Bitcoin Forum

http://za.news.yahoo.com/napster-effect-why-bitcoin-really-matters-041500408.html

What I am going to talk about is what I like to call the Napster Effect. Today, Napster isn’t the default for sharing, distributing or even purchasing music. However, what it did was far more powerful. It changed the psychology of consumers (early adopters) and the business of the music industry as a result.

Not really.
Napster was used by a bunch of people who had no respect for copyright or intellectual property rights and didn't mind crappy encoded mis-tagged audios.

E-gold was perfect, any libertarians dream, same with liberty reserve. These were centralized however, just like napster, while bitcoin is distributed. I believe the better analogy to use is that e-gold was the napster of money while bitcoin is the bittorrent, the unstoppable version.

True, but E-gold didn't catch the general public's attention the way Napster or Bitcoin did.

Back when Napster was still operating during its legal battles, I was suggesting that Shawn Fanning be nominated for the Nobel peace prize for what he'd done to popularize peer-to-peer networking, and enabling individual cooperation worldwide.

While Napster may have been doomed from the start due to its centralized nature, it was still the thin edge of the wedge. As soon as it was castrated into some goofy pay-site, less centralized networks like Fastrack (Kazaa, Gnutella, etc) and eDonkey quickly took up the slack. Near-decentralization came with Bittorrent, which still required trackers. With the move to Magnet links and with portals like The Pirate Bay replacing their terrestrial servers with cloud-based virtual machines, true decentralization is close.
 
Now the Bitcoin network, in all its exaFLOP/sec glory, is awakening people to the fact that we-the-people can truly be in charge, and that governments are merely servants of the people.

Don't you just hate insubordinate servants?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I would say that is a bad thing if you want your business to be taken seriously and not steal IP from people who aren't willing to share it for free. Just my opinion.

So-called "intellectual property" is a ridiculous concept to begin with, and doesn't deserve any serious consideration. It's nothing more than the media industry attempting to pass off a legal fiction as if it were a natural right. Anyone promoting it is either a shill or a useful idiot.

Monetizing knowledge and having intermediaries profit off of the work of others (who "stood on the shoulders" of past achievements) is probably one of the most toxic and defeating things ever to come out of only-for-profit societies.

It impedes advancement in knowledge and ultimately hurts people more collectively than it helps. We'll look back upon this time far in the future and wonder how the hell we even got anything done, with all the patent trolling and companies telling people what they can do with ideas.

Its all 'effing ridiculous.

The argument is not that monetizing knowledge is harmful to society but the attempt to use violence in an unmoral and unjustified way because the alleged victim is not harmed in anyway as copying is not theft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4).

Plagiarism is theft, copyright is merely a bunch of rules set by the creator about distribution, the problem is you've got a ton of propaganda out there trying to convince people differently, I hate and despise plagiarism, but I couldn't give a flying fuck about copyright, even as an artist.