The pointlessness of paying for digital copies

Peter Sunde, one of the founders of the popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay, opposes the idea that people have to pay money for every digital copy they download, and to prove his point, he created a special device that constantly creates copies.





Copyright holders have a different opinion. They believe that every digital copy has value. An “unlicensed” copy is lost profits. They have repeatedly used this argument in court, including against Peter Sunde himself, he still owes corporations millions of dollars in compensation for allegedly lost profits.
In his art project, Peter Sunde brought the idea to the point of absurdity.
A Raspberry Pi mini computer with an LCD display runs a Python script that continuously copies the same file to / dev / null - the Narls Barkley Crazy song.
According to the logic of corporations, each copy brings them losses. If so, the entire industry will soon go bankrupt - after all, The Kopimashin causes them "damage" in the tens of millions of dollars every day.
The methodology for calculating the "damage" from copying unlicensed files has always outraged Peter Sunde. In his opinion, corporations greatly overestimate the cost of pirated copies.
The Kopimashin produces 100 copies of a file per second, which is more than 8 million copies of a file per day. According to the method of calculating the lost profits of corporations, this means a daily "loss" of about $ 10 million. As files are copied, the figure of "damage" is updated on the LCD of the mini-computer.



The Kopimashin is part of an art project dedicated to digital copying, which is preparing for a future exhibition.
“I want to show the absurdity of the very principle of determining the cost of a digital copy,” says the author. - The machine is very crude and demonstrates that there is no threat to the industry at all. But if you follow their rhetoric and way of thinking, it will bankrupt them. "
The main goal of the project is to show that the millions of compensation invoices issued to Peter Sunde and his colleagues from The Pirate Bay have nothing to do with reality. They are as illusory as the numbers on The Kopimashin's screen.
In fact, the distribution of "unlicensed" files, on the contrary, stimulates the sale of music. Users of torrent trackers spend the most on purchasing licensed content, which has been repeatedly shown by various studies.
The Raspberry Pi machine, meanwhile, runs non-stop and continues to bankrupt the label that distributes Narls Barkley songs. “The one at my house has already made 120 million copies,” says Peter Sundé. "That equates to $ 150 million in losses to the record industry — following their logic."