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.
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.
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.
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?
"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?
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.
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
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?
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.
..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.
It's not about the cans, it about the fear.
Exactly. And, the fear is necessary because we instinctively know that we are being made to pay perpetually for things that are free, in the name of infinite greed. "Supporting the musicians" argument is simply not true. We are dealing with a rabid monster with insatiable hunger that has taken the position of a middle man between artists and the public and leeches on both.
For an example of the kind of monster, see Spirited Away.
Allowing such entities to dictate our laws, lives, relationship with art and artists is devastating to our culture and well-being.
Trying to appease them is futile and dangerous.