Does The Scene need Bitcoin?

[TeslaUa]

Bittorrent is the place most of us get movies, TV shows and programms.
The Scene is who put the content in. According to wikipedia article they are of highly motivated voluntaristic nature where monetization is frowned upon. Or that might be just one side of the picture, that is what I want to find out.

If there might be an easy way to donate to artist or releaser with your smartphone fingertap in a totally decentralized and authority free way... Like binding the hash of the torrent to the bitcoin donation address with namecoin or dianna.

But do we really want this? What effect would it have on The Scene? The prosecution of The Pirate Bay founders used their revenue points as a leverage. The inflow of money into so-called piracy will increase the quantity and reduce median quality. Not to mention the outrage of "the old style" that will start the financial war.

On the other hand this is clear and unavoidable advance in technology and the empowerment of the 99%

[Luno]

If you leave an address connected with the torrent you are leaving a "papertrail".

Antipiracy cops monitor specific torrents, with known infringing material, at the same time they can see how much you gained financially!

= more fines for tax evasion, selling stolen goods.

However the concept of associating a file or torrent with a Bitcoin address is interesting. You could make iTunes a thing of the past, as you simply pay to unlock a freely distributed copyrighted file.

Your original suggestion can still work if you find a way of doing it cloaked, maybe through an encrypted user site like Mega?

[TeslaUa]

I think the cloak needed here is purely financial, bitcoin mixers. Cops are certainly collecting stats on who downloads what. There is no way of stopping them to see how much it profits in distributed authority-free env, but the recipient of the funds can still be anonymous if needed.

[notig]

If you leave an address connected with the torrent you are leaving a "papertrail".

Antipiracy cops monitor specific torrents, with known infringing material, at the same time they can see how much you gained financially!

= more fines for tax evasion, selling stolen goods.

However the concept of associating a file or torrent with a Bitcoin address is interesting. You could make iTunes a thing of the past, as you simply pay to unlock a freely distributed copyrighted file.

Your original suggestion can still work if you find a way of doing it cloaked, maybe through an encrypted user site like Mega?

Actually... I bet they wouldn't want that to show lol. Because right now they claim hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages when really it's probably just very little.  If you have a movie that costs 20 dollars a certain amount of people will buy it. If someone gives that movie away illegally for 0.... and 5 million people take it then they claim that there is a 100 million dollar loss. The problem is as the price goes down to nothing people would watch it who would not have otherwise.

[ArticMine]

Bitcoin will pose a very strong competitive threat to both The Scene and the RIAA/Apple/Amazon conglomerates especially with music and ebooks by making it very cost effective to pay writers, artists, creators, indie developers etc.,directly and bypassing all of the middlemen. This will take away a sizeable market share from both sides.

When it comes to software FLOSS is slowly but surely taking away market share from companies like Microsoft and Apple; however The Scene including The Pirate Bay is delaying this process considerably especially in the case of Microsoft since pirated Windows is crucial to support of the network effect for Windows in the marketplace. Bitcoin again is most likely to favour the third option rather than "genuine" or "pirated" propriety software namely GNU/Linux and FLOSS.

Wars generally benefit not the belligerents but rather those who are neutral non participants. Btitcoin is already benefiting as a result of the war between big copyright and file sharing sites as the recent events surrounding MEGA demonstrate.

[TeslaUa]

What claimed to be damage is really a missed profit. Totally different thing, they should blame themselves really.
Indeed The Scene is a fungi on the already dead log of "treat information as physical good" concept. Envigorating it with money would only speedup the natural process of phasing things out. And not just concepts but pieces like proprietary OSes too for sure.

[ArticMine]

What claimed to be damage is really a missed profit. Totally different thing, they should blame themselves really.
Indeed The Scene is a fungi on the already dead log of "treat information as physical good" concept. Envigorating it with money would only speedup the natural process of phasing things out. And not just concepts but pieces like proprietary OSes too for sure.

In the case of Microsoft I would argue that The Scene is essential in order for Microsoft to compete with GNU/Linux. If the 30% of desktop computer users that run pirated Windows were to switch to GNU/Linux the market share of Windows would drop from over 90% to just over 60%. While GNU/Linux would go from 1% to over 30%. How long before a substantial number of desktop computer users that run genuine Windows would follow suite? Invigorating The Scene with money will only serve to delay the replacement of Microsoft Windows with GNU/Linux.

The Scene does not hurt Microsoft in any way but is does hurt the Free Software movement and GNU/Linux in a huge way.

... Although the world's largest software maker spends millions of dollars annually to combat illegal copying and distribution of its products, critics allege -- and Microsoft acknowledges -- that piracy sometimes helps the company establish itself in emerging markets and fend off threats from free open-source programs. ...

from:

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9

[TeslaUa]

I don't think that Bitcoin is a tool to either replace or delay the replacement of any particular OS however important. Besides The Scene is far more than sharing some proprietary OS.

[offtopic]The effect of Bitcoin adoption on MS Windows market share is unclear yet. However as Bitcoin will become more widespread that will expose the security weakness of the thing - we will see more and more malware stealing privkeys and that is immediately obvious to the user as opposed to ongoing stealing of bandwidth, cpu time and even private data.[/offtopic]