As reported on TechCrunch,
Kickstarter, which just recently celebrated the 10,000th successfully funded project in its 2.5-year history, is under siege by that most ubiquitous of foes, presently at least: patent litigation.
Read more>> (h/t Geoff Plauche)
This is sadly ironic: Kickstarter is one of the means emerging on the free market to make projects profitable WITHOUT copyright or IP; and now, IP is heping to klll it. Pathetic.
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
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Think of it as the environment giving Kickstarter type models a nudge toward an evolutionary path that involves immunity from copyright and patent litigation.
This just means that there will have to be a ‘BitTorrent type’ solution, i.e. a decentralised one where patent holders are faced with suing a significant fraction of the population if they wish them to cease and desist from exchanging their intellectual work in a free market.
To have a patent on free exchange is so perverse, that anyone who doesn’t recognise the irony is beyond deprogramming.
Your last paragraph seems sensible, but your words here are too convoluted to be readily comprehended. What exactly are you saying?
Napster was centralised. Litigation against it was evolutionary pressure upon file-sharing technologies/facilities to become decentralised, e.g. Gnutella, BitTorrent, etc.
Twitter will no doubt also come under pressure and when attacked or corrupted (quiet censorship is discovered) a decentralised version of Twitter will have to take over.
It is easy for the holder of a privilege to prosecute a single and slow moving target, but 50,000 fans of a musician distributing their work via BitTorrent in exchange for their fans’ commission via BitFund aren’t going to give a fuck about a patent lawyer’s threatening letters – and if they do, it’ll be a riot.
A big thank you for your blog article.Really looking forward to read more. Keep writing.
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