On intellectual property (also introducing bittit.info)

I hate almost all kinds of intellectual property. I find even the phrase "intellectual property" irrational, disgusting and childish. It reminds me of what kids do when they play: "Hey I though about being batman first, you can't be batman, it was my idea!". Owning an idea is absurd. You had an idea? Great. Use it. Keep it to yourself if you want. Or, why not, sell it. But once I understand it I don't see why it's more yours than mine. It's a part of me as much as it is a part of you. The whole human civilization has gone that far because people copied, spread and improved ideas of other people. Who are you to deny me the right to use an idea to make my life easier once I fully understand it?? The reason we have property is that if I take your car you will no longer have a car. But if I take your idea we can both use it freely so no harm is done. You'd say that harm is done actually because you could make money from it if you could enforce your patent. Well... who cares? The only reason you can now make money from an idea is the existence of an absurd law that allows you to make money from it. You can't make money from ideas in a free market. Because in a truly free market, such as the one that we will eventually reach, it will always be more expensive to enforce intellectual property laws than to break or circumvent them. People have two options:

1. Pay millions for the enforcement of laws that can hardly be enforced unless they give up many fundamental rights. For example the internet should be surveiled, police should be able to raid servers, Tor/Freenet/I2P/Bitcoin should probably be banned and encryption should be regulated (which equally stupid to regulating whispering). In return, if you ever have such an awesome idea you might be able to sell the patent rights HOPING that law enforcement will work.
2. Pay nothing for enforcement of stupid laws and have free access to every publicly known human idea or intellectual creation. You could still be able to sell ideas or intellectual creations in some cases but once it goes public, it's public.

I trully believe that any rational person would go for the second option. I think that the only reason we currently have intellectual property laws today is that governments have convinced people that it's for their own good or that they promote innovation. The truth is that people are innovative not because some law protects their intellectual creations but because that's the way their brain works. It is also true that currently mostly big corporations are profiting from patents and copyrights. Microsoft is currently making more money from Android (for which has written not a single line of code) than from Windows Mobile! Considering how big corps influence governments there is no wonder why governments favor copyrights and patents

If people realized that, they would probably preffer to stop paying for the enforcement of a practically unenforcable law and would start sharing their ideas for free, rather than pay for such laws hopping that some day they will have some awsome idea that will sell for millions IF these laws could be enforced. I don't believe people would wan't to give up their rights to whisper, encrypt, talk anonymously just to get this trivial benefit in exchange.

So if we had a totally free market somewhere, let's say in the internet or in an anonymous network like Tor. How would one be able to profit form his intellectual creations? Remember that you only control the use of your idea until you reveal it to someone else. If you trusted other people you could sell the idea to them under the terms of a contract that prohibits them from sharing that idea or creation (by creation I mean, song or movie or whatever) with other people but that wouldn't work because if one broke the contract the idea would go public and, without intellectual property laws everyone would be able to use it freely. So contracts wouldn't work if you can't 100% trust people. Even worse it wouldn't ever work in an anonymous market.

But you still control your creation until it gets to one person. So you could easily charge to release you creation for the first time. If possible you could even release your creation in steps getting paid for every bit you release. That would have the benefit that someone would be able to see what you created before paying the full amount you requested. You could even give a small part of your creation for free to start things up. That idea could at least work with music, pictures, videos, text, and, in some cases, programs. Currently I made, with help from a friend in the beggining, a site that allows you to do that with pictures. You can upload a photo, set a price for it and a starting resolution. For example let's say you got an amazing photo with a resolution of 5000x5000. You upload it and the site hosts a 100x100 version of this picture which is given for free to everyone. Now people are able to pay for the picture and the website automatically increases the resolution of the hosted picture so that everyone can get the bigger versions of the picture as payments are made for it. When the total price you set up has been payed, the picture will have reached 5000x5000 and everyone will have access to it. The site uses Bitcoins for payments and that means that the uploader receives payments directly (no fees) while the website watches for the total ammount deposited for each uploaded picture to increase the resolution accordingly. The site is free to use and you only pay to become a verified uploader (which also means that I'll have to know who you are).

The site is this: bittit.info
Υou can also access it via Tor here: ejz7kqoryhqwosbk.onion

bittit is a marketplace where copyright enforcement is irrelevant. Whether there are such laws or not, bittit works the same way. You get paid to release pictures on the public domain or you pay to make others release their pictures on the public domain. And the best part is that both can be done gradually and in a crowdsourced way.

One last thing. When I was making it I had to decide whether I should accept any kind of legal picture, including pornographic or nude pictures. Taking reddit's GoneWild into consideration I thought bittit could be useful for such pictures so I decided to alow them and put them in a separate NSFW category which is obviously not suitable for minors, or so the laws say.

Star Wars sucks

I really don't get how people, and supposedly techies, like this movie... It sucks in every possible way. I can understand EVERY single scientific error in a movie. I forgive every thing like "sound in space" or "lasers traveling slower than the speed of light" even though I am a fan of hard sci-fi. What I cannot forgive is flawed logic, unless the movie was supposed to be surrealistic, but I suppose it was not. Lets see:

1. It's the future. Everybody uses laser guns but for some reason some people insist in using swords??? Seriously? Yeah I know what you will say: with the force they can be fast enough to block lasers with it. Well that very convenient... Why hasn't anybody made a laser gun with three barrels that form a triangle? That way the lightsaber could only block two out of three lasers! It's simple geometry. It's not even science. Yeah he could use a hand at the same time to block the third one you'll say... Well, make a laser gun with 6 barrels for fuck's sake and wipe those Jedi off the universe!

Imagine that the One Ring could melt in boiling water, and yet the fellowship is taking a trip to Mordor to destroy it. It's ridiculous and I couldn't stop thinking how ridiculous this is throughout the movies.

2. The force SO obviously exists and still nobody believes in it and everybody considers it an old religion. I mean, Vader is telekinetically chocking people, people that use swords survive in battle because of the force, the fucking emperor is using the force and still the people that have the technology and the knowledge to make, drive and maintain spaceships that can warp, somehow refuse to accept the force's existence. Are we fucking serious? Obviously, Lucas hated non-religious people and wanted to mock them by parallelizing religious people with the Jedi and non-religious people with all those folks in the movie that are stupid and ignorant enough not to see the obviously existing force.

To sum up my rant: the Star Wars universe is a complete joke. Lucas was probably a teen when he tried to make a universe with knights, swords, a wild-west-like society with warp drive technology, spaceship racing, and he obviously failed. We should be grateful that he didn't put dinosaur-shaped spaceships in it too.

PS: Star trek is way better.

PS2: The only things I liked in Star Wars were Vader and R2.

PS3: Yoda is a prick. Skywalker was sent to Yoda's planet for training. And Yoda not only didn't introduce himself but he also got disappointed because Skywalker actually wanted to train and not spend his time dinning with the first random green piece of shit that he found on the planet. This is called eagerness, not lack of patience, Lucas!

AdSense random(?) account terminations

I've got a friend who is the admin of a big unofficial university forum. Until now, the mods and admins were paying for the server expenses themselves but with the Greek crisis and the constantly growing userbase of the forum, that was no longer possible. So they decided to put some ads on the forum. They started with adf.ly but the  money was not that much (using banner ads for outgoing links) so they removed it. I suggested they go for AdSense since I was using on this blog for years with no problems (although I haven't yet reached the money needed for a postal check payment).

AdSense was making some good money for them. They were going to make more than the server costs and they would be able to keep the extra to cover future server expenses. Until one day the AdSense account was disabled for "suspicious clicks" or something like that.

And now I wonder if Google is trying to make money by randomly closing accounts, which I doubt since stopping cooperations like that will eventually make you loose money both for making a bad name for yourself and because closing an account means that you loose precious placements for your ad network. So what is going on? Do their algorithms suck? Are they giving false positives? Because I am 100% sure that my friend wasn't clicking on the links. I had stressed a million times that doing so would get his account banned and I got him scared enough to watch every click he made in the forums not to accidentally click an ad. He also told every moderator not to click on ads without a reason. To our knowledge there was a mod that was clicking on some ads because Google was showing ads that he considered really interesting so those were genuine clicks. Even if Google thought that those weren't genuine clicks, he was a moderator so he should look like a normal forum member as far as Google is concerned. He was not connected to the AdSense account in any way.
I a few words: no one had access to that Adsense account and the admin who had access never clicked on an ad.

After asking for account reopening they answered that the clicks were examined by both a program and a human and that future communications regarding the issue will be IGNORED. How rude! And how can a human give false positives? I can only suppose that someone, a moderator or a simple user, did a lot of clicks but since it wasn't the administrator, and since there was nothing in the forum asking people to click on the ads why are they closing down the account, practically stealing the 40 euros in the balance? If they doubted the legitimacy of some clicks they could simply not pay for those clicks instead, or at least give a warning with advice on the actions the admin should take! They behavior is practically driving people away!

No wonder why people all over the internet are complaining about absurd account terminations in AdSense and not in other ad networks. After reading all those complaints I removed AdSense from my blog and I replaced it with adf.ly. My friend is considering adBrite and infolinks. I still haven't tried either but I am waiting for approval on infolinks to test it out.

Oh and to give them some credibility, adf.ly actually paid my friend, so I think you can trust them.

PAL on Fundry

I decided to give Fundry a try so I put PAL there



Powered by Fundry

This way you can fund new features that you want and I will not be able to withdraw the funds until users agree that I've implemented that feature. :-)

I wish Fundry supported Bitcoin payments too... :-/

Skype Home Page Killer

Are you annoyed by that retarded Skype Home Page that opens every time with the newest versions of Skype? Yeah me too... I've searched around and didn't find a way to disable it so I made a tiny script (two lines of AutoIt3 code) that starts up with your computer, waits for Skype to start and when the annoying page appears it closes it and terminates.

I made an installer for easy uninstallation when Microsoft (which bought Skype recently) decides to remove that annoying feature/bug. You can get HomeKiller from here. :-) (source code included, should be in installation directory)


Good riddance... Oh and it should work no matter what language you use for Skype!

PS: It seems I didn't search enough as there is another script that looks like it does the same thing already out there... Hehe...