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Pirate Bay Cofounder Utterly Bankrupts the Music Industry (torrentfreak.com)
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," storing them in /dev/null (which is of course, deleting them even as they're created). The machine, called a "Kopimashin," is cobbled together out of a Raspberry Pi, some hacky python that he doesn't want to show anyone, and an LCD screen that calculates a running tally of the damages he's inflicted upon the record industry through its use. The 8,000,000 copies it makes every day costs the record industry $10m/day in losses. At that rate, they'll be bankrupt in a few weeks at most.
That would be the point, no?
That many of the copies downloaded would be unrealised sales in any case
This implies an 80-cents loss per copy, which probably makes the incorrect assumption that almost every copy prevents a legitimate sell (of roughly $1 per song).
Often people will take something given for free even though they would otherwise NOT purchase it if the free option didn't exist. And often they are just test-listening to a song to see if they like it.
If I'm walking down the hall at work and somebody offers me a free donut, there's a pretty good chance I'd take it even if it's not my favorite kind. But put that very same donut for sale at a typical donut price, then I'd be much less likely to purchase it because likely it's not the flavor I want and/or I don't really feel like a donut at that time, at least not enough to part with cash for it.
I suspect the real lost-sales ratio for songs is more like 10-to-1.
Industry lobbyists often make the 1-for-1 false assumption in loss claims. I don't know whether its ignorance or spin, but suspect the second.
Table-ized A.I.
It is actually very American to use /dev/null. Our economy depends on the destruction of goods.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For maximum sarcasm, he needs to send each copy over the Internet, to another RPi -- which will store it in /dev/null. That ought to really frost them.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Editors, in case you never studied journalism, headlines are supposed to give a concise summary of the content and grab the reader's attention. They aren't supposed to blatantly mislead about the content of the story.
We already had that dingbat headline about the guy hacking the celebrities like he was on a murder spree and there was another one a couple days ago.
"Nobody is actually losing anything." Wait a minute... You don't think...
I hope at least *some* people see what brokep did there.
I think the point is a bit weak. If he were to try to make this argument in a courtroom to argue that the RIAA's standard for lost sales is unreasonable, the RIAA attorneys would simply say that he's not "making available" copies, that he's akin to a factory churning out knockoff purses and throwing them in a furnace - nobody would say, the attorneys would argue, that those knockoff purses that are immediately destroyed are lost sales. However - back to their standard argument - a person who downloads a song they want is a potential buyer who will no longer buy the song.
The RIAA argument is still of course wrong, but this stunt has no bearing on the wrongness of their argument because it doesn't affect anything that they're actually arguing about - other humans who want a song acquiring it without paying for it.
That was either the start of something bad or the end of something stupid.