The bot net issue was discussed recently:
That being said, I’m not 100% convinced that this concept of popularity rewards will work exactly like we want to. I’m inclined to believe that due to the integrated nature of SafeCoin a tipping culture will emerge. Most people that have a reasonable income are willing to pay for things they enjoy.
Take for example recent game ‘The Witcher 3’. The game company explicitly chose not to put DRM on it, because it is annoying for their legitimate customers. So everyone could download it for free using torrents or whatever. Yet they sold 6 million copies of the game in the first 6 days. I don’t know what the price was at release, but right now it’s about 60 Euros, so it’s not like it’s a cheap product.
The solution for piracy isn’t DRM or subsidies, it’s having a population with disposable income, combined with a culture where people appreciate each other’s labor, and having legal distribution platforms with better services than the illegal ones.
Especially culture is often overlooked or dismissed. Probably because of post-modernist culture relativism, and/or a lack of faith in humanity. But culture is everything.