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Pirate Bay Cofounder Utterly Bankrupts the Music Industry (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by timothy on from the conceptual-art-vs-conceptual-nonsense dept.

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.

8 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Accounting 101 by sunderland56 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    These are not losses. They are unrealized potential profit. Nobody is actually losing anything.

    (Well, other than /dev/null, which is going to go insane very soon after being forced to listen to Gnars Barkley).

    1. Re:Accounting 101 by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Peter Sunde risks falling within non-infringing use here, with a satirical art installation. That would defeat his purpose, I would think.

      It would have been a much more convincing argument if he, as he made the copies transferred them to Gottfried and Fredrik, who then played them at super-speed before deleting them.

      Or uploaded the song to pastebin or somewhere, one bit at a time. When, exactly, would the copyright infringement kick in?

    2. Re:Accounting 101 by vux984 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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,

      Ah; but how often does the RIAA actually attempt to establish lost sales, aka ACTUAL DAMAGES?

      From what I've seen they tend to collect on Statutory damages.

      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.

      True. But it IS enough to trigger statutory damages; which do not require any actual damages to be established, nor indeed to even hypothetically exist.

      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.

      I think this exercise, if nothing else highlights the absurdity of 'statutory damages'. Not to mention that any media coverage it gets brings attention to the larger real issues with current copyright law.

      And I think if the RIAA were required to demonstrate the actual harm an individual sharer tends to cause the whole thing would fall apart. e.g. if my upload ratio is 20 on an a song, i've effectively supplied 20 copies of that song. That puts the actual maximum harm at $20 for that song if we assume everybody that downloaded it would have paid retail for it if it wasn't available.

      And even that's ridiculous on its face. 8 of them wouldn't have bothered to get the song at all. 5 more didn't care about the quality and would have ripped it from youtube or spotify or the end credits of the movie it was used in, or the radio, or made a copy of a friends CD, or something. 3 of them are children who don't have the dollar, 3 more are from countries where the song isn't readily available or a 1$ is their daily food budget.. leaving one guy who wanted a high quality track, and would have paid for it if he hadn't been able to just download it. Actual damages to music industry: $1

  2. Copying is not theft by JBMcB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Relevant to the discussion :)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
  3. Re:Well by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Speaking of...

    If I XOR an MP3 file with a one time pad, and upload the file to somewhere, but keep the pad secret, have I created an illegal copy?

    What if I upload the pad the day after the copyrights for the song expire?

    What if I the pad was never stored anywhere, but discarded byte for byte as it encrypted the file?

    What if the file was resampled to 1 bps first?

    The problem is that the music industry and politicians wants black/white laws that work in their favor, while common sense says that unless the copyrighted work is of value to the recipient, there can't be an infringement.

  4. Re: Now explain that to the judge by mishehu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In America we'd [the police] would just invoke Civil Forfeiture and sue /dev/null for piracy (no, 'copyright infringement' is nowhere near politically charged enough). Then let /dev/null prove his innocence...

  5. Re: Now explain that to the judge by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually it seems lately that the economy depends on people buying more and more stuff and then renting self-storage lockers to store it in because they don't have enough room at home. I can't believe how many of the self-storage places are being built in my city.

    Mind you if people started buying their stuff in wood or bamboo it could be a great way to sequester carbon. Make whatever stuff people are going to buy and then have them store it in the lockers for ages.

  6. Re:I'll buy him another by matbury · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He should open source his hacky Python code so that everyone who wants can join in and speed up the process. I've got a Raspberry Pi sitting here just waiting to bring down the entire music industry. I'd like to start with Celine Dion's, Brian Adams', and Justin Bieber's record companies and move on from there.