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Pirate Bay P2P Trial Begins In Sweden
Many readers are writing to tell us that The Pirate Bay trial is now in full swing in Sweden. Looking at a possible two years in prison and $150,000 in fines (plus another $14.3 million if the record companies get their way), the battle of infringement is sure to be one of the most watched p2p trials. "The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) which is representing the case of music and film producers, made a statement about the case on Friday. Stating, For people who make a living out of creativity or in a creative business, there is scarcely anything more important than to have your rights protected by the law. Copyright exists to ensure that everyone in the creative world from the artist to the record label, from the independent film producer to the TV program maker - can choose how their creations are distributed and get fairly rewarded for their work. The operators of The Pirate Bay have violated those rights and, as the evidence in Court will show, they did so to make substantial revenues for themselves. That kind of abuse of the rights of others cannot be allowed to continue, and that is why these criminal proceedings are so important for the health of the creative community."
Songs cost $1 to download when they should cost 11 cents with ten cents going to the artist and one cent going to the host/distributor.
Well, if we're dealing with iTunes (the biggest and most popular distributor of music that I know of), don't forget that Apple takes it's 30%, not ~8% you infer would be fair. That leaves 70% for the artist and the label (if appropriate) to deal with (and you can really do without the latter in many cases).
Also, I don't think that most artists could live off of 10 cents a song for downloads (or the $1-1.5 an album) unless they have a very good PR plan/comity to not get lost in the giant sea that is the iTunes store.
Mostly, I think our disagreements stem from the numbers, which are easily adjustable. At least we agree that the methods could change (and roughly what directions to go from what we currently have).
The Pirate Bay is also a source to bypass the industry, which sometimes works against itself.
As an example, I have bought "Colossus: The Forbin Project" on VHS tape years ago. It's in widescreen.
Now, Universal, the owners of that title, butchered the North American DVD release by making it a 4:3 pan and scan title. They have no respect for their own property. There was some backlash on a lot of forums, and the UK release was made widescreen (not sure it's because of the backlash, but who knows). I've heard that they even butchered the interlacing on the UK DVD, to make things even worst.
So here's the problems:
1. If we go by the MPAA's terms of "buying a viewing license" for movies, I already paid my license for this movie when I bought the VHS tape.
2. Even if I was willing to pay the license AGAIN for the DVD, they botched the North American release DVD (4:3 instead of widescreen)
3. Even if I was willing to import the UK DVD, it wouldn't play in my DVD player
4. The only possible way to get a good digital copy of that movie would be to import the UK version and fix the interlacing problem while ripping it. But in some countries, ripping the DVD is also illegal, even though you bought the damn thing.
So, legally, the only good commercial version available for that movie still seems to be the LaserDisc. And we're In 2009. If that's not a good example of the industry being a slow dinosaur that can't even take care of its own products, I don't know what is.
I had a calculator once. It was a nice little Sharp model. It had a button for pi, and could even do numerical integration. I was pretty happy with it. One day, it was stolen. This theft left me calculatorless for some time. It was somewhat of a blow.
However, if instead, someone had looked at my calculator, taken out a 3D tricorder-mapper-duplicator-thingamabob and had made an exact copy of my calculator, complete with all functionality, and left me with mine, I don't think I would have been quite as upset. In fact, I think you will agree that if I ran around waving my calculator in the air claiming that it had been robbed from me and that I was a victim of "theft", I would not get a lot of sympathy. Indeed, some might even say my terminology was not entirely correct. If all this happenned, I would still have my calculator, which after following the actual theft I most certainly do not.
Copyright Infringement is not theft. Nor is it stealing. It is Copyright Infringement. Thank you for your attention, and for your sympathy in the case of my missing digital companion.
May the Maths Be with you!
I download various Linux distros from TPB all the time, it's faster than hitting the source sites. If the site exists exclusively for pirating, how is this pirating?
The media hypes up the financial aspects of this greatly. Something tells me the money made off ad revenue barely covers the costs of servers, legal defenses and other aspects of their operations. I guess we will find out for real as the trial proceeds.
I am not endorsing theft, but this is not theft, this is copyright infringement. That is not a technical difference, that is a different class of legal dispute altogether. In most cases, I don't think it is even a criminal offense, but a civil one. Do we really want the police acting as the copyright enforcers for giant corporations?
M