Dan Zizzo has found in experimental environments, folks are willing to spend their own money to burn the money-holdings of folks who have more money than they do, especially when they reckon that the folks with more money don't deserve it. I tend to think this sort of behaviour a nasty holdover from the Pleistocene - check Paul Rubin's work on Darwinian Politics for the evolutionary advantages of inequality aversion on the Savanna.
The Pirate Bay is exploiting this rather repugnant aspect of human nature in an interesting "distributed denial of dollars" attack. The Pirate Bay was sentenced to pay a fine for facilitating music piracy; they're now asking supporters to send small amounts to the law firm that represented the other side so that the bank fees will swamp the trivial amounts sent.
Surely this can't work though: can't the law firm direct its bank to reject small transfers? Or choose a different type of banking package with a different fee structure?
File this one under too good to be true methinks.
HT: BoingBoing
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