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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.
...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.
That would be the point, no?
That many of the copies downloaded would be unrealised sales in any case
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."
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.
He tried, but even /dev/null didn't want to accept this as input.
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!
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.
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.
Or by the New Order's Planet Sun Cannon.
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?
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
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...