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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.
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