Flattr is great and they actually do have something along the lines of tracking down people who aren't part of the system. You can flattr Twitter accounts and they will create a 'pending click' for that account which will only be processed if the person tries to collect the money.
The main problem I can see with your system is the difficulty in finding the appropriate person or organization to pay for every single file that the union downloads.
> Agreed, sadly, none in the filesharing camp has offered anything even remotely resembling morality. You tend to see something along the lines of "I'm not talking about morality, I'm just giving you reality etc" (followed by "want some of my cash? dance, bitch!").
How about this? Without copyright we could make the collective cultural works of mankind instantly accessible to every internet-connected person in the world, all the time, for free. Every book, every film, every recording. Would this be a good thing or do you think we should shutdown libraries as well?
If you think I'm being hyperbolic read-up on Google Books and Google Library. It's depressing the damage these laws have already done.
Well I agree with you. It's a tragedy that the overwhelming majority of good video ever recorded can't be found on video streaming sites because of copyright and can't be found through torrents because torrents are only really good at keeping popular content alive.
What we need to do is popularise something like I2P or GNUnet and make it accessible to regular users. Then it can form the platform for the next generation of culture-sharing websites.
Mickey Mouse and John Coltrane are widely and continuously available because people enjoy them. If their copyrights expired tomorrow there would still be plenty of Coltrane MP3s and torrents out there a year from now. However try playing Coltrane in your restaurant without paying a license or try uploading Steamboat Willy to youtube to show the world this strange old cartoon you found. Then you'll discover that people are prevented from enjoying these works because companies are using copyright to remove them.
You mentioned "reasonable safeguards" but I don't see how any legal safeguards can be both reasonable and effective - If they're able to stop me from sending someone a copyrighted file then they're necessarily able to monitor and control every channel of digital communication that's available to me. I don't think we'll actually end up with crazy DRM and a dystopia It's just that that's the logical conclusion of the industry and government's current approach. Until we take a stand against this things will get worse before they get better.
When the law is aligned with the market people will choose to pay for things. The only safeguard content producers will have is people's sense of reciprocity. This transition will take time but its a transition that can and should be supported by people in the tech startup space.
Whatever this alternative business model looks like it needs to be legally possible for me to watch any movie, listen to any song or read any book I like for free. Alternatively, people will find illegal ways to do this. They'll share files over this internet or bring their harddrives round to each others houses. Inevitably, the only way to effectively stop people doing this will be to ban private communication and have DRM required on all our hardware. Otherwise piracy will still be possible.
I'm all for rewarding artists to encourage them to create more work, but I'd rather it be impossible to finance big-budget cinema then have the kind of dystopia that would be required to enforce copyright law.
Suffering is bad. The fact that it occurs in nature is irrelevant.