Pirate Bay Trial Day 8: Pirates Kill the Music Biz | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay Trial Day 8: Pirates Kill the Music Biz

torrentfreak.com

20 pointsadnymarc14 comments

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

I must say it's getting really hard to tell the difference in this case.

"less is being paid for than ever before." Really? The second the first recording company came into business it was making 18 billion a year? I'm fairly sure it's still higher than throughout most of the history of the recording industry.

"Unfortunately The Pirate Bay does what it says in its description and its main aim is to make available unauthorized material." No, its main aim is to facilitate the sharing of files. The users choose to upload illegal material.

"It is common sense, if they couldn’t get it for free they would buy it and when we ask them, they confirm that." Prove it. I download plenty of music to see if it's any good, sometimes via youtube, sometimes via torrents. Probably at least 95% isn't, so I delete it again. I certainly wouldn't buy it.

"When asked if downloaders have less money than others, Kennedy said that younger people have the money but just don’t spend it on music anymore. Kennedy said that the reduction in sales in the music industry is directly attributable to illegal downloading." Again, PROVE IT. I suspect that if you put music sales next to video game sales you'll see some very close correlation between the decline of the former and the rise of the latter.

"He was asked if he understood BitTorrent. [...] It was very clear he knew nothing about any remotely technical issues." Perhaps you could spend 10 minutes reading up on it so you know what you're talking about in a court of law?

"The reason for this drop is that the number of premieres have increased but sales have decreased. File-sharing has somewhat made the market thinner." Or maybe people have only a limited budget for movies, so now they have to split it between them, resulting in lower sales per movie? Or you just make too many crappy movies? Again, get some proof.

"Sandgren further told that the damages they claim are based on a fictitious license fee." So basically they're just pulling numbers out of their ass.

"He had to admit, however, that he has no evidence to back these claims up." I'm not even going to comment on this one.

If only I were the judge... I'd hold them in contempt of the court for wasting everyone's time with unsubstantiated BS. Or better yet, sue the entertainment industry because they cost me several billion dollars. How did I arrive at that figure? Well, I have no evidence to back that claim up, but it seems reasonable to me. Now give me my money.

Pathetic.

>""Kennedy said that the reduction in sales in the music industry is directly attributable to illegal downloading." Again, PROVE IT."

Of course, it is impossible to "prove". But there is a strong correlation between the rise of downloading and the collapse of sales in the music industry. It would be sloppy reasoning to dismiss any causal relationship between the two a priori.

Sure, we can admit that correlation but can you improve that it's only illegal downloads? But what about iTunes, Amazon, etc. and their DRM-free software? Don't those encourage supposedly illegal sharing?

Supposedly they started including legal downloads in their tallies around the time iTunes rose up to prominence, and the trend is still downward.

I have often wondered if people buy less music because they can try it first and realize it's not worth buying. I can't count the number of times I have been excited about a new album, downloaded it when it leaks online, and realized it sucks. Before, I would have been excited, bought the album when it came out, realized it sucked, and regretted my purchase. Now I can save myself the money.

Of course, the reason could be as simple as attention spans. People only have so much time to be entertained (at most 24 hours a day)... and there seem to be more movies, tv shows, songs, video games, websites, etc than ever. If people are spending more time watching movies and playing games, they are probably spending less time listening to music... and hence less money buying new music to fill that time.

There is also a strong correlation between global warming and the amount of pirates (http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php). While I agree that dismissing it a priori is a bad idea, correlation still does not mean causation. Hence the request for proof instead of conjecture. If you're going to take someone to court you had better be able to prove your accusations.

There is a very plausible line of causation in the downloads => music sales hypothesis that does not exist in the pirates => global warming hypothesis.

Please be courteous and refrain from using obvious straw men in your arguments. It makes the person you are responding to feel like you are not taking them seriously.

the pirate bay doesn't have to prove anything. the business model of the recording industry should not be the courts concern. the cromulent question is this: is the pirate bay an information service and thus not responsible for the content that they help distribute.

No its not the pirates that killed the music biz...its the music biz themselves. Instead of adapting to the changing market conditions, they've dug in and decided to litigate

One off the cuff question related to this that popped into my head - Does a person implicitly own the digital rights to all of the music they have purchased in the past? (cds, vinyl, etc)

Can an older guy to download via torrent all of the music from old vinyl records he has in the closet? Considering economic conditions, receiving 9.99 for every crappy cd I bought as a teen would be nice.

Could one sell back to the record industry for the "value" of the digital rights?

I don't really agree with this, but one could apply this logic to vhs/dvds, books.

This is a huge part in the disconnect of views between the entertainment industries and the public. Physical media scarcity of past decades enabled a false duality to develop that entertainment companies have come to depend on. They want you to have to buy their product as if its a physical thing, but then behave as if its a temporary license grant. When you understand this, their seemingly irrational behavior starts to make a little more sense.

In most copyright doctrines you cannot -- even if you have bought the identical CD -- download mp3s extracted from other copies of it, if the author does not explicitely allow it. (Those other copies are counterfeit goods)

Without an agreement with the author, you cannot make copies of a copy you have bought legally, for he (or more exactly, the copyright-holders) is the only one allowed to make further copies.

Since this would make playing CDs on a computer impossible laws provide exceptions for the purposes of playing your legally bought representation (copies are made in cache memory, buffers etc...)

Other exceptions may be given (fair use doctrine, explicit mentions in other countries) letting you arrange a performance of the work (playing the CD) inside your private circle. (This would be impossible to enforce against)

So it stands to logic that if you have bought say, a vinyl of a particular work, you do not have a right to obtain counterfeit copies made of other representations (of the same work) as CDs or digital files.

" He then admitted to not knowing how The Pirate Bay works so the defense lawyers put it to him - if you don’t understand how TPB works, how can you say they are to blame?" I really want to hear the answer to that one. Most people probably know how TPB works even if they don't use it. This guy probably doesn't know a thing about the internet except that it is a source of money, and people can use it to download music.

I find a couple of things ridiculous about this whole thing.

1) The music industry refused to acknowledge the impact of iTMS instead pretending as if CD sales are the only thing making them money. I might be wrong, but isn't iTMS the number 1 seller now... ?

2) I have a deep, very deep problem with commenters who say stuff like "piracy for life" or "I'll keep pirating till I die". They're just confirming the views of the music labels.

  2) I have a deep, very deep problem with commenters who
  say stuff like "piracy for life" or "I'll keep pirating
  till I die". They're just confirming the views of the
  music labels.

I do agree to an extent that statements such as these may in some sense undermine The Pirate Bay's case. However, an argument could certainly be made that in the era of essentially free copying (i.e. almost no marginal cost) society is better served by a regime without copyright. I cannot look inside the commenter's head to see if he is making his statements on this basis, or simply likes to receive free digital information-- but in the limit it ends up being the same: such statements are ultimately an expression of the need for some type of copyright reform so that the laws can be more aligned to how people on the whole actually behave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com