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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.
If it will speed up the process and kill them faster.
You know a song is really bad is when it goes straight to /dev/null without being heard.
a Miley Cyrus track instead. At least make a secondary point as you're doing that.
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).
...but with the Koran. Let's seem 'em come and jihad me!
As an audiophile, I am able to hear music even from /dev/null. So good luck with arguing in court that the copies are useless.
Sorry, I sent Beatles.Revolution.mp3 to /dev/null
Clearly it's the same mechanism by which the sun's energy is being sucked up by those solar panels in Woodland, NC.
Now that you mention it, I am noticing a tiny itty-bitty quality loss caused by storing the FLAC bits in /dev/null. Are you able to notice this quality loss?
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.
"Can we subpoena Mr Dev Null?
We should charge and arrest Dev Null. What? It's not a person? Is this terrorism related? We should outlaw it. Usage of dev null aids the enemy. It's unamerican to use dev null."
Relevant to the discussion :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Ironically, many believe MS turned a blind eye to pirating early on to gain market share, and eventually market lock-in. They only cracked down once they had a strangle-hold on the market. I do remember it was easy to copy some early MS software, even as other vendors put in more protections.
It's yet another reason that pirating loss claims are often exaggerated or misleading.
I'd be tempted to play if it were Sock Bill Gates.
Table-ized A.I.
Sure. You can send anything you want to him. I wouldn't count on a reply, however.
The refutation of a proposition by demonstrating the inevitably absurd conclusion to which it would logically lead.
Simple.
1. He has the original track on some kind of non-volatile storage (probably a microUSB card). /dev/null (which is a no-op kernel-side, but there may be another memory copy involved), then frees the buffer, reads it from non-volatile storage again...
2. He has a tight loop where he reads that file out of non-volatile storage into RAM, then writes it to
Because the implementation of /dev/null's "write" method is to return the number of bytes passed in as an argument, all you're really doing is copying it around to different regions of system memory. So, technically, you could just have a tight loop where you have a copy of the song in one buffer, then memcpy() it to the second buffer, free the second buffer, and repeat.
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.
Send them to /dev/null.
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!
It's not brilliant. It's stupid as shit and will accomplish nothing.
Except that now many people are talking about this, and about the absurdity of the music industry calling copied songs actual monetary losses.
Seems like it's accomplishing a lot, actually.
The Kopimashin is illegal in England:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-quashes-regulations-copy-cds-musicians
It might be illegal in other jurisdictions as well? And that's kind of the point of building it.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
We would probably all be amazed (or maybe not...) by the number of people who effectively are doing this by never testing the "restore" part of the "backup" procedure.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
Brilliant! You have at your disposal an entire computer.... A machine DESIGNED for performing repetitive and tedious tasks, and you're asking *ME* to do math in my head? You're fired!
Or by the New Order's Planet Sun Cannon.
As others have noted, the music industry isn't losing money over this effort. What will actually happen is this:
- The music industry will start lobbying to make the Raspberry Pi, LCD screens, Python, and /dev/null illegal since they are infringing devices. /dev/null. A smaller segment of the economy will be stuck in paper age until programs incorporating Python itself or that are programmed in Python are replaced.
- Governments will pass legislation that reflects the interests of the music industry.
- Huge swaths of economy will be stuck in the paper age until Unix systems can be patched to operate properly without
- School children and electronics hobbyists will fill prisons and, upon release, find themselves unemployable because of their criminal records. The result is that there will be a lack of skilled labor to help the economy to recover in the years to come.
- Microsoft and Apple will declare bankruptcy, as manufacturers find that they cannot produce enough CRTs in a timely manner and GUI-centric operating systems will be unable to adapt to consoles based upon LEDs and toggle switches fast enough.
- On a positive note, the MPAA will collapse due to it's current dependence upon LCD technology to deliver its content to consumers.
- On a negative note, the lack of competition will means the RIAA will take over.
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...
but hey, that's their measurements... bye, guys. sorta sucks having known ya. watching for my favorite artists to sell on their own websites...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
My guess is rather that people have to move into smaller places and need some place to stuff their surplus crap because in this economy you can't find anyone to buy it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The point is, by the logic presented by the music industry and the logic used against Pirate Bay this WILL hurt them. He is proving that it will not, so therefore it begs the question why they were allowed to use this logic in the first place.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Consumption IS destruction from a purely economic point of view. It has the same net effect: Something is gone and needs to be replaced. The main difference being that consumption is something the buyer places positive aspects on while replacing something broken has a negative associated aspect.
Consumption also has a positive, non-monetary aspect to the one doing it. Consumption is necessary or enjoyable. Or even both. Replacing something broken is neither. So even though on the pure economic side they represent the same (buyer buys something with the intent to remove it from the economic circuit), the non-monetary aspects are vastly different.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.