And just like that, the copyright industry lost everything they’d fought for

Posted on Apr 29, 2018 by Rick Falkvinge

It was just an idea posted in a random financial forum, but people saw the implications immediately. The Bitcoin-BCH financial network brings with it an uncensorable Twitter-like microblogging, called Memo. Once somebody realized this can also be used for magnet links, the copyright industry’s despicable repression game was at the beginning of its inevitable end.

It is no coincidence that censorship-resistant technologies like bitcoin can defeat the copyright monopoly: copyright was created as a censorship mechanism, and at its core has always been suppression of the freedom of speech. (This is even acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court, which mandated “fair use” exceptions to the copyright monopoly to somewhat get around this bad reputation caused by the fact that copyright is a censorship mechanism.)

Therefore, when everybody is guaranteed to be able to write straight into a global financial system, and everybody is guaranteed to be able to read from it, torrent magnets are going to appear almost immediately. This cannot be shut down with any less effort than shutting down that entire global financial system, and even on the extremely unlikely chance that could somehow happen, a new one with the same capability harder entrenched would appear almost immediately.

Indeed, the very highest-voted comment exclaims; “UNCENSORABLE PIRATE BAY!”, complete with capslock.

One can argue that the copyright monopoly is encoded in law, and therefore should be respected. One would be naïve to not have noticed that this particular law has no support nor respect whatsoever among the net generation, and will be discontinued the moment the net generation is pulling enough political strings.

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2 Comments

  1. calem

    soon…

    7 years ago
  2. herzmeister

    aha, so if you’re so against copyrights, then why are you backing the patent mafia around craig wright, roger ver, jihan wu

    a blockchain controlled by a miner monopoly won’t suddenly be so censorship resistant anymore you know

    7 years ago