I often try to distinguish between business models and economic models. Business models come about as a result of how you best utilise the laws as they are, while I would say economic models are the actual laws that create an economy. I therefore often say that crowdfunding is an alternative economic model to Copyright in order to hammer home the essential idea that there is another way to solve the so-called "free-rider" problem that my opponents like to talk about.
Assuming, of course, that the free-rider problem can be solved by Copyright anyway, considering how people still borrow DVDs and watch them without paying, as well as pirate. But since people pay regardless of being able to get it for free, it has to be said that there must be something else at force which is making people pay other than Copyright.
Correction: Sentence should be "And if Copyright claims to be the BEST way, i.e. acknowledging other ways, it must demonstrate so and also demonstrate that it is necessary to compromise liberties in order to do so... which I doubt it can do."
Not that Crowdfunding itself is not up for skeptical criticism as well :). The only difference between my opponents and I is that as a believer in the Dialectic and scientific inquiry I welcome criticism and do not resort to logical fallacies.
I will happily answer any challenge put towards me in regards to Crowdfunding being a substitute to Copyright. Happily. I would love to be proved wrong.
I would hate to make the argument about how Crowdfunding can replace Copyright seem like an unfalsifiable position by talking about how it is okay for projects to fail as well as succeed, or how it is justified for Kickstarter to push the working projects to the front page while hiding the unsuccessful ones. But it is important to bear in mind that any publisher is going to take on successful and failed projects, as well as deliberately advertising the best ones while not talking much about the failed. When put in this context, the argument gains strength.
Copyright is MUCH more unfalsifiable, because believers have never been able to demonstrate what evidence would prove Copyright wrong. In the world of science, unfalsifiable assumptions are always the weakest ones: like the religious believer who will defend the unfalsifiable claim of God and his cruel torture of humanity by shrugging off all the criticism in saying "God works in mysterious ways" - it sets itself up to never be proved wrong just like Copyright, which should make us all suspicious.
If Copyright claims to be the only way to fund creators, it should face the evidence that contradicts the claim, and in this case ticket-based admission ala crowdfunding is the evidence and lots of it. Ticket-based admission has survived for centuries, proven to be a primary source of income for those involved, and Crowdfunding is a powerful form of it. And if Crowdfunding claims to be the BEST way, i.e. acknowledging other ways, it must demonstrate so and also demonstrate that it is necessary to compromise liberties in order to do so... which I doubt it can do.
It is a claim like any other and must be treated as such.
Anybody who purchased manga using JManga is morally entitled, in fact I should say "obligated", to hack their downloads and save them from deletion.
And anybody who disagrees with this can fuck off.
The disgraceful rhetoric I've been seeing in these comments: the idea that because there are pirates therefore people who pay their hard earned money deserve to be ripped off and, get this, "brought it all on themselves." I have to ask, because it cannot be as stupid as it seems, what exactly did paying customers do to deserve having their content stolen?
Yes. Just wait until Radiohead tries it. They were so close last time, but the "pay what you want" does not quite give the same level of accountability that crowdfunding does (they made the album first, then recuperated after, which is a bad move). "Pay what you want" is also, unfortunately, still a form of intellectual property.
Intellectual servicing is where it is at. No rights get compromised, and you have both original and deviant markets similar to the fashion industry's perspective. You will of course see crowdfunding websites becoming too corporate and too rich for their own good, but it is best to save that separate working-class fight for another day and focus on the powers of the free market for the time being.
And the best way to support the free market here is to fight Copyright.
Re: As Japan said after WW2: "not necessarily in Japan's best interests..."
1. Kickstarter gets 5% still. And yes, they are justified in pushing the best projects to their site's front page. They are no different from any other publisher that hides its success and failures.
2. It isn't different. More of it is to come and it's going to get a whole lot better. What's your point?
3. I don't know who Bjork is, but in any case this seems to be a silly ad-hominem. In fact, even if fools like Justin Bieber get millions for producing mediocre music it still shows the system works as expected.
4. You never know of what you pay for with creativity. It's the same with buying a DVD for the first time - by definition you do not know what you are supporting until you watch the movie.
5. Nonsense. As competition grows in the crowdfunding market, creators using crowdfunding will have to work harder to win over buyers. Also, you cannot exactly imply that normal DVD producers cannot second-rate crap and still sell out. And by the way, since we already know that publishers are prepared to put money into projects with the possibility that they may walk out with losses and not profits, they will take this fall still by refunding crowdfunders if the project fails. All it takes is the first crowdfunding website to offer this guaranteed refund, and many crowdfunders will flock there instead. We know the market exists, because publishers take this fall in any case.
6. I'm way ahead of you, thank you very much.
7. This is not a new business model, it is a new ECONOMIC model, because it is independent of Copyright: crowdfunding is intellectual servicing, which is far superior to intellectual property. And for a model that is supposedly free there does seem to be a good deal of... paying, involved. Also, I wish you would stop implying that if you follow Copyright law you necessarily fund creators - I can borrow DVDs from friends, follow every Copyright law out there, and still give the creators nothing. I do not choose to do this. What about you? I doubt it.
And to conclude, your hysterically imagined circular logic supposedly coming from Techdirt, which is what I assume it is from your encouragement of taking a "loopy tour", was funny the first thousand times but now it is just boring.
It is still a failure in the basic sense that the project did not get off the ground, but yes there is something to be said in how nobody loses out if the project goes under.
Expect more of this experimental attitude, by the way. Watch as people will vote on projects they wish to see from creators, how much they'd be willing to pay for a "ticket", how creators will have multiple projects up at the same time and let fans pick whichever storyline, art style or other concept works best, how they will split the project into categories of "special effects, cameras, bonus songs etc" to see exactly where people want the money to go, how funding campaigns can be divided for each chapter of a book or each volume of a comic, how eventually Kickstarter will allow projects to continue to receive funds after the deadline so that people can still contribute to making the project better. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I still laugh when I hear Copyright believers don't want crowdfunding to happen, all because it will challenge their beliefs in a very profound way. Some of them no doubt even would want to make the existence of crowdfunding websites illegal (they probably would have been under SOPA). It's ironic for this bunch of folk: demanding that creators get paid while desperately fighting against the greatest, most revolutionary way that creators all over can get paid in ways that would make the jaws of sincere Copyright economists drop. Intellectual servicing trumps intellectual property.
To say that us on the Copyright abolitionism side of the debate do not want creators to be funded is a stupid attempt at a slander. We can solve the free-rider problem much better than you can.
Even if it wasn't for crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter, the free-rider problem for creators of any kind does not seem to be much of a problem in any case. You would think that the invention of the lightning-speed, exponentially viral MP3 format would have genuinely made the free-rider problem so horrible that it would have crushed the music industry. Yet strangely despite the sheer, ridiculous ease of getting music for free, literally as easy as digging up dirt from your back garden, people still continue to pay the musicians. In fact, bizarrely enough the opposite is the case: people are paying more than before the MP3 format and internet inventions.
Why is this the case?
Well let us consider the logic that Copyright uses to "solve" the free-rider problem. It says that if you give the keys of the rights to copy solely to the creators, it means each copy obtains added value through an artificial scarcity. This raises a few problems. First, it still allows these copies to be swapped amongst others who have not paid anything and yet can still experience the creativity - literally "stealing" from the artists while following every Copyright law in the book. Copyright advocates will say "yes we are aware of this, but the nature of Copyright is that it allows the artists to raise the prices in order to compensate for the second-hand trading" - hold on? So the original buyers of the content have to cover someone else's pay? How can this be so passively permitted, especially how the original buyer therefore must make a resale in order to recuperate his loss? Never mind the fact that he'd then be without a copy himself while the next person will have the copy, and therefore indefinite viewing of the copy. The ones who can borrow for nothing, or pay for a cheaper second-hand copy, end up benefiting while the others must carry the unfair burden of their debt, whether either party realise it or not.
Next, following on from that logic, is the catch that I need to stress: this logic proposed by copyright does not actually solve the free-rider problem. I hope you can see right away how free-rider mentality can still occur. If second-hand copies are cheaper, nobody will be first-hand buyers. Or at most, very few people, meaning the only way that "saturation" of copies floating around can occur is if enough people are willing to take up the initial burden of someone else's potentially unpaid debt.
However, people do still buy the first-hand copies. And it is quite simply because there is not much of a free rider problem to begin with. People realise right away that if they don't pay, artists can't work. It's simple common sense and both buyers and sellers realise it. During the Communist revolution this might not have been as apparent amongst its believers because they put too much trust in the system and its supposedly flawless ability to give everyone a fair share of resources for their work. But we've moved past it. Nowadays we innately realise that artists need consumers to create, and consumers need artists for creations, and therefore money has to be involved. The key word being "innate". And the innate instinct to do it still exists in a world where the internet should have brought a huge "tragedy of the commons" to creative industries ages ago, but hasn't.
"But what about the corporations who could take other's creations and make money of their own - isn't that a moral issue that Copyright answers?" Not just Copyright. This is why I stress the importance of crowdfunded projects, which have been around even before the internet in the form of ticket-based admission: if Copyright were abolished and creators were financed through crowdfunding, those same corporations are going to start placing large funds for the artists themselves in order to preserve their interests and use the creations. This is really important to understand. The creators can start holding corporations to account by not releasing new creations until they pay up, depending on how popular the creators are. And what of corporations using work already paid for? Well that's just it: the work is already paid for. Also, it means the artist does not have to pay the corporations for advertising fees for their next project. And we all know from the fashion industry that people will buy official versions and not knock-offs, meaning a chance still for the "innate" need to fund creators to flourish even more. There are other issues such as the rights of the final consumers to participate in the markets they want (fanfiction, devinatArt...), and the corporation's rights to their fruits of additional labour as well.
Intellectual SERVICING trumps intellectual property for these reasons.
I invested £30,000 worth of time and labour into the perfect algorithm that generates a white screen on a computer. Therefore nobody can use white screens (or white paper). After all, I need the rewards of my fruits of £30,000 labour, don't I? The end result may be extremely common amongst anything in this world ever, but I still have a right to trade as if there were a market for people buying my white over anyone else's copy of white, which remember they paid absolutely nothing to create.
...or should my fruits of labour and my right to engage in trading "IP" that happened to come out in a typical manner somehow suffer less rights than anyone else's? Why should someone else who invests £30,000 who just happens to produce something different have the rights?
This is why IP sucks. But if a form of intellectual servicing were common place for funding creator's labour such as crowdfunding, we wouldn't have this problem.
You're quite right in saying that crowdfunding has been going on long before Kickstarter and IndieGoGo started. Admission via tickets, such as gigs, plays, sports events etc, is technically a form of crowdfunding.
Here are the similarities:
- Refunds (full or partial) for all ticket-holders if the performance does not go ahead, which will happen soon enough with crowdfunding in the same way publishers always take this fall anyway.
- The performers can choose to not go ahead with the show if not enough tickets were sold (all-or-nothing model).
- Higher priced tickets for sitting closer to the stage and being more involved with the performance (or creative production).
- Ticket numbers are limited only to the size of the stadium or venue (the internet) and how well you can advertise.
- Gig duration is as long as it needs to be (two hours for a rock band playing songs, six months for an album development).
- Official merchandise for those willing to pay extra.
- Chance for other bands to be advertised through headline bands (so ads can rack up money on big crowdfunding projects).
- The audience get what they pay for.
- The artists get whatever profits the markets think they are worth.
- Impossible for pirates to take any money from it.
You should call the section "Evidence Of Copyright's Falsifiability."
First it'll be torrent sites. Next it'll be VPNs, TOR and even Encryption.
And just like that, Copyright lobbyists end up supporting the blocking of technologies that are vital to opposition movements that go against fascist and totalitarian movements across the world.
"How dare you revolt against your dictators - don't you know we have our OWN terrorists and Commies to fight?"
I always try to say that the best way to take down the pirates of China and the Kim Dotcoms - the modern day Al Capones of the world - is to get rid of Copyright law. That way pirates won't profit because the black market won't exist, in the same way that stopping the drug war will stop drug cartels running away with untaxed profits, and make things in general a whole lot simpler. Occam's Razor is always underrated.
Why should these profiteering pirates be able to take advantage of a bad law, while the rest of us are left with censorship, market destruction, SOPA, etc?
You know who'd be the sort of person likely to lobby for prolonging the war on drugs? The drug cartels. If it were not for that war, they would not profit in the way they can: no tax, no accountability for the dangerous doses they give nor the children they fail to ID-check, just nothing but money. And I would not be surprised if pirates also have a secret sympathy for wanting Copyright law to go on just so they can profit in the same way.
So there may indeed be a reason to hate profiteering pirates... but not for the reasons people might think. They profit out of an unjust law, nothing more and nothing less. Crowdfunding should make these pirates very fearful, as they must know that they will never profiteer from an economic system in the same way. It solves the free rider problem without the need for Copyright because equity is preserved between the creators and funders. A pirate has nowhere to turn when the money is geared towards the "servicing" of creativity, and not the pseudo concept of intellectual property "goods".
I personally cannot wait to stop China from leeching off of our bad laws. Their government's imperialist empire has bullied many neighbouring countries, their censorship laws have put many in misery, their Great Firewall deprived a lot of communication, their restrictions of free trade, their abusing of human rights in general - trust me when I say that these guys want Copyright law to go on back here, so they can continue to profit from the gullible.
On the post: DailyDirt: Basic Science Deserves Some Respect
Re: Oh, boohoo, for "scientists": just another welfare niche.
On the post: Connecting Athletes With Fans Via Video Games... And Via Crowdfunding
Re: Re: Re: Re: Evidence.
On the post: Connecting Athletes With Fans Via Video Games... And Via Crowdfunding
Re: Re: Re: Evidence.
Assuming, of course, that the free-rider problem can be solved by Copyright anyway, considering how people still borrow DVDs and watch them without paying, as well as pirate. But since people pay regardless of being able to get it for free, it has to be said that there must be something else at force which is making people pay other than Copyright.
On the post: Connecting Athletes With Fans Via Video Games... And Via Crowdfunding
Re: Evidence.
Not that Crowdfunding itself is not up for skeptical criticism as well :). The only difference between my opponents and I is that as a believer in the Dialectic and scientific inquiry I welcome criticism and do not resort to logical fallacies.
I will happily answer any challenge put towards me in regards to Crowdfunding being a substitute to Copyright. Happily. I would love to be proved wrong.
On the post: Connecting Athletes With Fans Via Video Games... And Via Crowdfunding
Evidence.
Copyright is MUCH more unfalsifiable, because believers have never been able to demonstrate what evidence would prove Copyright wrong. In the world of science, unfalsifiable assumptions are always the weakest ones: like the religious believer who will defend the unfalsifiable claim of God and his cruel torture of humanity by shrugging off all the criticism in saying "God works in mysterious ways" - it sets itself up to never be proved wrong just like Copyright, which should make us all suspicious.
If Copyright claims to be the only way to fund creators, it should face the evidence that contradicts the claim, and in this case ticket-based admission ala crowdfunding is the evidence and lots of it. Ticket-based admission has survived for centuries, proven to be a primary source of income for those involved, and Crowdfunding is a powerful form of it. And if Crowdfunding claims to be the BEST way, i.e. acknowledging other ways, it must demonstrate so and also demonstrate that it is necessary to compromise liberties in order to do so... which I doubt it can do.
It is a claim like any other and must be treated as such.
On the post: DRM Strikes Again: Digital Comics Distributor JManga Closing Down... And Deleting Everyone's Purchases
And anybody who disagrees with this can fuck off.
The disgraceful rhetoric I've been seeing in these comments: the idea that because there are pirates therefore people who pay their hard earned money deserve to be ripped off and, get this, "brought it all on themselves." I have to ask, because it cannot be as stupid as it seems, what exactly did paying customers do to deserve having their content stolen?
On the post: Judge Wright Orders Second Prenda Hearing, Tells Everyone They Better Actually Show Up This Time
Re:
On the post: No, Sim City Debacle Doesn't Mean Gamers Need A Bill Of Rights
On the post: Judge Wright Orders Second Prenda Hearing, Tells Everyone They Better Actually Show Up This Time
On the post: Kickstarter Projects That Don't Meet Their Goal Are Not 'Failures'; They Help People Avoid Failures
Re: Re: More experiments on the way.
Intellectual servicing is where it is at. No rights get compromised, and you have both original and deviant markets similar to the fashion industry's perspective. You will of course see crowdfunding websites becoming too corporate and too rich for their own good, but it is best to save that separate working-class fight for another day and focus on the powers of the free market for the time being.
And the best way to support the free market here is to fight Copyright.
On the post: Kickstarter Projects That Don't Meet Their Goal Are Not 'Failures'; They Help People Avoid Failures
Re: As Japan said after WW2: "not necessarily in Japan's best interests..."
2. It isn't different. More of it is to come and it's going to get a whole lot better. What's your point?
3. I don't know who Bjork is, but in any case this seems to be a silly ad-hominem. In fact, even if fools like Justin Bieber get millions for producing mediocre music it still shows the system works as expected.
4. You never know of what you pay for with creativity. It's the same with buying a DVD for the first time - by definition you do not know what you are supporting until you watch the movie.
5. Nonsense. As competition grows in the crowdfunding market, creators using crowdfunding will have to work harder to win over buyers. Also, you cannot exactly imply that normal DVD producers cannot second-rate crap and still sell out. And by the way, since we already know that publishers are prepared to put money into projects with the possibility that they may walk out with losses and not profits, they will take this fall still by refunding crowdfunders if the project fails. All it takes is the first crowdfunding website to offer this guaranteed refund, and many crowdfunders will flock there instead. We know the market exists, because publishers take this fall in any case.
6. I'm way ahead of you, thank you very much.
7. This is not a new business model, it is a new ECONOMIC model, because it is independent of Copyright: crowdfunding is intellectual servicing, which is far superior to intellectual property. And for a model that is supposedly free there does seem to be a good deal of... paying, involved. Also, I wish you would stop implying that if you follow Copyright law you necessarily fund creators - I can borrow DVDs from friends, follow every Copyright law out there, and still give the creators nothing. I do not choose to do this. What about you? I doubt it.
And to conclude, your hysterically imagined circular logic supposedly coming from Techdirt, which is what I assume it is from your encouragement of taking a "loopy tour", was funny the first thousand times but now it is just boring.
On the post: Kickstarter Projects That Don't Meet Their Goal Are Not 'Failures'; They Help People Avoid Failures
More experiments on the way.
Expect more of this experimental attitude, by the way. Watch as people will vote on projects they wish to see from creators, how much they'd be willing to pay for a "ticket", how creators will have multiple projects up at the same time and let fans pick whichever storyline, art style or other concept works best, how they will split the project into categories of "special effects, cameras, bonus songs etc" to see exactly where people want the money to go, how funding campaigns can be divided for each chapter of a book or each volume of a comic, how eventually Kickstarter will allow projects to continue to receive funds after the deadline so that people can still contribute to making the project better. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I still laugh when I hear Copyright believers don't want crowdfunding to happen, all because it will challenge their beliefs in a very profound way. Some of them no doubt even would want to make the existence of crowdfunding websites illegal (they probably would have been under SOPA). It's ironic for this bunch of folk: demanding that creators get paid while desperately fighting against the greatest, most revolutionary way that creators all over can get paid in ways that would make the jaws of sincere Copyright economists drop. Intellectual servicing trumps intellectual property.
To say that us on the Copyright abolitionism side of the debate do not want creators to be funded is a stupid attempt at a slander. We can solve the free-rider problem much better than you can.
On the post: Case Study: Band Embraces Grooveshark And Catapults Its Career
Paying for services, not goods.
Why is this the case?
Well let us consider the logic that Copyright uses to "solve" the free-rider problem. It says that if you give the keys of the rights to copy solely to the creators, it means each copy obtains added value through an artificial scarcity. This raises a few problems. First, it still allows these copies to be swapped amongst others who have not paid anything and yet can still experience the creativity - literally "stealing" from the artists while following every Copyright law in the book. Copyright advocates will say "yes we are aware of this, but the nature of Copyright is that it allows the artists to raise the prices in order to compensate for the second-hand trading" - hold on? So the original buyers of the content have to cover someone else's pay? How can this be so passively permitted, especially how the original buyer therefore must make a resale in order to recuperate his loss? Never mind the fact that he'd then be without a copy himself while the next person will have the copy, and therefore indefinite viewing of the copy. The ones who can borrow for nothing, or pay for a cheaper second-hand copy, end up benefiting while the others must carry the unfair burden of their debt, whether either party realise it or not.
Next, following on from that logic, is the catch that I need to stress: this logic proposed by copyright does not actually solve the free-rider problem. I hope you can see right away how free-rider mentality can still occur. If second-hand copies are cheaper, nobody will be first-hand buyers. Or at most, very few people, meaning the only way that "saturation" of copies floating around can occur is if enough people are willing to take up the initial burden of someone else's potentially unpaid debt.
However, people do still buy the first-hand copies. And it is quite simply because there is not much of a free rider problem to begin with. People realise right away that if they don't pay, artists can't work. It's simple common sense and both buyers and sellers realise it. During the Communist revolution this might not have been as apparent amongst its believers because they put too much trust in the system and its supposedly flawless ability to give everyone a fair share of resources for their work. But we've moved past it. Nowadays we innately realise that artists need consumers to create, and consumers need artists for creations, and therefore money has to be involved. The key word being "innate". And the innate instinct to do it still exists in a world where the internet should have brought a huge "tragedy of the commons" to creative industries ages ago, but hasn't.
"But what about the corporations who could take other's creations and make money of their own - isn't that a moral issue that Copyright answers?" Not just Copyright. This is why I stress the importance of crowdfunded projects, which have been around even before the internet in the form of ticket-based admission: if Copyright were abolished and creators were financed through crowdfunding, those same corporations are going to start placing large funds for the artists themselves in order to preserve their interests and use the creations. This is really important to understand. The creators can start holding corporations to account by not releasing new creations until they pay up, depending on how popular the creators are. And what of corporations using work already paid for? Well that's just it: the work is already paid for. Also, it means the artist does not have to pay the corporations for advertising fees for their next project. And we all know from the fashion industry that people will buy official versions and not knock-offs, meaning a chance still for the "innate" need to fund creators to flourish even more. There are other issues such as the rights of the final consumers to participate in the markets they want (fanfiction, devinatArt...), and the corporation's rights to their fruits of additional labour as well.
Intellectual SERVICING trumps intellectual property for these reasons.
On the post: SimCity: The Backlash
http://i.imgur.com/JTbXxQT.gif?1
On the post: Because Congress Isn't Already Maximalist Enough: New 'Creative Rights' Caucus Forms
...or should my fruits of labour and my right to engage in trading "IP" that happened to come out in a typical manner somehow suffer less rights than anyone else's? Why should someone else who invests £30,000 who just happens to produce something different have the rights?
This is why IP sucks. But if a form of intellectual servicing were common place for funding creator's labour such as crowdfunding, we wouldn't have this problem.
On the post: White House Says Mobile Phone Unlocking Should Be Legal
On the post: Crowdfunding Picks: Throw Trucks With Your Mind & Other Cool Control Interfaces
Here are the similarities:
- Refunds (full or partial) for all ticket-holders if the performance does not go ahead, which will happen soon enough with crowdfunding in the same way publishers always take this fall anyway.
- The performers can choose to not go ahead with the show if not enough tickets were sold (all-or-nothing model).
- Higher priced tickets for sitting closer to the stage and being more involved with the performance (or creative production).
- Ticket numbers are limited only to the size of the stadium or venue (the internet) and how well you can advertise.
- Gig duration is as long as it needs to be (two hours for a rock band playing songs, six months for an album development).
- Official merchandise for those willing to pay extra.
- Chance for other bands to be advertised through headline bands (so ads can rack up money on big crowdfunding projects).
- The audience get what they pay for.
- The artists get whatever profits the markets think they are worth.
- Impossible for pirates to take any money from it.
You should call the section "Evidence Of Copyright's Falsifiability."
On the post: UK Lets The Recording Industry Decide What Websites To Censor
And just like that, Copyright lobbyists end up supporting the blocking of technologies that are vital to opposition movements that go against fascist and totalitarian movements across the world.
"How dare you revolt against your dictators - don't you know we have our OWN terrorists and Commies to fight?"
On the post: Japanese Law Enforcement Uses New Copyright Law To Arrest 27 File Sharers
Re: Re:
They are in no position to talk about how pirates "free-ride" at all.
On the post: YouTube's ContentID Trolls: Claim Copyright On Lots Of Gameplay Videos, Hope No One Complains, Collect Free Money [Updated]
Unlikely Alliances.
Why should these profiteering pirates be able to take advantage of a bad law, while the rest of us are left with censorship, market destruction, SOPA, etc?
You know who'd be the sort of person likely to lobby for prolonging the war on drugs? The drug cartels. If it were not for that war, they would not profit in the way they can: no tax, no accountability for the dangerous doses they give nor the children they fail to ID-check, just nothing but money. And I would not be surprised if pirates also have a secret sympathy for wanting Copyright law to go on just so they can profit in the same way.
So there may indeed be a reason to hate profiteering pirates... but not for the reasons people might think. They profit out of an unjust law, nothing more and nothing less. Crowdfunding should make these pirates very fearful, as they must know that they will never profiteer from an economic system in the same way. It solves the free rider problem without the need for Copyright because equity is preserved between the creators and funders. A pirate has nowhere to turn when the money is geared towards the "servicing" of creativity, and not the pseudo concept of intellectual property "goods".
I personally cannot wait to stop China from leeching off of our bad laws. Their government's imperialist empire has bullied many neighbouring countries, their censorship laws have put many in misery, their Great Firewall deprived a lot of communication, their restrictions of free trade, their abusing of human rights in general - trust me when I say that these guys want Copyright law to go on back here, so they can continue to profit from the gullible.
I can't wait when we put an end to it.
Next >>