
Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay? - Flemlord
http://thepiratebay.org/?
======
jim-greer
Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and
gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with
copyrighted music in the background.

~~~
sangaya
The part about the kitten isn't directly relevant to the pirate bay, I'll give
you that. Though I look at the cartoon as more of an over all social
commentary about our current state of affairs; not "this is our situation."

All too often the copyright lawyers said DMCA takedowns against just such
videos. Heck they've sent takedowns to youtube because a person was singing
copy written music ( _cough_ viacom _cough_ ).

As someone already said and I'm sure many others will agree, the current
system is broken.

The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of
sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be
capitalized on. It's a dirt cheap distribution method that should be used to
it's fullest potential.

The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would
have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded. Why? Cause the other 99% is
crap. And I don't know that until I've heard it. I don't hear it until I
download it. The radios are owned and controlled so that the one good song on
the whole album is played, and the rest isn't.

If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article
sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down,
number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down,
number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy
trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of
the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly
falling.....

~~~
jacoblyles
>"The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of
sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be
capitalized on."

With services available like the Pirate Bay, an artist might have millions of
fans enjoying his music but there will be no way for him to capitalize on it.
The only way I can see to monetize bit torrent for artists are very indirect
and way out of proportion to the enjoyment they create, akin to putting google
ads on a popular website. Examples include using recorded music as an
advertisement for big, expensive concerts and begging people to donate after
they already have your music for free.

>"The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would
have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded."

How much of that did you _actually_ buy? For many people it is 0%.

Money has flowed out of music lately. The industry as a whole is shrinking.
Downloaders sometimes say it is because "music isn't as good as it used to
be". The music industry blames it on easy free downloads. I am more inclined
to believe the latter. There is still lots of great music out there.

That said, I don't think there is any way to stop what is happening, and it is
incumbent on artists that want to survive to deal with it as best they can.
Unfortunately, that might mean going back to that day job at Starbucks for
most of them.

~~~
doki_pen
Musicians have always made a majority of their money from playing live
shows(with some large exceptions, obviously). Do you need this backed up with
facts? It's pretty well known. Albums are a great way to advertise your live
music. It used to cost a ton of money to make a crappy recording. Now it's
practically free to create a good recording.

I don't see the point of the recording industry, frankly. I'm not willing to
give up my right to share with people in order to ensure that the record
companies exist. Sorry. Listen to the crap that is put out by record
companies. They control the radio stations. You here the same thing all day,
from DJs who don't even know what they are playing. Most of the quality stuff
is made without their help, they merely act as a distribution channel.

I see music as being much more home grown in the future. Maybe DJs will once
again play what they like instead of what corporations force down our throats.
One thing is for sure, if people love music they will continue to make it. We
will be left with a lot less crap once the record companies are gone.

~~~
tjr
And, in this home-grown music future, would people pay for recordings of good
music? Or is recorded music just worthless?

I produced a recording last year that cost about $20,000, to get best-of-class
session players for the sound I was after. While I'd rather people hear the
music than not, even if they don't pay for it, I would sure appreciate folks
buying a copy.

~~~
captainobvious
Since under his utopia those session players will be basically out of work,
they would be a lot cheaper and you could still make your album.

------
zaius
Lawrence Lessig did a speech a while ago about the read-write web:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU>

In that, he talks about how, when the phonograph came out, people were up-in-
arms that it would destroy the performance and enjoyment of music as a social
thing, which clearly happened. The music world is changing back to that again,
and I'm kind of glad.

Also, he does a bitching powerpoint.

~~~
timcederman
I love this as an illustration of how nothing changes.
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevernameless/320619642/>

~~~
jimbokun
I like the phrase "authorized jobber." Much more catchy than "middleman."

------
nazgulnarsil
The problem with digital distribution is that it fucks with our already
imperfect understanding of how an economy functions. Our explanations of how
price works generally relies upon supply and demand as well as the cost of
production. How do you analyze these variables when supply is infinite and the
cost of production is zero?

This scares a lot of people. The more your business model relies on the status
quo the more it scares you.

~~~
lvecsey
I think it's wrong to assume that the economy, with the cash transaction at
the heart of it, is somehow an immortal or god given / evolutionary design.
Imagine if it was replaced with a smart-card where your transaction had a
programmable, algorithmic component to it. Now all of a sudden the system can
become a lot more creative, and even carry a 'vote' like characteristic that
will survive multiple successive transfers.

------
apag
For posterity (hopefully this link will last longer than the front page),
here’s what was on it:

<http://static.thepiratebay.org/doodles/cartoonish.gif>

------
sharkbrainguy
Just to make it __blatantly __obvious that this comic was not specifically
made about this situation.

[http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/getting-ready-
for-...](http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/getting-ready-for-the-
blackout.html)

P.S. not strictly relevant but Dylan Horrocks is a really great guy and you
should all read Hicksville

------
mjgoins
If you're not happy about how "one sided" this is, I'd suggest
<http://questioncopyright.org> if you want a more reasoned argument.

The gist of it is that if we all abandoned copyright, we'd lose a few things,
but the gains would outweigh the losses.

I agree, but I also don't like big-budget movies, and don't lay any closed-
source games, so I guess I'm in the tiny minority.

------
ashleyw
The right to violate copyright is part of our human rights?

Now I'm an occasional pirate (mainly TV, since I'm not in the US), but these
guys are bonkers; I know pirating is wrong, however these guys seem to think
that nobody should have the rights to their own work, and anyone should be
allowed to take what they want without giving anything back to the owner. Is
it just me, or is that absurd?

~~~
alexfarran
I think the point is that there are other rights besides copyright, the right
to privacy for example, and that where they come into conflict copyright
should not automatically supersede all other rights.

------
sketerpot
Those guys have style, and always have.

~~~
chacha102
I loved reading their Legal page that showcases how dumb companies are. When
will companies get a clue that if they make it inconvenient for customers,
people are going to torrent it. (One of the reasons iTunes is widely used, its
easy to pay a buck for a song instead of torrenting it)

------
calvin
Small print on the image says, "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By..."

I love it.

~~~
devinnived
It says "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By Dylan Horrocks '09".

Dylan is a cartoonist from New Zealand. Here is a high resolution version of
the comic ( <http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/not-copyright.html> ) ,
and a post about the NZ Copyright Amendment Act that inspired it (
[http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/why-i-
oppose-s92-o...](http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/why-i-
oppose-s92-of-the-copyright-amendment-act.html) ).

------
rms
Good article by a defense attorney on Torrentfreak:
[http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-
understanding-f...](http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-
understanding-finreactor-090223/)

------
jotto
To be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software.
It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and
indexing ability of the Internet.

~~~
kajecounterhack
I agree, which is also why I think this spectrial was a mishap to begin with.
They should have not attacked torrenting in general, they needed to attack the
fact that Pirate Bay did nothing to remove torrents even by request. They also
needed to show that Pirate Bay tracks almost exclusively pirated
software/movies/music.

They went after the wrong thing, because torrenting isn't inherently bad. It's
only bad if people use it in the wrong way. Which, granted, happens a lot.

~~~
mrtron
Clearly a technology is not to blame, or Google would be at fault for linking
to them as well. But using torrents the 'wrong' way?

File sharing is legal in Sweden, which is why they have been able to operate
for this long in a very transparent way (in terms of who runs the massive
site).

Downloading music/movies is legal for personal use for me in Canada.
Annoyingly, we pay a tax, but that is a whole other can of worms.

Why would the Pirate Bay remove torrents by request? They are doing nothing
wrong. The MPAA/RIAA's course of action should have been to try and track down
and sue individual downloaders in the US. The reason they aren't keen on that
anymore is the bad publicity of suing regular folks and especially children.

I also really dislike the term 'wrong' here because it is not clear that it is
wrong to copy a file. Downloads can lead to higher sales through exposure, and
to me the rampant litigation to fight change (as demonstrated by the cartoon)
is wrong.

~~~
jotto
There is no interpretation necessary, it is illegal/wrong to pirate MPAA and
RIAA works. It doesn't matter if you think what they do is wrong - they have
the law on their side.

~~~
vetinari
Illegal? Yes. Wrong? Not so sure. You should be able to download Queen songs
or Steamboat Willie cartoon from the Internet.

I see it as a form of civil disobedience against bought law. No matter how
many trials the industry goes through, it will be not respected, because it is
not balanced.

------
johnbender
I think its time to create a gui in visual basic and put the ever-loving-
smackdown on the RIAA

~~~
Jem
This isn't reddit. The CSI gui gag is not likely to get you massive upvotes
here.

~~~
dgordon
But saying "This isn't reddit" will get you a few.

~~~
Jem
Wasn't my intention - just trying to save the newbie some massive downvoting
in the future :)

