'If you like it, leave a tip', WIRED magazine

Sunday, September 12, 2010

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Start Profile: Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.
The cofounder of the Pirate Bay wants to monetise appreciation
By James Silver.

In April 2009, the Finnish-Norwegian Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi was found guilty in a Stockholm courtroom - with three others - of “assisting in making copyright content available”.

Sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay 31 million Swedish Kroner in damages to entertainment companies, he refused point-blank to co-operate with the authorities. “Even if I had the money I’d rather burn everything I own, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes,” the 31-year-old said at the time.

His latest venture is altogether more generous. Flattr.com is a "social" micro-payments system which allows fans of particular pieces of content - blog-post or video, song or piece of software - to make micro-donations to their creators, by clicking on a Flattr button on participating sites.

Donors pay a minimum of €2 per month into their accounts, and then distribute pennies whenever they like. Flattr takes ten per cent.

“Instead of forcing content behind a pay-wall," he says, "we wanted to find an internet solution based on the net’s principles of free access to all, to help finance content creators.”

Flattr should appeal to “capitalists as well as socialist people like me, who want to work together against the big corporations. We’ve learned from the net that there are lots of ways to reach people, which means you have to have different payments methods as well.

I’m not saying Flattr will be the grand solution for everything, but I do think it will be one of the solutions.”

(Wired magazine 9th December 2010)
(Read the original article HERE)

Posted by James Silver - On Sunday, September 12, 2010

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