The Sinking of the Pirate Ship

[Soulbrother]

A nice summation of the whole Pirate Bay debate, and piracy in general:

The Sick Bag

Any thoughts?

[SeanG]

Good stuff.


thumbsup

[qtuner]

great article thanx for posting.

[gurubuzz]

It is stealing..

I've always thought that if your music is available on P2P you must be famous....

Same as finding your CD at a pawn brokers...it's flattery...

[adpz]

It beats any post I've written or read on this subject.

It should be made a sticky at the top of this forum. It's a cogent view of the whole lay of the land.

[spaceman]

very very good article. It really does sum it up nicely. i agree with almost 100% of what he says.

[oudplayer]

Yea, really weird, a blog post that's lucid, well written, AND not clueless...

I know full well, that the best way of stopping a guy like me (and almost everybody I know) from copying stuff, is to make it too hard, too fiddly, too risky, too technical, too nerdy or too dangerous.

Some parts of the equation really are simple at heart.

[durre]

Very well written!

[adpz]

On the other side of the coin, here's a quote from the blog of one of L. Lessig's free culture acolytes. The guy is Harvard-educated, but you'd be hard pressed to believe that from this seemingly Red-Bull addled gobboldygook:

"
Lab Report: Tithing In the Interest of Awesome


Proposed: a geek is someone who actively works to forward the interests of awesome wherever it lies. And tries to fill the awesome gap as increasing quantities of that mysterious substance escapes the universe.
Proposed: But the generation of awesome — the public or community sense that all things the social and physical environment are entirely elastic and malleable — usually isn’t merely spontaneous, it requires the active creation of some latent ether of resources, capital, and community to materialize.
So the Would Buy Again question is: how do you design this as a feature of social systems?
I’ve been kind of flirting recently with the idea of pushing a community norm of creating personal tithes. Specifically budgeted blocks of financial and time resources (10% if you want to be really traditional) for the dedicated intention of creating the necessary ether fabric for awesome, either for investing in social capital, building skills, or otherwise.
This might seem like a complete anachronism, but people personally tithe all the time to goods or ideas. You set aside money to keep up with the latest ideas, or to look stylish, or you hold out for a brand new kickass set of Heelies. This is mostly the same idea, though the traditionally self-centralized direction of these disbursements are turned towards tithing in the interest of creating new projects and promoting public activity. Creating, in some sense, your own little personally managed fund that you keep in reserve when opportunities for the not-so-rainy-day when serving the interest of awesome come along.
On the individual level, this might promote a constant low-level circulation of earmarking that’s effective in creating local clusters of social/financial resources that can work to support geek efforts. But there’s also network benefits to encouraging this build-up of microresources held in reserve as an accepted personal accounting standard for geek culture in general. The likelihood of people meeting with the combination of common interests and common purposes for resources raises the probability of real action on ideas. Much larger action too, since there suddenly exists incentives for geeks to actively group together to achieve their ends. You can imagine the conversation, “How much do you have in your fund? I really need to buy this helicopter and for this plan I’ve got.”
This personal tithing approach has worked pretty well — with two or three months under the system operating at about a 10% money/time tithing level, I’ve been able to personally support Information Superhighway One, Information Superhighway Two, and some initial stuff for Hello Silo (it’s a plan to rent a missile silo — long story, USBFB will report on it later — you can follow news about it @hellosilo) So at least on the microlevel, it’s working.
But who knows if it’d scale to the level of social community engineering though — thoughts?

[vonrichter]

"The Sinking Of The Pirate Ship" was an excellent article. None of the usual misinformation and blatant ignorance of reality that usually pollutes discussions of piracy. Some news organization or something should hire this guy.

[s.d.finley]

Thank you for posting the link. An excellent read.