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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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Krogt, n. (chemical symbol: Kr):
The metallic silver coating found on fast-food game cards.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Sunday December 27 2015, @04:04AM
Copies are not the problem? Of course not, it is producing the master, the original, the first copy, which then, after all, is not a copy! So time to go all Pharma: it is not the cost of production (copying) or distribution (also near zero for online "property"), but the cost of development and marketing that determine the price of a drug. That, or some young capitalist who will probably end up in jail sooner or later. Marketing is really kind of silly, "we charge our customers the costs of getting them to buy our product!" Seems like consumers should get a better deal than that. But back to drugs. Development costs for a particular drug are sunk, but the problem is that not every development cost actually produces something of value. So Pharma expects the successes to subsidize the losers, while they search for a bonanza like high-blood pressure medication that gives old men something to do. But in any case, patents expire much more quickly than copyright. All this is supposed to ensure a continual progress in the advancement of medicine, health, and the well being of society. Of course, Pharma has to actually produce, despite bits of inhumanity and criminal misconduct here and there.
Copy rights should be based on the same reasoning, except that there are significant differences. Creativity is not chemistry. We have no idea what produces something of value, not even the artists themselves do. And we have no idea what people will find of value. Marketers drool after the ability to go viral. But we grant copyright just incase either of these two things occurs (value and/or being valued), for the express purpose of incentivising the production of more value. So it is not the copies that are significant, it is supporting the artists, copyright is a down payment on future art. This is why I suggest that we give it some teeth. Pharma can go bust, bankrupt, they can fail. I suggest that if an artist produces no further works, we rescind any copy right and repossess any income that we as a society have paid to said artist, or his owner or representative. Dead people do not hold copyright! So Sunde does not go far enough.