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Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has taken steps to refute the notion of many in the music publishing industry that each digital copy has a certain value--upon which should be based damages if someone is found to have committed copyright infringement.
Sunde has built a machine from a Raspberry PI, called Kopismashin, designed to make copies of single tracks at the rate of 100 copies per second [and drops them to /dev/null].
"I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy.... [F]ollowing their rhetoric and mindset it will bankrupt them," says Sunde.
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What's a Digital Copy Worth? Not Much, Says Peter Sunde's New Machine
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday December 26 2015, @06:14PM
Part of their problem is that they got addicted to the money. They jumped right on the technology that made their job easier and cheaper but they didn't pass ANY of the savings on. In some cases, the "legit" downloads cost MORE than buying on CD.
Meanwhile, they're de-skilling fast. They probably don't have many (if any) people left who know how to properly cut a master for a record. Where they used to have people doing the final mix to get the most out of the medium at hand, now they have monkeys who just crank everything to 11, call it hot, and demand a percent. A child could have done that for nothing. It really doesn't make much sense to spend $100,000 on a good recording engineer and studio when you're going to squash all of the quality out of it right at the end anyway.
So yeah, it really is possible to make just as good of a recording on the cheap and then distribute it for next to nothing. Done right, there's probably even some money in it, just not as much as they're used to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @09:18AM
"Part of their problem is that they got addicted to the money. They jumped right on the technology that made their job easier and cheaper but they didn't pass ANY of the savings on."
What? They didn't "jump right on the technology that made their job easier and cheaper". They spent years ignoring it existed, then many more years actively trying to destroy it. They got pulled into the new technology that made it difficult for them to sell bulky, overpriced items, kicking and screaming all the way until they were finally here ... and realized it was actually profitable.
But you're right that they didn't pass on ANY savings. An argument consumers had for why everyone should go digital, although many of us knew damned well they wouldn't make anything cheaper, and if anything make things more expensive once digital was the only option. (currently the physical side often goes on sale due to stores trying to get rid of unsold merch, but once that competition goes away we'll see far less in the digital sales department.)
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 27 2015, @09:34PM
They did jump on it, but only the parts that didn't result in them being out of the loop. It takes time to invent new and more draconian DRM. While that was going on, they did switch to digital recording and mastering which is cheaper than pro level analog recording. They were pretty quick to push CDs which were cheaper to make and cheaper to ship than LPs.They avoided PC based recording because that wouldn't let them put bands in debt where they could fudge the numbers in their favor. They resisted downloading for a long time because of the lack of unbreakable DRM.
None of that resulted in a lower price. When they were finally convinced to get into downloadable music, they made it even more expensive.