Luca's meaningless thoughts  

I learned that Flattr, a social micropayment service that I've been overlooking for a long time, was created by some of the founders of The Pirate Bay after watching TPB AFK.

I'm trying to donate (or pay) more and more to people using alternative means to produce stuff, like artists using CC licenses or software developers working with free licenses (I already bought a copy of the movie :). I feel like I have to get more involved to keep the wheel spinning and help people keep doing stuff, cutting the intermediaries as much as possible.

I don't know why I had some resistance to get into Flattr, maybe is because Facebook made me hate anything that have a thumbs up, or a +1 or counter, but knowing the history behind it a little better encouraged me to finally get an account and start using Flattr. And is really nice. Is much easier than going through Paypal each time a want to give some bucks to someone, and allows you to even make very small donations.

I recommend to see this introductory video:

I also decided to flattr-ize all my website, each project individually and even this blog. Not exactly for economical reasons (I think very few people know about anything I do so I don't really expect to earn any money from this), but as another way to spread the word. Also, I'm really curious about what I just said, I really wonder if there is someone out there grateful enough to make even a micro-donation to anything I do or did :)

Anyway, I would like to recommend to do the same, if you do something great, add a Flattr button to what you do, and if you like something out there and it has a Flattr, click it. Let's see if it helps to keep the wheel spinning :)

So, Peter Sundes from The Pirate Bay has been convicted to 1 year prison and 11 million euro. He lost the appeal too, so now he is looking for a last resort, a plea for pardon, a procedure where you can get a judicial sentencing undone by the political administration in exceptional circumstances.

The plea for pardon is not serious in the sense that he is not really doing so, he is denouncing an extremely corrupt and absurd trial. You can read the plea and find out, is long but really interesting how the trial makes no sense (besides what's your stand on file sharing, copyright, etc.).

If you believe the trial was unfair, you can sign this petition, it will probably be completely ignored, but hey, it only takes 2 seconds, worth trying.

Nice post by Paulo Coelho promoting the piracy of his own books via The Pirate Bay (whom reciprocally returns the favor).

The Pirate Bay starts today a new and interesting system to promote arts.

Do you have a band? Are you an aspiring movie producer? A comedian? A cartoon artist?

They will replace the front page logo with a link to your work.

As soon as I learned about it, I decided to participate. Several of my books are there, and as I said in a previous post, My thoughts on SOPA, the physical sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites.

Welcome to download my books for free and, if you enjoy them, buy a hard copy – the way we have to tell to the industry that greed leads to nowhere.

Love

The Pirate Coelho

Go, search, download, read and if you like them, buy or show your appreciation in another way.

After a couple of days of downtime, TPB sais:

OTOH, one of the creators launched, a couple of months ago, Flattr (from Wikipedia):

Flattr is a project started by Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson. Users will be able to pay a small monthly amount and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum users will have to pay is 2 euros. Sunde said, "the money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content."

In the beginning of the service Flattr itself will take a 10% of all the users monthly flatrate. It's currently in a closed beta but users can sign up for a beta invite code on their own site.

Let's see how it goes...