Crank It Up To Eleven! 05.05.09: The PirateBay Rant
Posted by Sandeep Murali on 05.05.2009
The Swedish courts have pronounced The Pirate Bay founders guilty of the charges levied against them. My thoughts on the same.
Hello everyone and welcome back after a two week break. Part of the fun being in the CG industry is that you get to sacrifice your weekends to make sure the day is saved for your clients (Much like doctors) and get paid more or less the same you would've otherwise (Not so much). Either way, that threw a spanner in the works and the column had to be put on hold for two weeks straight. A ton of thanks to Mitch for understanding the situation.
Now be little angels and bookmark 411mania.com because that's the only scientifically proven way to counter global warming. Pretty please?
Pirates are baaad, mmmkay?
So it's been a couple of weeks since the now-famous Piratebay verdict was delivered and the owners were pronounced guilty. Everybody has a strong, polarized and opinionated take on the subject and that's fine. It's meant to be that way. No harm in listening to another one, right?
Before we start off, let me update you all on something. The Piratebay defense team may move for a mistrial since, lemme get this straight; the judge who ruled against them turns out to be a member of a Copyright lobbying group! You can't make this shit up, folks! Yes, the "Impartial" face of law that was supposed to preside over the matter and deliver an unbiased verdict based on the strengths/ weaknesses of the arguments presented by either side already had his mind made up even before he took a dump the morning the trial started. Priceless.
Which kinda explains why TPB founders were pronounced guilty even though the prosecution, on more than one occasion fell flat on their collective face and in general, proved little understanding of how TPB, Torrents or piracy in general works. Their whole argument can be summarized into "Pirates are baaad, mmmkay"? And (ironically) a Chewbacca defense. There were several instances reported by the tech blogs where the defense team proved the prosecution's allegations wrong right inside the courtroom with a computer and an internet connection. They made enough blunders while discussing vital points such as trackers to show that they were ill prepared at best to take on a case of such magnitude. Nevertheless, a verdict has been handed over and even if a mistrial is not declared, it will be fought in the court of appeals for at least a couple of years. Sufficed to say, we haven't seen the last of this by a long shot.
Which brings us to the opinion part. What EXACTLY is TPB guilty for? Providing copyrighted content free for download to all and the sundry? Hell no! TPB is little more than a search engine that just provides results for your search query, only more refined than say, Google. i.e. where you get 300000 results in a Google query, you get 30 in TPB. This is obviously very different from the Napster situation which we discussed a few weeks ago; where the company actively helped the users to share copyrighted content with their proprietary software and databases that resided in their servers. If anything, decentralized P2P learned from Napster's folly and built an ecosystem around themselves where no single party can be held accountable for their collective actions.
Perhaps, it's the "Pirate" part in the name that freaked the labels out. Which may be why they are apparently oblivious to the existence of a kabillion other torrent searching sites that were there before TPB (and still continue to exist). Granted, TPB was the biggest fish of 'em all, but it's painfully obvious that the prosecution took their name a bit too seriously and weaved a case around it that had little to do with the actual way that the site functioned.
I, as someone who holds music very dearly, is not here to defend stealing. Far from it. The artists (Well, some of them. Fucked if I am asked to defend Britney Spears or Fall Out Boy) work very hard to make their music and deserve every cent they get. They ARE doing something not everyone of us can do and therefore seserve to be richer than the average Joe. But that said, the current business model is a very bad one (To say the least) where the person(s) providing the creative input isn't the one getting the lion's share. Things like stepped pricing (Which was the subject of last week's column) that telegraph the labels' greed is not helping their case either. Places like TPB exist because a fundamental flaw exists in the system. No, the flaw isn't that all the ISPs in the world won't do the labels' bidding and shut down P2P traffic as a whole. The flaw is that the current pricing strategies suck donkey balls. The software industry has realized this folly and have already made amendments. For example, a software such as Adobe Lightroom which is the next best thing since sliced bread for photographers cost only a fraction of what it's bigger brother (Photoshop) costs. Yet, it does everything a digital photographer asks of it and then some. Better than Photoshop does it, actually. If anything, this gives the end user an onus to get a legal copy for himself. Or take the case of Windows, where viral outbreaks like Conficker have enlightened the end user the importance of having a legal copy which gets all the security updates regularly.
The point is, the software industry by and large have understood the importance of providing genuine reasons for their customers to go legal. Most of the big players have acted on this and while software piracy is far from dead, a significant number of people are seeing the advantage of going legal. The music industry on the other hand, haven't doen anything even remotely similar. Online music stores were a good start, but they are slowly shooting themselves in the foot with things like staged pricing. THEY ARE DRIVING THEIR TARGET AUDIENCE AWAY. And all they can say in their defense is "Pirates are baaad, mmmkay "? What is the ideal solution? Online only labels that sell their music direct to customers/ have special deals with existing e-stores and can therefore, free themselves of the massive overheads physical labels suffer from? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But either way, it's quite clear that the current model of business is far from perfect. And it's quite clear that "Stick it to the man" efforts such as TPB are far from being obliterated from the face of the earth forever.
Never say goodbye:
What do you guys think? Who IS the guilty party here? Are reforms long overdue for the recording industry? Do TPB owners deserve everything they got and then some? Do let me know in the usual place.
When a women gets raped she gets 100000sek, and the industry gets 30m sek for a copy of a movie/album. thats fair??
Why should the industry keep filling their allready big pockets? Not 1 swedish krona of that 30m sek will go to the Swedish artist anyway because their money was taken away in the ruling. 30m sek to the record labels. Swedish citicents are wery angry at this.
Posted By: jesse (Guest) on May 05, 2009 at 02:34 AM
Completely agree with this article, I have always maintained that the music industry should have long ago buckled under it's own weight.
They scream about how this trend of 'piracy' hurts the artists and places in peril the future of the music industry as a whole but the truth is, even if the labels collapse more bands can go indie and delivery systems are much more accesible these days, royalties and bottom line figures for artists will stay much the same but they will have more artistic freedom.
Like the oil industry who have been so used to ruling the economical world for so long, their running scared of the fact that their swollen bank accounts may soon start to be effected and cling to their need for 'ignorance sales' and lack of other options consumer side.
Take the Literature industry, do writers and book publishers suffer for the existance of librarys?
put simply, the only sales these labels are losing are sales of ignorance based on nothing other than the hersay and media hype of bands/films, personally I would prefer to see/hear the finished product then decide if it's worth my money.
The industry is changing and like the church before them (who also relied on ignorance) the information age is slowly pulling the rug from underneath these opertuistic capitolist con-men and personally I think it's the best thing that could happen to the creative industries, since when has art influenced business and vice-versa? the very essence of art is incompatible with business strategy.
All hail the Pirate bay!
Posted By: DeVIAtE (Guest) on May 05, 2009 at 07:28 AM
A lot of bands don't even directly see any profits from album sales; the majority of their income comes from touring and t-shirt sales. The only ones directly affected by piracy are the record companies, who I have a very hard time feeling sorry for.
This whole "trial" was a farce.
Posted By: mrw420 (Guest) on May 05, 2009 at 08:51 AM
The recording industry ranks right up there with Ticketmaster as being one of the worst industries in terms of customer relations. They focus their attention on selling generic crap, which is the only stuff that is priced down, while marking up the good stuff, or making it impossible to get except through indy stores and online sites. They sue their own customers if the customers dare to do anything with their product that reeks of sharing. They make it impossible for DVD companies to put out sets of many classic TV shows without editing the music to pieces (Hunter, WKRP), or without paying massive royalties.
And on top of it all, the people whom they claim they are protecting---the artists--get screwed, as they are snapped up when they are starting out, locked into long-term contracts and then don't give them the appropriate royalties if those artists happen to make it big. The artists typically have to take the companies to courts to see any decent share of their product.
But things are changing. Music is no longer available only via a physical format--music is electronic, and many entrepreneurs who have pull are changing distribution. It's only a matter of time before the industry either adapts or dies.
Posted By: Michael L (Guest) on May 05, 2009 at 08:52 AM
mrw420-
Though I don't think you're 100% correct on the "bands don't make any money from albums" comment, let's assume you're correct.
People go see bands live and buy t-shirts because they hear their songs. They record their songs with record company money. If a label gives a band money and makes none of it back on album sales, why would they then go give them money for another album?
Epic fail.
Posted By: Mitch Michaels (Registered) on May 05, 2009 at 09:56 AM
@Mitch
You're still in the old way of thinking here, the expertise and technology to record an album are becoming more widely available and easier/cheaper to attain, studio time can be bought with money pooling if a band is hard working. My previous band funded and put out our own EP twice and made a decent sum in local sales from it too, with the digital era I daresay it would have done even better.
I'm not saying labels are obsolete here but look at smaller indie labels such as Fat-wreck (fatmike from NOFX label) and other indies, they take little off the top and support their artists who get a much better share of the profits, saying that bands will die out because huge corps wont fund them is a fallacy.
Posted By: DeVIAtE (Guest) on May 05, 2009 at 10:38 AM
Technically the ruling is not set yet since there will be an appeal coming in from the pirate bay guys... :P
Posted By: saer (Guest) on May 05, 2009 at 11:37 AM
If a band or singer can't make money by getting out and touring, I say fuck'em. As for the movie industry, how about recouping your losses from the free crap you throw at A Listers?
Posted By: LuxeDeluxe (Guest) on May 06, 2009 at 06:56 AM
Great article,and you didn't even get into one of the biggest reasons why the music industry's so-called legal alternatives have largely been a failure. DRM. Who with any sense at all would spend 1 cent let alone 99 of them on files that are locked down, making it next to or completely impossible to do things that should be easy, like moving them from one device to another? Imagine if you bought a CD and the thing only worked in your stereo. To play it in the car or at your buddy's house you would have to buy extra keys. Would anybody stand for that? My guess is no, so why this sorta kinda works in the digital world is beyond me. It largely doesn't, which makes sense. If you have the choice of getting music with all kinds of technical problems that will stop working should the company you bought it from go out of business or a free copy that you can use however you'd like, it's pretty much a no brainer. the industry is slowly starting to figure this out, the problem is that they're 10 years too late. If they had figured out a way to work with Napster and others like it at the time, it's pretty likely we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation right now. But they resisted and resisted the change that was coming, and when they finally went digital, they did so in the stupidest ways possible and now here we are.
Posted By: Steve W (Guest) on June 03, 2009 at 08:36 AM
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