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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!
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?
"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.
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.
Replace step 1 with "???" and you have the internet business model that has prevailed since the mid-nineties!
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.
uh, metallica?
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
"Please understand, you're not stealing from a corporation. There is only the five of us. We make a living doing this, and only this. When you steal my music, YOU ARE STEALING FOOD FROM MY DAUGHTER'S PLATE."
-David "Lars Ulrich" Phipps, Metallica drummer (emphasis was his)
Of course, this was apparently when Napster was downloading food as well as songs. That technology did not, successfully, carry over into torrents.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
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?
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's not about the cans, it about the fear.
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.
They're all over the board. Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich spouted off about evil pirates (and their popularity and incomes suddenly started shrinking).
The Offspring wanted to post the entire Original Prankster album on their web site, but their label wouldn't let them. After the group threatened to go indie when their contract expired, the label allowed them to post one song from the album.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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...
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.
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.
Another Summer Shakespeare in the Park ruined. Thanks you jerks. ;)
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