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[Sowelu]

Reliability requires a brand presence.  Requires trust.

I hear "Ford" and I think "Well, maybe some of their vehicles suck pretty hard, but they've been around HOW many decades?  They must plan to be around for a while longer, so I can trust their next car to not suck so hard that they know they will go out of business because of it".

Some guy off the internet who modifies a design?  I know feck-all about him and his history.  I'm not getting in that car and I don't want it on the road with me.  I want LOTS of oversight, lots of regulation, lots of requirements, and that takes manpower and resources and money to test.

So let's say one guy has been in the free-car scene for a couple years, and he's pretty good.  Mind you, two years is a SHORT time to become an industry expert, but let's just pretend.  Okay, he's working, he's trusted, and...then his savings runs out and he says "oh crap I gotta eat something".  Does he take a job where he's getting paid, abandoning free cars, or does he try to get paid by the community somehow?  Maybe he says "Well, I'd like five thousand dollars to personally certify a car design".  Where does that money come from?  Some random donor who likes his work?  Riiight.  Or maybe he says "I'll help clean up and certify this design, but I want $200 for every copy of this car that gets made".  And suddenly they're not free anymore.

Donations isn't that viable either, if your audience is small and not very wealthy.  Suddenly you move into an old-fashioned patronage kind of system, where the artists all flock to the rich people and try to become their pets or something.

I want to like the barter system, I really do, but what happens when the peanut farmer wants a new tractor but half the tractor-design team is allergic to peanuts?  And how the bloody hell do you handle micropayments?  Barter works for big costly things where social capital is still in place, where one guy can get shorted on a deal and everyone knows the other guy still owes him something.  If you make jewelry, how do you buy a copy of one song from an artist?  I mean maybe you can copy your jewelry too, so it becomes a fair trade, but...maybe you draw portraits, which aren't easy to give to multiple people at once, and take many hours to design...

[Captain Hat]

Damn people, learn to do some research.

Let's open with this informative pictar.


Let's start with the beginning. The Pirate Bay itself was started by Sweden's Pirate Party, a political party favoring copy-left and other positions. The website was intended as a means of promoting BitTorrent technology

They soon expand and are now run by the notable faces seen the recent trial.

Hell, they've even got a disclaimer about what people upload

Usage policy for The Pirate Bay tracker system.

Our tracker system (hereby "the tracker") is free of charge for anyone for personal usage. Organisations (for instance, but not limited to, non-profit or companies) may use the system if they clear this with the system operators first. Permission for organisations/companies is not needed for obvious "well meaning" usage, i.e. distributing works of cultural benefit for the end user.

The tracker may not be used by anyone with the intention to track usage, log ip addresses/usage or anything else that we consider intrusion of privacy or disruption of tracker service. If you are not sure if this would be the case for your usage, please contact us in order to get our permission.

The tracker is run privately. That means that we do not guarantee that the tracker will be available for users at all time but we try our best to make the tracker run stable. We take no responsibility for loss of income or similar due to tracker downtime/failure.

The responsibility lies upon the user to not spread malicious, false or illegal material using the tracker.
We do not censor but we do block people that use our service wrongfully (i.e. commercial organisations that have not cleared the usage with us first).

We reserve the rights to charge for usage of the tracker in case this policy is violated. The charge will consist of a basic fee of EUR 5 000 plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation.
Personal usage, although violating this policy, will not be charged. We will simply block those users.

We also reserve the rights to publish any information regarding violations. Info hashes, IP addresses and all other information that is supplied to the tracker
will be considered our right to publish.

This policy may change at any time, please check in before using the tracker.

Connecting to any of our trackers means that you accept this policy agreement.

It's like trying to ban every troll who invades your chat room, you'll get some, but they'll keep coming.

TL;DR: Sweden isn't America, copyright is(used to be) different there.

[Mel_Vixen]

Sowelu. You have to difference between Virtual stuff and Material Stuff. You can also use a Tax system over which the designer gets payed if you want to use the virtual system into the material world.

Secondly there is something called reputation. A good car-designer who designs cars for free which are good and save (not to mention that there are safety regulations by the laws) can earn a good reputation and reputation pays. If he says "Guys i have a great idea but i would need 5000 dollars for it" the folks following him would donate if they know the designer does good work. And if hes a very good designer he can get jobs form the still existing Companies ^^.

[Jackrabbit]

What if some greeks would suddenly pop and say that by there 5000 years copyright noone is allowed to use anything that bases on old greek inventions/math?

What they created was meant to be used by people who could understand it. They don't own it, they just thought it up. They didn't distribute it for profit unless you count school fees. Different things.

[Ampersand]

That's hot.

I now owe Paris Hilton money for copyright infringement.

[Sowelu]

Sowelu. You have to difference between Virtual stuff and Material Stuff. You can also use a Tax system over which the designer gets payed if you want to use the virtual system into the material world.

Secondly there is something called reputation. A good car-designer who designs cars for free which are good and save (not to mention that there are safety regulations by the laws) can earn a good reputation and reputation pays. If he says "Guys i have a great idea but i would need 5000 dollars for it" the folks following him would donate if they know the designer does good work. And if hes a very good designer he can get jobs form the still existing Companies ^^.

With a tax system though, you're back to being forced to pay for stuff.  And now you have all sorts of weird things where some people don't use any of it and reject the tax...etc.  You could turn it into a voluntary subscription but then it becomes just a slightly different business model, not a free copying thing...

And while donations work, I'm still not sure that donations will occur on the scale required to build a good car.  I think an engineer would be EXTREMELY disappointed if he made less than $60,000/yr, and in private industry he could make ten times that at the kind of levels we're talking here...

Besides, cars aren't going to be free anyway.  The material cost can't be ignored.  And if someone is paying, oh, $1,000 for the materials (a steal, perhaps)...well, what's $100 to pay the guy who made it?  Who could argue if he required a small fee to use his creation?  I dunno.  The whole thing seems a bit unlikely.

One of my best friends has a guest column running on Thingiverse right now, I'm seriously excited about RepRaps and stuff.  And little things like pillbottles with screw caps are already not difficult to print in your own home!  But cars?  Cars are a classic example of "what if we could copy anything" but I've never liked that example.  It just goes a little TOO far.  There's TOO much work required in designing a car, there's too much material cost.  Just doesn't work.

[Sean Mirrsen]

"Matter replicator" are the two words that solve everything. Presuming you can get it to convert, say, nuclear waste (or regular waste) into individual elementary particles (or just energy), and then make it into something useful, you have a winner. I'm talking purely theoretical here. The only industries that would remain in this case would be the power production, the service providers (internet/cellular), and the art houses. The engineer wouldn't need five-digit sums of money to live his life as he wants.

Designing a car is not "too much" work. You have to comply to some fearsome standards for it to be street legal, and have some knowledge of engineering to actually make it work, but all in all a car is just a metal box with wheels, lights, and a motor. Steering wheel and brakes are optional. There's nothing in designing a car that you can't learn from Wikipedia. Not everyone can think up a good design (our russian cars are the epitome of that one), but once you figure out the basics, improving the concept is easy. Of course, if you can't design a car yourself, you can go out and copy someone's design. But it won't be original anymore.

[Nilocy]

I think they should be sentanced harder to be honest. They've probably sucked hundreds of millions, if not billions, out of the global economy. People wonder why record companies go under? Piratebay's (and any other torrent/newsgroups) are causing it. For one, I can admit i've used torrents to check out music by people, but then i go out and buy their stuff. An indie record company that supplied a great many music cd's went under recently, one can wonder whether pirating was at fault.

[Tormy]

Damn people, learn to do some research.

Let's open with this informative pictar.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Let's start with the beginning. The Pirate Bay itself was started by Sweden's Pirate Party, a political party favoring copy-left and other positions. The website was intended as a means of promoting BitTorrent technology

They soon expand and are now run by the notable faces seen the recent trial.

Hell, they've even got a disclaimer about what people upload

Usage policy for The Pirate Bay tracker system.

Our tracker system (hereby "the tracker") is free of charge for anyone for personal usage. Organisations (for instance, but not limited to, non-profit or companies) may use the system if they clear this with the system operators first. Permission for organisations/companies is not needed for obvious "well meaning" usage, i.e. distributing works of cultural benefit for the end user.

The tracker may not be used by anyone with the intention to track usage, log ip addresses/usage or anything else that we consider intrusion of privacy or disruption of tracker service. If you are not sure if this would be the case for your usage, please contact us in order to get our permission.

The tracker is run privately. That means that we do not guarantee that the tracker will be available for users at all time but we try our best to make the tracker run stable. We take no responsibility for loss of income or similar due to tracker downtime/failure.

The responsibility lies upon the user to not spread malicious, false or illegal material using the tracker.
We do not censor but we do block people that use our service wrongfully (i.e. commercial organisations that have not cleared the usage with us first).

We reserve the rights to charge for usage of the tracker in case this policy is violated. The charge will consist of a basic fee of EUR 5 000 plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation.
Personal usage, although violating this policy, will not be charged. We will simply block those users.

We also reserve the rights to publish any information regarding violations. Info hashes, IP addresses and all other information that is supplied to the tracker
will be considered our right to publish.

This policy may change at any time, please check in before using the tracker.

Connecting to any of our trackers means that you accept this policy agreement.

It's like trying to ban every troll who invades your chat room, you'll get some, but they'll keep coming.

TL;DR: Sweden isn't America, copyright is(used to be) different there.

File sharing IS piracy. When you create a torrent a site, you know already, that most of the "users" will [illegally] download movies, games, mp3 files etc. -> Those torrents should be deleted, correct? Question: Did they ever delete any illegal torrents? I guess the answer is: no.

[Mel_Vixen]

Well if you are a provider you know that a certain percentage of the data going over your net is about crimes, sex and is technically illegal. Controlling every "bit" is technically impossible so you could also sue any provider as helper for crimes and Terror.

So providing a web/telephone -access is CRIME, PIRACY and TERROR. -> Those contents should be deleted, correct? Question: Did they ever delete any illegal Material? I guess the answer is: yes but not nearly as much as needed.

The difference of a Web-provider and TPB is that Providers also often host the data which is mourned so they can legally delete these data. TPB on the other hand cant do this because the data is hosted on private PCs and Servers which belong to other people then TPB.

Do you sue google because you found a illegal page over it for said illegal page? Or Vodaphone because terrorists used theyr sms system?

[Yanlin]

I like how far the car metaphor went. It's now in unrelated territory.

Donationware only works for games like DF. One or two devs, full time development, great product.

Notice that about 90% of the population will shun DF.

[Mel_Vixen]

On the other hand you have Mozilla Firefox (with Mozilla foundation), Wikipedia and the different Linux distributions which are open source and work in basic on Donations (in form of code, money and hosting).

[Muz]

Donationware only works with a product that's still awesome with all its bugs.

[Vucar Fikodastesh]

On the other hand you have Mozilla Firefox (with Mozilla foundation), Wikipedia and the different Linux distributions which are open source and work in basic on Donations (in form of code, money and hosting).

O rly?

In 2006 the Mozilla Foundation received $66.8 million in revenues, of which $61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties".

The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox. A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006, however Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and has now renewed the contract through 2011. Approximately 85% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract."; this equates to approximately US$56.8 million.

Wikipedia Look for Income Opportunities.

As the organization grows, it is still figuring out how to support itself without relying on ad revenue or commercial enterprises, though Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, says “there are some kinds of ways of using our brand name — a trivia game, a branded home-edition trivia game” — that may fit with Wikipedia’s mission.

“Existing on donations keeps us on a shoestring budget,” says Mr. Wales.

And these are existing products. Do you thing Toady would have been able to quit his job to work on DF if he didn't have anything released?

[Mel_Vixen]

But the Mozilla foundation still takes donations and the Google-deal is good way to get money but wasnt there from the beginning. It is also a creative way to get financed. The point is they found a way to distribut there stuff still for free but getting money out of it via adviserment in this case. They started small (on donations and some startcapital) and with theyr growing reputation did come the google-deal.

And well toady could have made money with Df if he hadnt released stuff before but the start would have be more rought. IIRC toady did quite his job after he started releasing DF.