> [Piracy] has always existed and I believe it will always exist. ... Content providers and copyright holders should just acknowledge this and try to find a way to revolutionize the idea of content distribution and its business model.
This seems to me to be a good way to remind people (or introduce them to the idea) that all information on the Internet, whether political speech, a copy of The Origin of Species, mindless Twitter blather, or copyrighted files, is in the end the same stuff, just a bunch of ones and zeroes.
Once you've acknowledged that fact, it's a short step to realizing that you cannot disrupt piracy through technical means without also disrupting communication essential to a free society. I think that's what the author's getting at.
Using Twitter was just a provocative way of analyzing the issue, given that the experiment was deeply interesting also under the light of DMCA, as another user suggested. I was thinking what would happen if people started "infesting" legit websites such as Twitter or other blogging platforms with copyright protected content under the form of Mime64 messages or using any other encoding method which translates a file in text. While posting a link to a copyright protected file would justify a DMCA takedown notice, the problem would be bigger if the file would be hosted (under the form of Mime64 tweets) by the blogging platform itself.
Let's make it even more complex. What if tweets or blog posts would be posted randomly (not just by one user) and links to all these tweets or posts would be collected in a small document, something similar to a .nzb file? Could Twitter or any other blogging platform refuse a DMCA takedown notice for messages which are harmless by themselves and which are a violation of a copyrighted work only if collected together following the list of files contained in the .nzb-look-a-like file (which may be hosted somewhere else)? This would be a general counsel's nightmare.
In conclusion, the fight against piracy is the classic mouse-cat fight...piracy will never die and the only way to bypass this is to come up with a new business model for content providers and copyright holders.
I know that Paul Graham recently launched the idea of "killing Hollywood" by creating a new business model for content distribution. I think this idea should even be broader and should be about "how to kill piracy" by removing the fundamentals of pirates (which is, I think, sharing, avoid paying premium prices, etc.) by creating a new business model or method for content delivery and fee collection for content utilization.
Thanks everyone for the great comments that you posted so far.
Sure they could, the tweets would still have the work's colour[1].
But more to the point, there's a guy who stored JS code in PNG images[1], and any binary string could be used instead.
[1]: http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/05/compression-using-canvas-an...
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see what you could do with it that you can't already do better with other services.