Slashdot Mirror
Music Industry Wants a Cut of Pirate Bay Sale
suraj.sun writes "The music industry will attempt to seize money paid to acquire the Pirate Bay. A couple of weeks back the Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software company, announced that it would acquire the Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. Since then the company has been touting a new business model and even hiring executives, such as Wayne Rosso, the former Grokster president, to legally obtain content from film and music industries. What remains to be seen is how that sale might be affected by attempts by the music industry to collect the $3.6 million damages that a Swedish court awarded it in April. Alex Jacob, a spokesman for the IFPI, said that the group has always intended to collect the damages award, but now, should the sale go through, music execs know that the original Pirate Bay operators have access to the money." According to CNet, the four original Pirates claim they no longer own the company and that no money from the sale will go to them.
The music industry wants a cut of your liver as well.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
We need Obama on national television to verbally put these guys in their place. Set the record straight. No one in America thinks you're doing the Right Thing. Infact most everyone thinks you're doing the wrong thing.
I'm speaking generally about the RIAA's whole epic journey.
It's a good thing I pirated a copy of the Pirate Bay, otherwise my money would end up going to the music industry!
For all my "contributions" over the years, I deserve a cut.
They don't want just a cut of the Pirate Bay sale; they want a cut of your salary for the music they think you should have bought. And they think that amount should increase each year.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
(whether or not they legitimately earned it)
Informational film at 11.
I am officially gone from
I bet they are planning on introducing "paid subscriptions" to cover the money needed to please the owners of the media. Which would be pretty bad, since why the hell would I pay to torrent if I could pay for Usenet access and download anything I want at decent speeds?
Hall Monitor Baby Pool.
"If you liked free music, you're going to LOVE paying for it!"
Is this making sense to anyone? What is the Pirate Bay without the pirates?
1. Create torrent tracker that carries pirate torrents
2. Relentlessly self-promote
3. Find high profile buyer suckered into 'capturing the audience' while dodging the criminal case judgment
4. Profit!
"should the sale go through, music execs know that the original Pirate Bay operators have access to the money."
/. article:
But from http://www.thelocal.se/20364/20090630/ in the linked
"...the money would not reach their pockets.
Rather, he said, the money would be used to create a fund to develop other internet projects."
Also surely they cannot intervene to collect the awarded money when there is still an appeal pending.
Since I never downloaded any music from the internet *cough* I should be rewarded as well.
Please explain why anyone would pay money for a customer base that doesn't like to pay money for media?
Also $3.6m seems pretty cheap, here in the US I lost track of how many trillions of dollars the RIAA insists everyone owes them.
$3.6 million? If each song is worth like $150k, what is that, like 25 songs? Just send the RIAA a coupon for a free download of Thriller and The Wall.
I have never heard from any big name musical groups where their position is with the RIAA, I mean are the big artists in agreement with what the RIAA is attempting here. Maybe I am just ignorant, but can somebody clarify this?
Portia won not by appealing to mercy but because she understood the fine print better than Shylock: Shylock wanted his pound of flesh, but Portia pointed out that he was entitled to exactly a pound, and if he took any more or less he'd be guilty of murder.
Not quite - she actually argued that he could take the pound of flesh but that he must not spill any blood since he was not entitled to that and that his lands and fortune would be forfeit under Venetian law should he take more than he was entitled to.
I wonder which company is buying ? google lol - http://www.directpro.com/
Ignore for a moment your hatred for RIAA/MPAA (i know it's hard, but try).
RIAA sued Piratebay
RIAA won
RIAA want's their money before Piratebay tries to run off with it
Now again, ignore your hatred of the RIAA - or swap RIAA for say your grandmother. How is this such a bad thing that the RIAA wants the money they won in a lawsuit? Imagine your grandmother sued the local supermarket and won. Now the supermarket is trying to sell itself and figure out a way to not pay your grandmother. Why would you object to your mother trying to claim the money she won?
Hate them - love them - or be indifferent - but they won a lawsuit and they should get what they are owed...and in this case its about 3.2 million.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Who's calling whom a pirate?
WTF but why would you bother with bittorrent for mp3's. It makes more sense that the movie industry would want a cut, or even the software industry. I mean really what's the use of using torrents for 5 meg files.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
If i were tPB guys, i would have deleted everything, including the backups and burned all the remaining hardware and swag. You want it? Here it is. i'd sooner destroy it than give it away.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Doesn't mean they will get it. ^^
Film at 11.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Novell sued SCO for the money SCO got in licensing their own products
Novell won
Novell wants their money before SCO tries to "sell" their assets to a buyer that is nothing but a sham front company for SCO.
According to groklaw, this is exactly what is going on right now.
The thing about the law is that it is supposed to operate equally for everybody. And it actually does - when all the parties are rich. For whatever else you want to believe, the PirateBay is not poor.
Hate them or love them, the English nobles were entitled to First Night with Scottish women. Braveheart and his wife did not follow the law, and she paid the price after being found guilty. According to your logic, there is no moral argument once a government makes a ruling.
Hate them - love them - or be indifferent - but they won and they should get what they are owed...
The IFPI sued the Pirate Bay, not the MPAA.
The IFPI won an initial judgement. There are still a whole boatload of appeals to go before the Pirate Bay is required to give any money to the IFPI.
But the IFPI don't really want reparations; what they do want is for millions of people to give up pirating music. In order to do that, they have to give all those people the impression that they will be mercilessly crushed by the law if they dare infringe copyrights.
That's why the personal friend of the music industry (the judge) hit them with a huge initial fine, and the entire news media (owned by the same people who own the music industry) disseminated the fact of the huge fine as widely as the could muster.
At the end of the day, it's not really about the Pirate Bay. It's about YOU, the average consumer. The IFPI are driven by a need to control you. If they can't make you love them, they'll make you fear them.
Does my bum look big in this?
If the music industry feels it's entitled to a piece of the Pirate Bay pie, what of the other industries that are affected, where is their share? Movie studios, Television studios, Book publishers, Anime production companies, Comic book studios, Game developers, Software Application developers and Porn studios; all need to be included in on their cut of the proceeds.
Does anyone actually know how much music is pirated as compared to these other media? I'd have imagined that at the start of the P2P thing (when everyone had a 56K modem) that it would be mostly music due to smaller file sizes, but given the penetration of high speed broadband connections I should think that music only makes up a small portion of all media that's pirated nowadays.
And yet, why is it that it's the music industry always seems to be the first to swim along when they smell blood? What is it about their corporate culture that makes them so greedy and litigation-happy?
Seriously is anyone besides me sick and tired of the music industry begging and asking for money from everyone. I swear they would want a cut of a homeless guy's shopping cart full of cans if they found out he downloaded a song before he was homeless. It is getting rediculous everyday on Slashdot there is something new they want a cut from or want money from. Yet the RIAA won't show anyone their earnings books. Next we are going to hear Obama downloaded a song illegally from the White House and the Music Industry will want a cut of Fort Knox.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/05/1535222
and can find some way to sell the company without the liabilities...
AFAIK, The Pirate Bay has very few assets so collecting the amount of damages awarded might be difficult.
What is clear however that that has been sold is the 'Name'. This is usually counted in what is called 'goodwill' when you do du-diligence of a company during a merger/take-over. If the contract puts the monies from the sale into something like a Blind Trust then the MPAA/RIAA/Whoever will find it difficult to recover. Swedish law may not allow the operation of a blind trust though.
If not there is always and account in the Caymans...
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
RIAA helping GOP to retake majority.
You can click the link and inform yourself. Or was your real objective to smear the Dems?
Ok, taking out of the equation the emotional responses of 'those bastards', but legally why wouldn't they? In fact, is it not now the responsibility of the buying company to aquire all debts so aren't they now directly on the hook for it? Aren't debts and liabilities part of what you buy as if they were assets that come along with the company?
This is a really stupid purchase in the first place. Just how hard will it be to set-up The Pirate Bay II in competition?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So they sue Pirate Bay into oblivion for enabling illegal music downloading...
Pirate Bay gets bought out and decides to go Legit...
So they then sue the bejesus out of Legit Pirate Bay, effectively putting it out of business...
Repeat.
Seems like mixed messaging to me. I understand their rational for doing it (the owners of Pirate Bay actually making a profit from what the RIAA feel are ill gotten gains), but I don't think they are really looking at the big picture.
Not that I am surprised at all.
As much lobby money as they might have, people grow up and eventually vote, at which point they are fcsked.
Let's be reasonable here. Does the RIAA (or their national equivalents all over the globe) sue for money? Not really. They sue for the shock and awe effect. Copy this and you gotta pay 'til your grandchildren are out of the house, that's the message. They don't care about winning or losing a trial, they care about shock news that you're gonna pay through the nose and that there's no escape from that debt for the rest of your life.
Now imagine someone manages to weasel out of this and get away.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
..so called "justice" authority dweebs going to investigate the music and movie industry for widescale and ongoing racketeering, for collusion and price fixing and so on? What they want for a cheap bit of stamped plastic or a digital download is beyond ludicrous, and is really only explainable by the industry as a whole maintaining the illusion that somehow, especially as regards digital bits transferred on the internet, that there is a "scarcity" of copies that would result in such high prices, which everyone knows is blatantly false.
Letting them get away with this and legislating technological luddism into law will *really* bite humanity once we have tangible replicator tech down better. This precedent with enforced artificial scarcity and ludicrous "per unit" prices that seek to mimic charges back when it actually took a lot of resources to make additional copies is *nuts*.
Sure, there are production costs of X for this or that music or movie, but then they fail at making the copies that could be much cheaper "legally" available. A dollar for less than a penny's worth of bandwith for a tune, and not much more for a movie when they want 10 or 20 bucks for a few gigs of data bits transferred down the tubes is blatant price gouging, no way around that, and "regional" pricing and restrictions are even more unfair. It's not only an unfair and quite *stupid* business practice**, but they created a serious adversarial condition with their customers on purpose to pull this off. Economies of scale, selling millions and millions more copies for cheaper, would have basically nipped so called "piracy" in the bud years ago, and maintained profitability at the same time.
**Having been in both areas professionally before, all I can say is it is THE most chronically drunken and drug abusing industry out there I have ever been exposed to, generally speaking of course. I think that might help explain these stupid decisions they make all the time. It doesn't explain all of it, but a lot of it.
If my grandma acted like the RIAA I would condemn her too...
Are you saying that if your grandmother ran around like a mobster abusing the law to bludgeon people who don't have the money to defend themselves in this country's fsked up courts you would be ok with that because she's your grandma? If so you are either immorally loyal or a poster child for Might-Makes-Right when you are the one with might.
Either way I can't respect your argument.
What would happen if they just spent all the money before anybody could get their hands on it? Especially if they spent it all on a ball pit, for disabled children. What would the music industry do then?!
But why would they compete with the original URL when what they already do is very risky and free-of-charge? If I were them, I would take the money and run-run, run-run, run ...
I've got a torrent up to try and help mirror some large content (Blender Underground's "Blender Basics") - It's using the Pirate Bay as a tracker, as they seem to be reliable.
Is that likely to change?
Are there any alternatives? Does anyone know of a good, speedy tracker that has a low risk of shutdown (preferrably a moderated, or legal-only one)?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I was wondering what things would be like today for the music industry, artists, and music lovers if the RIAA had never waged this campaign against filesharing - and napster continued unabated...What do you think?
Would it be better than it is now? Would it be worse? Would it be the same? Why?
I guess I think that eventually artists would have gotten involved - and since they aren't multinational corporations, they might not have been as successful at getting the authorities on their side. Some probably would have acted like Lars Ulrich; but ultimately I think more of them would have resorted to interfacing directly with their fans, kind of like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails - but I am curious what other people think.
*note: I am all for filesharing...I have a massive vinyl and CD collection. I used to have a ton of cassettes too before I transfered the non-replaceable ones to CD and downloaded (without paying a second time I might add) everything I already owned on cassette in MP3 and FLAC versions. I still buy music from time to time, but most of what I donwload are live shows and stuff I already have paid for at least once. If I download something new and end up liking it, then usually I will buy it. So I hate the RIAA, I think they rip off musicians, they exist for one purpose: to protect and enrich the large media conglomerates. They don't give a fuck about artists - only about an artist's ability to produce money for the machine, and if they can get more of the money by extending ownership of master tapes or anything else which fucks the artist, they love doing so.
I wish people would return to thinking with their heads, instead of with their attorneys.
:/
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I'm more than happy to cut you in on the profits.
How does 60% of nothing sound to you?
I just wonder one thing. How many billions of dollars in public relations did RIAA lose with that ridiculous mp3 case and Pirate Bay case?
Calculate this way. How many billions of dollars must music industry spend in advertising, donations, public apologies to fix their image and the artists they claim to represent?
I somehow think it is impossible but I better ask anyway. It must be billions even if it is possible. Way more than couple of millions.
I respect to Ulrich way more than those assholes hiding somewhere and let house wives pay millions for their pirated tracks.
Right or not (IMHO he was trolled big time), at least he went there and openly said what he was thinking.
Man they are such stupid that nobody had the evil idea of amazing cheap PR move. "We, as a band, protest this ridiculous case and we will cover her monetarily whatever it costs.". That exact moment, you are a hero even while you are an evil bastard who just looks for cheap (yes,compare to others) PR.
It seems that the *AAs are trying to catch a butterfly in a coffee mug here. It's impossible, and everyone knows it, but they still prefer to flail around like this than give up and acknowledge that the market has changed.
Note: I was 13 when I wrote most of this. Take with several grains of salt.
Another Summer Shakespeare in the Park ruined. Thanks you jerks. ;)
[UID-HeinzIntel]
If you look at the larger picture, *some* people pay at the price gouging "official" level like you point out, a lot more pay at the pegleg "arrgh matey" level. Both. The real sweet spot that has yet to be achieved, as this is a dynamic market (restrictive laws versus obvious demand), is in between those two places, but is much closer to the pegleg "price point" than it is now.
The white market vendors have been frantic to try and maintain the old "per unit" pricing models they got long accustomed to when the only copies that could be traded on the market were all expensive to produce tangible copies. Digital reality and the internet has stomped that flat on a technical basis, and the market has yet to fully adjust other than then lobbying hard to make it so the public is forced "legally" to ignore this. That's why I termed it forced luddism, and why I see it as threat to the eventual ability to have real replicators and to reduce want, to reduce the effects of poverty and scarcity. That's the long view and why I think the current biz models are such a boneheaded move and actual threat, they establish a very bad legal precedent that ignores proven scientific reality.
When the only scarcity in this or that is artificially constructed and maintained, it has lapsed to a burden on society and will get ignored, if possible. Now with tangible cars, it is near impossible for people to make their own copies of cars cheaply, hence why they could get away with a price point like that. Digital bits throw that right out the window, brand new ballgame.
When the laws are skewed in such a way as the official white market prices annoy the people, they turn to the black market, which is also capitalism, it just is, it's part of the overall market, even if it means bending the rules by large segments of the consuming public.