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.
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.
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Your last paragraph seems sensible, but your words here are too convoluted to be readily comprehended. What exactly are you saying?
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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.
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A big thank you for your blog article.Really looking forward to read more. Keep writing.
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