Week 4 of 2012 was perhaps the most talked about of 2012. Stichting Brein forced through a lawsuit that the torrent site 'The Pirate Bay' can no longer be visited by Ziggo and XS4ALL subscribers. Kodak, the Apple of the previous century, filed for bankruptcy. SOPA and PIPA, two legislative proposals to combat digital piracy, were put on hold indefinitely by the American Congress.
MegaUpload, the world's largest file-sharing portal, where movies, music, books, and software are illegally distributed, was taken offline by the FBI with a great show of force. With a DDOS B(l)itz-Krieg, hacktivist group Anonymous took down the websites of the White House, the FBI, the US Department of Justice, several record label sites, the MPAA, RIAA, and the US Copyright Office.
What connects these events? That traditional systems, relics of the industrial age, are increasingly under pressure as a brother cell phone list result of the headlong advancing Digitalization of the World. Atoms versus bits in 1 big B(l)itz-Krieg. Existing institutions are desperately trying to maintain the problem, for which they have the solution in-house, but they completely ignore the fact that these problems no longer exist in the digital world. Scarcity in particular is increasingly being dismissed as an economic raison d'être. The bankruptcy of Kodak, the company that was at the cradle of the digital camera, makes this even clearer. Kodak traded in memories, in the tenderly cherished Kodak moments, but online and in the cloud that raison d'être is no longer valid. In the past, people would run into their house in the event of a fire to save a shoebox full of photos from the flames. Nowadays, you can browse through all your own inflammable digital photos, plus those of others, from any corner of the world!