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.
(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.