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.

Comments

Not good enough!

[kheldan]

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.

Re:Accounting 101

[Rei]

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.