialist future!
Dude, Communism had its run, it looked dynamite on paper, but here in the really real world, it failed. While I agree that Capitalism is looking to follow Comunism down the same drain, what we need is something new, not a rehash of the same tired ideas. Show me something that provides institutional protection of individuals from the indescriminate hoarding of the greedy. Show me a system that reduces a persons power and influence as their wealth increases. Show me a system that rewards creativity over greed, but still recognizes and rewards hard work. Show me something that might fit that bill, and we'll talk. Until then, what you've got is empty rhetoric and three quarters of a century of failure.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
As an author one has two interests: That one's works should be widely enjoyed (i.e. the wish to leave a mark on the world, and be popular), and the wish to earn money. In the current system the latter is solved via copyright: Each author has a monopoly on distributing his works for a (very, very long) time, letting him sell copies of his work with little worry of competition. This mechanism works, but it is not optimal because it conflicts with the other goal of authors, which is that one's works should be widely enjoyed. Under copyright, income depends on strict control of copying, and unauthorized copying potentially represents lost sales. The author therefore finds himself trying to stop others from spreading his work, and to limit those who enjoy it to those who bought a copy. His first and second goals are working against each other.
In a perfect system, authors would not have such a conflict of interest with themselves. Several alternatives to copyright exist which solve this problem, but introduce others.
1. Upfront payment (Kickstarter): The author asks for the full payment for his work before he performs it, rather than extracting it gradually over years afterwards. This could be organized in the same manner as the highly successfull Kickstarter: They author creates a Kickstarter page detailing his plan for, say, a new book, with some information about what it would be about, and states a price he wants for writing it (say 50,000€), possibly with some stretch goals (bonus chapter after 100,000€, for example). Potential readers then choose how much money they want to commit. Once enough money to reach the author's price has been reached, he gets the money, and starts working. If too much time passes (time-limit is commonly 90 days with Kickstarter) without the goal being reached, then the potential readers get their money back, and the author must try some other approach.
The advantage of this approach is that since the author has already been paid before he does the work, he does not need to control copying: copies are free, and can be shared freely. The more copies are shared, and the more people who enjoy his work, the easier it will be for him to gather money for his work.
The disadvantage of this system is that it will be hard for unknown authors to find people willing to fund them. Probably, their first book would need to be written for free in order to get enough interested readers for this approach to work. On the other hand, in practice, authors already write their first book for free under the current system (they need something to show the editor in order to be funded), so this is not a serious disadvantage.
Projects of more than $1,000,000 are regularly funded through Kickstarter, and more than 50,000 projects have been funded during the 4 years since its founding. So a Kickstarter-inspired model of up-front payment really looks like it could work.
2. Usage-based payment: In stead of the author selling copies, the state could measure how much his works are used and compensate him accordingly. That would solve his conflict of interest with himself - now it would be in his economic interest to see people share his work with each other. Something similar to this has been in use for some artists in Norway since 1886, though in a much less expansive fashion. An advantage of this approach is that it allows one to make the economic reward non-proportional to the popularity. For example, one could reduce the money per fan per work for the most popular works in order to encourage diversity and avoid super-star effects where a few authors become billionaires while others get nothing (like the current system). A disadvantage of this is that it would require a significant bureaucracy, and there could be difficulties in getting unbiased measurements of popularity of individual works.
3. Donation-based payment: Fans of works could voluntarily donate money to authors. This would make the author's income grow as the number of fans grow, and it would be in authors