Autonomous Archives: 07 Peter Sunde (brokep) - flattr

Cinematographer: Nisha Vasudevan

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Properties of the Autonomous Archive, a 2-day event, hosted by CAMP, was a gathering of key internet platforms, archival initiatives and related infrastructures.
The discussion was intended to focus on the qualities and powers of contemporary archives: including their stable or emergent properties, their performance and beauty, survival and capacity, and autonomy.

"In declaring their autonomy, archives seek to produce norms beyond normativity, and ethical claims beyond the law."
- excerpts from Pad.ma, Ten Theses on the Archive, no. 9.

Day one was a day of presentations and discussions: "Show me your Properties!"
01 Pad.ma: Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert - 'people annotate describe make add'
02 UbuWeb: Kenneth Goldsmith - 'If we had to ask permission, we wouldn't exist: a brief history of UbuWeb and the law'
04 SFG (Shared Footage Group): 'Its past and future'
05 Sundar and Gurung: 'Archiving in the vernacular, experiences from Tamil and Nepali'
06 Rochelle Pinto: 'The mundane state - historians in a state archive'
07 Peter S. - flattr: 'Flattr, the need for alternative financial views'
08 Matthew Fuller: 'Two evil media stratagems: Structured data & Know your sorts'
09 Liang and Lutgert - Leaks: 'Privacy and Scandal: Radia tapes and Wikileaks'

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (brokep) co-founded The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker site and Flattr, a micropayments system which enables viewers of websites to make small donations by clicking a "Flattr this" button.

"I'm essentially a pirate. In more ways than one.
Piracy is about culture, culture is about humanity and I'm a human being."
- http://brokep.com

NM: ... Brokep, speaking about The Pirate Bay and a bit about Flattr.
Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

P: Hello everybody. Thanks for having me over to India... I'm really happy to come.

P: I'm going to talk a little bit about my background, and why I have this background. And my new project which has kind of emerged from everything I have learnt the past 7 or something years doing The Pirate Bay. So I will start with the old project to make you understand the new one.

P: A little bit about myself - I am probably more of an activist than anything else. I like to do things technically. I'm very pragmatic when I do things. When I think about things I see as harming society, I try to find a fix for it, not only by making people understand it, but also by making an alternative to the current situation which people can actually use. I find that very important.

P: I started with computers very early - I was 9. I'm 32 today. So its been a long time. And one of the first things that I discovered was that when I copy things, I learn things. So everything I learned was from copying people. And that's been very key for me, everything I do, I try to aim for helping people understand the value of copying in education.

P: When I had become a bit older I realised that the view of freedom of information has been very different between me and some of the world. I have a video that I hope is going to work, that kind of explains it very very easily. This is Hollywood's view on what I believe is learning.

P: ...hang on let me try again. Its very low sound, can someone turn up the volume?

P: So you can't hear it, but try to read it instead
(subtitles)
Jackie and I are on a mission to stop piracy
If this were a movie we could take on the bad guys ourselves
But this is the real world, we need your help
When you buy pirated movies and music you support criminals
Now these criminals are counterfeiting other things like electronics and medicines
Help us stop piracy
Let's terminate it

P: This is actually an advertisement from Hollywood saying that if you copy movies, essentially what will happen is that the people that you support by doing that in some financial aspect, will start copying medicines and other things and make people die. I don't really recognise that world.

P: I joined a group in Sweden called Piratbyran, which means the bureau for piracy - which is a play on the word Antipiratbyron - which was started before, which was an organisation from Hollywood saying that piracy is bad. They published a lot of information in the Swedish media saying that we lose so much money and we didn't really recognise that either. It was without discussion why these numbers were published. It was just facts that no one really bothered to check if they were real or not.

P: We did a lot of more playful things. We had demonstrations saying that in our country, Sweden, where we have welfare as something very important. You have to have 100 mbit, otherwise you don't have welfare. Playing with technology encouraged the situation.

P: One of the projects we started was The Pirate Bay, which from the beginning was something we did to just make Scandinavian file sharers have a place in their own native tongue that they could share files on. We just wanted to have (?) and also wanted them to understand new technology at that time which was called Bittorrent, which I think most of you understand how it works. For those who don't - very easily - its technology which is real p2p networking. So you share files with other people on the internet and there is no central hub that contains the files.

P: So we never have any files on our machines. Everything is always from a user to a user, directly. All the files are split up into small pieces, which means that you don't have to download everything from one person. You can download small pieces from thousand people at the same time. So its very fast and its very efficient.

P: Pirate Bay has always been a hobby project from the beginning. Some people were into technology, some people from Piratbyran were more of academics or theorists or artists that wanted to play with this new technology. In the end we were 3 people running it, and all of us kind of techy people, and very different. We don't like each other very much. But we still like to do the project together. Its very important to us.

P: In Sweden you can essentially vote 3 different directions - and we 3 have those 3 different political views. So its been very cross-politics for us and its been very good, I think, because of that. One thing we realised was that we were on a mission that we didn't want to censor anything. We didn't want to shut anyone down. We have never removed the link to any files on The Pirate Bay ever, which is probably why we get sued every now and then.

P: Pirate Bay is - just to make you understand how big it is - the users of Pirate Bay are responsible for half of all of the bandwidth use in the world today. So when they are sharing files over half of them is people on the Pirate Bay, or mapped on the Pirate Bay.

P: The really interesting thing is that we are 3 people, sometimes not really working at all on this project. I'm not working too much with it. It has its own life. It has not been updated since the past 5 years. It still looks the same. Nothing really happens with it. But it still goes. Its the 50th biggest website in the world as well, and just a fraction of that- the bandwidth it uses.

P: This is the first system. This is basically the way we run things. We are very pragmatic. We don't have any money. We tend to do it like this. So the blue server in the middle is the first Pirate Bay server in a shoe-box, in Mexico somewhere.

P: Pirate Bay became very famous because of this animal. (screen: image of a polar bear) When we started allowing people to share files,... we'd get those cease-and-desist letters in the end. And mostly we'd get them from Hollywood or from the US and they always quote American law, which is not very applicable in Europe. We try to make them understand that as well. We replied to those- some reply in a good way, some other people don't reply, and we replied in the worst way ever. We told lawyers to fuck off. This is the picture we sent to one of the lawyers, saying 'Hey, look at this, this is polar bear. Our problem is not copyright. Its that these polar bears are trying to eat us. Bye.'

P: We also published all of these legal threats on our website. So you can go there and read them. Its a lot of them. This is my favourite one, because its very clever. Its a German company called Linotype which sent a cease-and-desist letter saying that they found some of the fonts they own on The Pirate Bay. They wanted us to stop allowing people to share information on where to find these fonts. Because that's essentially what Pirate Bay does. And they sent a contract that they wanted us to sign, and that we should pay them 25,000 euros and sign to never do this again and say we're sorry.

P: So we were thinking - how can we answer that in a funny way. So we took the letter and we reversed it, saying that they had to pay us money and they should stop with this. And we used all of the fonts that they complained about.
(laughter)
P: This is typically our attitude, and it works very well, because they don't reply after this. They have no come-back from this.

P: We've been sued by lots. We lost some of them. We won some of them. There's really only one that matters and we lost in the first 2 levels of court in Sweden. We're still going to the Supreme court. Its been a very crazy case where it originally started with the US inviting the Swedish Minister of Justice to come to the White House and talk about this problem. And then there was a big police raid. The responsiible police officer during the investigation was working for Warner Bros. and Universal. The judge in the first case was on the board of directors for the Pro-Copyright Society of Sweden, also on the payroll for the music industry. Its essentially been very crazy.

P: Other things that Pirate Bay has sprung has been the Pirate Party in Sweden. We were never interested in going into politics in the way that we wanted to start a party. But a lot of people did. (We like other types of parties.) They started and became really successful in the European Union elections where they got 2 seats in the Parliament. They got 7.2% of the votes in Sweden for the European Union polls.

P: So we're trying to do this more broadly- we try to influence people and politicians with a view on why its important - freedom of information and why its important to not do censorship. We met some funny people. This is me and president Lula of Brazil. I met him about a year ago. I'd never been to South America before. I met this guy who is like... this... short. He comes up to me and the first thing he says is 'Peter, Sweden and Brazil, there is no extradition treaty. So you can come here if there's a problem.
(laughter)
P: But I like the approach.

P: And I'm probably talking to an audience that already knows this, but the way we see it is not really that there's a problem with people downloading things, its a problem with people having too much things to download. That's rather a problem even in the real world - that I have so much music that I don't know how to find the music I like. Its not what the music actually costs, but its a problem for me - how to find this. I could gladly for a filter or something like that, but today the cost of production maybe exists, but the copies do not have a price. Some people invent clever ways to circumvent this - which we think is good.

P: This is Swedish musician called Moto Boy which is really famous in Sweden. Instead of selling CDs he gives out his music for free. And he sells these music boxes which cost more than CD, but his fans really buy them and they love it because they have something more personal to them. And they make money than they have ever done before in music sales. We think this is something which you have to do in the current world. Its very pragmatic.

P: When we talk about copyright and why this is important, we try to have a broader perspective than just mainstream media culture or whatever. We also see that the internet is just a platform. Its an infrastructure for sharing all types of information. So the next type of information that will be spread is probably things like plastic parts. This is a machine called RepRap which I think is something we all should have in mind when we discuss the internet should be free. Its a 3D printer that can replicate itself. The first thing you can print with it is a copy of the printer itself. So you have physical objects. We see a future where maybe in 20 years we will download a pair of jeans. And it will be a pair of shoes or whatever. It will have the same laws and legislation as surrounding music and movies today. So we're trying to see in that aspect what does really happen when you enforce new laws and treaties without thinking ahead.

P: One of the problems we've seen is, of course, payment. We've seen that a lot of people are interested in helping out, but as everything gets easier with the internet except one thing - which is payments. Like 10 years ago you could just log in with a passport to your bank. But today you need lots of backing(?), signature, dongles, whatever and it's becoming harder and harder, with lots of customer regulations and so on. So its really, really painful to do payments online.

P: Its also a lot of different entities that want the money. The music industries in Europe have this monthly payment, where you pay maybe 10 euros a month to get access to music. But that doesn't give you legal access to movies, or to texts. Or why shouldn't blogs be part of this? Because they are not organised enough. So we have been trying to find more of a method to help people share money as they share information in other forms.

P: I took the idea maybe 4 or 5 years ago from social news sites like digg.com which is very successful in Europe and the US, and tried to combine that with adding money to it. I'm going to show a video, so I would be reallyy happy if we got sound out of it.

P(video): On the internet you can create or take part of content. What you create is not really a good way to get money for the content. When you find something you like, there's no good way to show your love for it. This problem is universal. For bloggers and their readers, musicians and their listeners, photographers, film-creators, programmers, and so on. So we created Flattr to solve this. This is how it works.

P(video): Every month the Flattr user-
(sound dies)

SB: Yeah... I don't think you'll be able to touch your computer while its doing that.

P(video): ...What you create is not really a good way to get money for the content. (When you find something you like, there's no good way to show your) love for it. This problem is universal. For bloggers and their readers, musicians and their listeners, photographers, film-creators, programmers, and so on. So we created Flattr to solve this. This is how it works.

P(video): Every month the Flattr user pays a small fee. Let's compare it with birthday cake. When you have a cake, you want to give slices to the people you like. Flattr helps you do that. If you've created something, you can add a Flattr button to your content. Or if you find something you like and there's a Flattr button besides the content, you click it.

P(video): Each button has a counter showing how many people are willing to give cake for the content. At the end of the month, your cake is sliced in as many pieces as you clicked Flattr buttons. Each slice is then given to the correct content creator. If you clicked 10 buttons, the 10 creators will get a tenth of the cake each. If you click a hundred buttons, the hundred creators will get a hundredth of the cake. The slices might be small, but everyone's slices will all add up. As we say in Sweden, (translation) 'Many small streams will form a large river'.

P(video): As a creator you will get money you've never got before. As a consumer you can help creators out with just a small click. If you haven't guessed it, Flattr is a word play of 'flatter' and 'flat rate' - with a flat rate fee, you can flatter people.

P: Okay, so, its a very easy system itself, but its very hard to describe in an easy way. But one thing that is not shown in this video is that you select yourself how much money you want to spend on information you find every month. So you can select from 2 euros or 100 euros a month - its up to you. We're trying to make it a system where it doesn't matter how much money you have, or how much money you can spend. We just want you to spend it. We never show how much money anyone puts into the system. You can't use it as a payment system. Its just a way to send money and receive money. Nothing else.

P: We also removed this whole idea of creator versus consumers. There's no such thing on Flattr. Everyone is both. Because that's the way the internet works. So if you have a Flattr account, you can both send and receive money. And one of the things we see happening is that bloggers are first people using Flattr. They put up Flattr buttons on the blog posts and so on. The really interesting thing is when they put up Flattr support for comments on blogs. So if you don't like the blog entry you don't have to Flattr it, but maybe you write a comment about it saying that its totally out of whack. Then you can Flattr that comment. So the metadata or surrounding data is also valuable, and we're showing that within the Flattr system, which is a different way to think about the internet than most people do.

P: Also we see that Flattr can help people that usually don't make any money at all to make money, instead of just (inaudible) (?). So you see for instance on YouTube, if you put up Flattr support on YouTube, people actually create videos and put them up there. They have a monetary way to get some feedback. So first you get support, but you also get the money support. Its not based on advertising or anything that's intrusive. You don't have to sell your soul for it. It's more based on an easy way to get money from people that like the things you do.

P: One of the people who has been very successful is WikiLeaks. They use Flattr as their only alternative right now to get money. Its been a lot of discussions along that. And I think we'll be talking about that a little more later - this WikiLeaks thing. But very interestingly, its also a lot of big news organisations, specially in Germany that use Flattr; some of the biggest newspapers have Flattr on all of their articles. We don't know if the money they make goes to the journalist that wrote the article or if they keep it for themselves. But its a very interesting thing to think about.

P: The single person that makes the most amount of money actually makes more than the whole newspaper. He is a podcaster in Germany called Tim Pritlove who's been podcasting for many years and he makes a couple of thousand euros a month from his podcasts. Just by people loving what he does. That really makes a difference for him. Flattr is quite new still, so its very interesting to see where it goes.

P: We of course implemented API's for people to use Flattr, not only that people have to go to our website to use our services. We're trying to make it very open like everything else on the web today, in the fashion that you can implement it for instance on a media player. You can Flattr anything. It doesn't have to be a webpage. It can be an MP3 file or AVI file. You just have to register once with our service, and then you can use an interface that you create yourself to let people Flattr you.

P: The newest thing is that you can use offline Flattrs, which are like QR codes you can find on newspapers and art galleries to get more information on the web. You can also use that code to Flattr certain offline things. Kind of advanced, but its very interesting to see how the web is both online and offline. Or services that are on the internet go offline as well.

P: It's also a very interesting thing in a way to filter and find content, because the difference between pushing a Flattr button and pushing a Facebook 'like' button which is also very popular, is that with Flattr you actually say that this is quality enough that I want to spend money on it. Facebook 'like' you can like whatever, it doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't cost you more than a bit of time. But you know that money will go. So we see a big difference in quality.

P: I, for instance found this photographer's website - its a French photographer that just had lots of photographs that she takes of different plants and so on. She's really good and I found her on Flattr, because it was among the most Flattred things in France tagged with photos, which was kind of an interesting way to find material and people you like.

P: I found some videos as well. We tried to embed it into our website so that we can see it here as well. Because not all sites support Flattr so we need to do that for it to work. So we tried to make people that don't want to support Flattr - we tried to take their work to Flattr. So it's kind of interesting as well.

P: We can also see Flattr on some open source projects which we are really happy about. So it's going beyond just typical text stuff like blogs and news articles which are really easy to implement. There's a whole lot of open source that uses Flattr now to help them fund their system.

P: Because of that we also implemented a new feature on Flattr which is like a subscription. If you click on the button, you can also decide that you want to automatically Flattr this once every month for 12 months. So its more like a subscription model to support people. You don't know how much it will be in money, but you know that you will support it from your money every month for 8 to 12 months or so.

P: This is what it looks like when you log in. You have one account with outgoing money which we call 'means', and then you have 'revenue' which is money you've earned on the system. So you can see money in and out. Any time during the month you can change how much money you want to spend during the month.

P: Here you can see how many clicks you've done and how much that actually equals per click. This is different for every person. Its upto you to decide if its too much or too little per click. We want to encourage people who have money to spend more money of course, but most important is that people help. So we're more happy to have thousand users that spend 2 euros per month than just one who spends thousand euros a month. Its much more important.

P: We also added a way to actually do direct donations now, because there's been a lot of pressure with PayPal and all the other big corporations that help with funding for instance, WikiLeaks - we saw that people wanted to have an alternate way to give money directly to them. So we added a direct donation which is also something that you can see here in the pending section that I'm giving 2 euros this month to WikiLeaks. But we're also always trying to not be a payment system. So its a fine balance the whole time.

P: I was very fast - Any questions?

(applause)

Q(MF): What's (?) your relationships to banks? Previous microfunding systems fall into that model. ...Your relationship to the banks?
P: Oh to the banks. With the Pirate Bay for instance we got shut down by banks and we got shut down by PayPal. They stole money from us. We've had issues with that before. Also this thing with micropayments - it doesn't really work the way PayPal looks at it. With Flattr you can do nano payments even, it doesn't really matter. The relationship is that we are not really a bank. We're more of a payment gateway or agent, and we try to work that way and just help people share money. We just view money as some other sort of detailed information which you really should do on the internet today. Other than that we don't really have a relationship with banks.

Q(MF): If you do these transactions, its got to generate some kind of costs from the banks?
P: Only when you put money in and out of the system. So you can keep the money inside Flattr. We have money on accounts which is like an escrow account that we store for the users, that we don't touch. But otherwise if you keep the money in the system, they don't see any transactions.

P: Also one thing I didn't mention is that all of the transactions within Flattr are anonymous unless you say you want to show it. But otherwise you don't have to tell anyone what you Flattr or how much money you spend on it. Its totally anonymous, which is really important to us. We don't need to know who you are.

Q: How do you deal with the free-rider problem on Flattr? Becuase, I would hope for you that it becomes universal, that everybody uses it. But since it probably won't, what tactics would you use to get people to...I guess in a certain way, support this style of payment?
P: The thing is that there's not really a market at all. As you say we're kind of creating a market. It's a new type of payment and its a new way of looking at things. But the thing is we're just experimenting. We really don't know where we're going or anything. We just wanted to make people understand that you have to do...everything that you take for granted today, you have to throw it away and make something new out of it and see if it works. So we don't (?) we just try things.

Q: I mean since its not a paid-for services system, how much success have you had with people actually signing up for it?
P: We have like 16-17 thousand users. We've been open for everyone maybe 5 months. We've had a lot of attention from (?) of course, which has been helping a lot. But we see that most people actually sign up to the system wanting to give moeny to people, because they have no other easy way to do it, or they don't want the mental hassle of deciding how much anything is worth, because that's actually a big problem. Because if I find somewhere I can donate money to someone, I don't just have to go into the bank, I also have to decide how much is this worth. Should I spend 10 dollars, should I spend one? Do I really want to spend time on just giving one dollar? Am I not cheap at that time? So its... people kind of like the idea to be able to support - like binary weights. Yes I like this; or, I don't like this.

Q: I think its really cool. I really like the whole sort of... idea of actually downloading torrents, I think it's really cool. Its probably the next level of the internet. Beyond this whole search which is so commercialised on Google. I mean really because typically, Google is like - if you really want to - I mean I used to use Mozilla so much, you can't really access YouTube. So you have to access only Chrome. Because Google has a tie-up with YouTube. That kind of really big capitalist...I think this one is really cool. I like it.
P: Thanks. Like you say, its a big problem with the big corporations just taking over...
Q: I Flattr you.
P: Heh, thanks. But the corporations are...
(audience): Where's the money?
(laughter)
P: You can use the offline. I have an Android app for it.

P: But we see that all the time. Its also a problem with the Pirate Bay. Pirate Bay is becoming the default instrument for people to share files on the internet. And they always expect it to be there. And one of the reasons for Pirate Bay not being updated is that we all kind of want it to die and something else to take over and take it to the next level. Because we've been spending a lot of time and energy with it, and now people take it for granted. That's not good. Because there is nothing new coming out of that era. And we hope for it to die somehow, either with a big accidental crash or whatever, or by just turning off servers, or something. Even the legal thing could be good, in order to make people to realise that you can't take anything for granted. You have to come up with... Even things that work, a bit, you should just make technology better all the time.

Q(KG): Wasn't Pirate Bay sold or something?
P: There was an offer to get Pirate Bay on the Swedish stock exchange. And we thought that was such a funny idea, that people would actually want to own shares of Pirate Bay and trade them with each other. And the guys who were trying to buy Pirate Bay were the ones who buy the domain name. They were really crazy. It turned out that they didn't have any money, and so on. But we kind of liked it anyhow, even though it became a big figure. Because the figure itself was really good. Because a lot of people had this big holy picture of the Pirate Bay ... they didn't like it so much anymore. And that was good because a lot of people then went to alternative sites and started alternative projects because they didn't like what Pirate Bay became. And we love that, which is kind of ironic. But its very important to us.

Q(KG): I'm not quite sure. I remember one of the things that came out of that period for you was claiming Pirate Bay as an art-work.
P: Oh we did that many years before actually. Florence for instance when we were on a bus trip, We went on a bus trip as an art project. We bought in Sweden and drove to Italy for 4 days I think. We've been exhibiting art in many places...
KG: I find it a perfectly great art project. I'm curious about framing that discourse. To me, if I was curating the next Documenta, I would have to include the Pirate Bay.
P: So, do.

Q(KG): I'm kind of curious about your relationship to the art world. Are curators coming to you and saying 'you really need to be in the next...'
P: We've been invited to a lot art shows and we've been to a lot of them as well. But that mostly is more Piratbyran Pirate Bay stuff. Even though Piratbyran founded the Pirate Bay and then kind of Pirate Bay became a separate project. Its still like best friends and doing things together. A lot of time, people would want the Pirate Bay included, and we just send Piratbyran instead, which is sometimes the same thing and sometimes its totally different.

Q(KG): Sorry, what was that?
P: Piratbyran - Its the Bureau for Piracy. Its them that founded the Pirate Bay. Some people don't understand the difference between Pyratebyran, the Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party which we think is great as well, because we don't like people to always understand everything. Its very hard to say what the Pirate Bay really is, because we don't really - we don't even know what it is.

Q(SD): Its actually a very specific and technical question about Flattr having to do with - basically a way to aggregate the payee, could be in the ball-park where my question is - that somehow the recipient of the Flattr would be a group of people? This is coming maybe out of thinking about authorship - non-monetary capital kind of circulates around where authorship matters. And so that could be a symbol acknowledging a group of people working on something who don't want to institutionalise in order to have a Flattr account. Or it could be an acknowledgement of all the people that you're drawing from in order to produce the thing that you're producing. If that makes any sense?
P: Yeah a lot of people want some sort of link the Flattr button to these people intead of this person. Because you can then share the Flattr to 10 people or whatever. But its really hard to do technically. And so we're not doing it. But that's more of a nice gesture than something that actually makes too much sense in a technical manner. Because usually if you're doing something with someone, someone will step up and take the money and divide it. Or someone will always take the glory for it anyhow. That's always with group of people I think.

Q(SD): It also comes a little bit selfishly or anecdotally, I'm thinking ... at one point I was thinking ... because I've also taken the view as Kenneth, to stay as far away from money as possible. But how would I deal with money you've offered. I certainly don't want to pen down every one percent ... and I was thinking at one point, the simplest way would be simply to ask people to stake a claim to their money... and that involves offers also to the people who did the work of uploading and marketing, they can perform a marketing function. There's a lot of different ways when it comes to doing stuff. (inaudible)(?)
P: Yeah that's really hard. So the easy part for us has been just to ignore it. Its really really hard. Its different in every case - how its shared or whatever. We just decided to stay out of it. Maybe its something we'll do in the future. But its just too hard.

Q(J): Did you ever have a problem with people asking for donations and then someone complaining that this isn't their work?
P: That has never happened actually. But we've not been up for that long. So its never been a problem. People have been not really knowing if they really give to the right individuals, specially for some of the open source projects which are using Flattr, for WikiLeaks particularly. We introduced verified account, that we can veryify that this is this person. But usually if you see a button on a website, you know that they have a Flattr account, otherwise it wouldn't be there.

Q(LL): Is there a way in which you can combine Pirate Bay and Flattr?
P: Yeah you could probably just add a Flatttr button to any torrent.
Q(LL): And then where would the money go?
P: That's a big question. So we haven't done it. Because it's our question. Why shouldn't the uploader get anything and why should he be the one who takes care of it, takes responsibility for the work? But at the same time if you do that, you're putting money to something which could be copyrighted.

Q(SL): So why shouldn't the music industry pay all these people who download and do their distribution for free?
P: And why should I be made to listen to that music? Its also - they're taking my time. The whole thing, when it comes to money in this industry is very difficult.

Q(SL): As you were saying, enumeration is really tricky. If you look at it - our basic assumptions about how this should be could be completely wrong. What I find so nice about Flattr is that it takes one slice of this thing - this grand scheme of enumeration, and tries to get it right. Not right in the philosophical sense, but right so that certain audiences can enter these types of reactions. And its results are much better than any other system.

P: Yeah, the problem is - the systems that exist today are mostly like collecting societies - that take money from radio and they arbitrarily give money to some companies. And the people who really create the interesting things, they get nothing. Because they are not even recorded. So Flattr solves that problem, which is easier to do on the internet of course.

Q: Do you find that companies that are successful and (?) ... tend to use Flattr because in some ways it almost feels like a justification of piracy? Let's say MGM makes a film and on its website it's got a Flattr button. In some ways it makes the issue a little bit quirky. If there's a sort of fee for each time the film is accessed - I'm just curious - is there a clean break (?) clients that are interested in Flattr, as in people who would be able to make money (?)
P: I think Flattr is not the method to make money. So everything combines. I'm not sure I got the question right.

P: But I think the corporations that make money somehow they are really not interested because its a really small amount of money in this. When it comes to pament they are not interested in this at all because its not big money at all. They make money on every transaction and we don't take any money on the small transactions. We take account when you take money out of the system. But we also try to share it in distribution channels. So if you have a site that has a lot of content for instance art, you could get money by having Flattr on there without actually being the one that created it. But that comes from our account not the producers account.

P: We understand service is only meant to be for free a lot of the time, but it doesn't actually mean, and it doesn't often mean to the people who are (?) (unlear)

NM I think we have to stop with questions.
P: Yeah, okay. Thankyou.
(applause)

NM: We seem to have a laugh-track at quite inappropriate times.
KG: Its better than crying.
(laughter)

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