The music industry has long been claiming that pirating music is a determent to the record company, that sharing music online takes money right out of their pockets. This idea led to the downfall of Napster like we learned earlier this year, but is it actually true?
In 2016, Peter Sunde, the founder of pirating website Pirate Bay, created a device called Kopimashin. It's a screen attached to a basic computer, and its only function is to copy a single song over and over again. Overall, the song, Gnarls Barkley "Crazy", is copied around 8 million times per day. Once the song is copied, its essentially deleted. Sundes goal is to bankrupt the music industry.
Most record labels use $1.25 per song when assessing damages, which means that in one week the machine could cause $70 million dollars in damage. The music industry is worth $15.7 billion, so in just 4 years this machine could shut down everything.
Of course, the music industry isn't going to go bankrupt from this device. The main reason Sunde created it was to show the problem of assign value to a copy. The machines only purpose was to disprove the claim that unauthorized copies = lost sales. It's meant to make you think about what makes up a digital copy, and if that has any actual value.
Work Cited:
https://www.musictimes.com/articles/59485/20151224/pirate-bay-co-founder-plans-bankrupt-record-industry-new-art.htm
https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/6vgq3b/the-founder-of-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-bankrupt-the-music-industry-with-his-new-art-project
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Interesting post! Prior to reading this, I believed that any form of music piracy would negatively effect the music industry. Yet as you stated, the truth is, simple copied downloads don't affect the state or value of the original. The music industry only looses opportunity if that copy is distributed or if the copier places value on the download and begins listening to the track instead of simply re-downloading it. In Napster's case, the music had been pirated and distributed across the web, which ultimately played into why the site was shut down. While a single person's copy won't impact the music industry, the opposite could be said for everyone downloading copies of songs off the internet instead of buying them.
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