Despite this, there will also be labels that perform badly for unrelated reasons. How convenient is it then, to blame evil file-sharers for your disappointing results. The Finnish hard rock label Lion Music is doing just that, with rather dramatic consequences.

Because of all the stealing and looting by Internet pirates, the label has decided not to sign any new acts until politicians have found a remedy.

“We are NOT able to sign more artists. No demos or masters you send us will be considered for release. We will NOT listen to any mp3 files or check out your websites and we will NOT respond to questions regarding releasing your album,” the label’s bosses write on their website.

“The illegal file sharing on the net is killing independent music. We are sorry about this situation but we are sure you are aware of what is going on,” the dramatic rant continues.

“Our demo policy will not change before our politicians have stopped the P2P sites. Illegal file sharing is not just about stealing from rich major companies. It is about killing independent music and making it impossible for many great musicians to have a chance to release albums and have a musical career even as a part time job.”

“Next time you consider downloading an album for free or adding new torrents please think of the impact you are having on the artists – would you like it if we came into your home and stole your pay check?”

The label’s bosses then go on to show various statistics of how many times the albums of their artists were pirated though an unnamed BitTorrent site, arguing that these downloads are responsible for their disappointing results.

To add to the drama the label has asked their musicians to write up their thoughts on piracy in a section called “The Murder of Music.”

One of the artists that penned up his thoughts on piracy is guitar hero Borislav Mitic. Mitic is just as gentle in his commentary as the label’s bosses.

“Just because you CAN download music for free today on the Internet doesn’t mean you SHOULD,” he writes. “You CAN also beat up an old lady on the street and steal her pension from her wallet … but somebody CAN beat you up too and do the same to you. Would you like this?”

According to Borislav, illegal downloading will lead to a “society of filthy, wild savages.” To those people who dare to continue stealing through BitTorrent sites he adds, “the blood will be on your hands…”

Those who have the courage to read the rest of the artist entries will be amazed at the hostile tone towards the readers, who they assume are pirates.

Don’t get us wrong. Despite research that points in the opposite direction, it could be that piracy is hurting the sales of Lion Music. But even if this was true, their way of bringing the message across is not going to help their cause, it will only alienate the fans.

A label taking completely the opposite stance, embracing both file-sharing and their fans, is Thorny Bleeder Records, who have just released the second volume of their free download series. Entitled Get Thorny 2, the album features new music from seventeen independent Canadian artists. (link to torrent on Mininova)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek, who started the site as a fun project to show off to some friends on IRC. The site started off with a very primitive setup, hosted on a Linux box at Sloncek’s home.

In the weeks that followed, word of the “Universal BitTorrent Source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that the traffic generated by Suprnova quickly maxed out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity Sloncek had at home.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time as other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors to guarantee that the site stayed up. At its peak it indexed almost 60,000 torrents and served around 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

In November 2004, Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers had been taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but it was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time, Reuters wrote about Sloncek and his rapidly growing site in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press.

This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take Suprnova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug on December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

The fall of Suprnova resulted in an avalanche of new sites that aimed to fill the gap. Among these new sites was Mininova, which despite its name outgrew Suprnova within a year, establishing itself as one of the leading torrent sites for nearly five years.

In 2007, Suprnova returned to the BitTorrent stage, resurrected by the folks behind The Pirate Bay. The site never even came close to what it was though, and as of today it is just serving a few torrents a day to some lost souls.

Sloncek himself moved on with his life. He moved to San Francisco in 2007 where he’s attending the Academy of Art University. He didn’t cut his BitTorrent roots completely though, as he’s currently directing TorrentFreak TV in his spare time.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.

The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.

During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.

In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.

More information on the consequences and background of Mininova’s decision will be addressed in a follow up article.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“We’re starting a BitTorrent tracker to show artists how to properly use P2P technology in order to gain access to a cheap and efficient marketing and distribution network,” Pirate Party spokesman Jake Daynes explained to TorrentFreak.

Just a couple of days later and already Canadian record label Thorny Bleeder Records is showing its support for the party and its new RivetTracker-based distribution system.

Thorny Bleeder Records is an independent record label and the fruits of a partnership between Art of Dying’s Jonny Hetherington and Greg Bradley along with industry veteran Brian Thompson. They aim to offer artists new options in today’s music business.

“As a show of support for the Pirate Party of Canada, Thorny Bleeder Records are proud to announce that our sixteen track, multi-artist Get Thorny compilation is now available for free on their website,” announced the label.

TorrentFreak caught up with Brian Thompson to learn more about their decision to embrace the Pirate Party and their tracker.

“Thorny Bleeder Records strongly believes in the culture of file sharing as a benefit to an artist’s development and to the growth of their fan base,” Brian told TorrentFreak. “It’s become increasingly difficult and expensive to have a band’s single added to a radio station’s playlist, so the Internet has quickly become the next best thing for new music discovery.”

“As a an artist and a record label, your number one goal is to be heard by as many people as possible. BitTorrent provides the perfect distribution for music discovery to occur, it’s today’s version of the record store listening post. Pirate Party’s new BitTorrent tracker provides us with the perfect avenue to expose our artists to an entire new audience that would otherwise be unaccessible,” he added.

Brian told us that Thorny Bleeder also supports the Pirate Party in their fight for copyright reform.

“The world has changed dramatically since these laws were introduced eons ago and it makes no sense to continue adhering to these old laws that no longer support creativity and distribution in the digital reality of today and tomorrow,” he added.

The compilation ‘Get Thorny’ can be downloaded here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

James Monaghan from the company has recently taken part in the BERR consultation on file-sharing so has been watching this week’s developments closely. The government has set a deadline for responses to its plans (which include disconnecting alleged file-sharers from the Internet) of 29th September and, like many others, James has responded to the new statement by sending his thoughts in to the consultation. His feelings will resonate with many TorrentFreak readers. Here they are in full;

Monaghan Media Response To Latest BERR Statement

There are an estimated 7 million file-sharers (your figures) in the UK, and you want to reduce that number by 70%. 70% is 4.9 million. A fair trial is fundamental to democracy. To fairly prosecute 4.9 million citizens is an optimistic suggestion when currently Her Majesty’s Court System holds 200,000 criminal cases per year. This would suggest it is going to take 25 years to reduce file-sharing by 70%. This is only dealing with the 70% of today’s file-sharing with no regard to the expected increase of file-sharing. Research suggests that the number of file-sharers increases every day, 63% of people aged 14-24 now admit file-sharing, with 83% of those file-sharing every day.

To prosecute 4.9million people you will also need evidence. No evidence exists. Anywhere.

The ‘evidence’ championed by the failing sector of the media industry – the physical distribution sector – has been proven time and time again to be incredibly flawed. I refer here to the elderly couple who the copyright industry began legal proceedings against for downloading hardcore gay nazi pornographic film ‘Army Fuckers’ (1) among others. I also refer to the law firm Davenport-Lyons, who sent out 15,000 letters telling people to pay a small ‘fine’ (usually about £600) and they’d make a lawsuit against them (for file-sharing) go away. This is what is known as ‘extortion’.

Luckily for the consumers, and all of those of us who enjoy freedom from criminals, Davenport-Lyons were quickly picked up by BBC’s Watchdog program, and promptly disappeared.

I note though, that in today’s (25th August 2009) response, you don’t mention a fair trial. In fact you don’t mention any opportunity for those accused with this flawed and faulty evidence to defend themselves. Which rather gives the impression that there will be no opportunity for the accused to defend themselves. What you do say is this:

“…the previous proposals, whilst robust, would take an unacceptable amount of time to complete in a situation that calls for urgent action…”

So what you’ve stated, is that it is impossible for your draconian anti-file-sharing measures to be implemented fairly. Which is correct. What this means, is that this route of anti-file-sharing legislation, the ‘criminalise-7-million-of-your-citizens’ route is wholly unfeasible, impossible to implement without massive cost to the tax-payer, and impossible to implement without massive damage to the progress of the UK’s creative industries. What this does not mean is that instead of fair trials and the assumption that the accused are innocent until proven guilty, everyone should be presumed guilty until they are proven innocent. This is perverse as the accused would not then have the opportunity to be proven innocent.

In my previous contribution to this consultation, I briefly touched upon the fact that the industry has never been able to show any loss, financial or otherwise, has been caused by file-sharing. I’ve gone into a little more detail here, which shows, with numbers, evidence, and references, (rather than the usual hearsay provided by the industry) to show that there isn’t a financial loss to any of the most downloaded films this year (so far).

You’ll note that all of the top ten most downloaded films so far this year (3) are all incredible commercial successes, each making hundreds of millions of pounds. Watchmen, the most downloaded film with 16.9 million illegal downloads, still made $185,248,060. How can anyone argue that file-sharing has caused it a financial loss? Benjamin Button was the second most downloaded film so far, being downloaded 13.1 million times illegally. It made $332,860,689. A financial loss? I think not.

What we are seeing here, is the end of one type of business: the physical distribution of digital products. We are in a world where DVDs are old technology, in less than ten years Blu-ray disks will go the same way as LPs, as tape cassettes, as VHS tapes, and as DVDs. The internet however, has outlived the DVD. And it will outlive the Blu-ray disk. And it will outlive whatever format ‘succeeds’ the Blu-ray disk. The internet is here to stay. What we are seeing in the Creative Industry is a very small sector (distribution), which makes massive money from a system which is made redundant by the internet.

It is not the responsibility of the government, of the ISPs to prop up a failing business. If a business is failing, it is the responsibility of that business to look at itself, at its actions and rethink its operations in order to save itself.

It is wholly unfeasible to enforce any rule against filesharers, and impossible, literally impossible to enforce according to law.

I reiterate the statement I made in my first contribution to this consultation, the majority of my audiences watch my films over the BitTorrent system, a system so revolutionarily brilliant that it means I, an independent film-maker, can distribute a film in full High Definition to hundreds of millions of viewers with absolutely no cost incurred to me, where normally global film distribution costs several tens of millions of pounds. I think it is acceptable to say then, that my company and I are at the forefront of the industry.

As someone who uses file-sharing systems, not only to gain access to media which I never could’ve before, but also to distribute my own contributions to the UK’s Creative Industry, I am utterly shocked and appalled by the lengths to which your government will go to make my audiences, my peers and myself criminals.

This is not the end of the creative industry. I can say this with great confidence, as someone working in the industry. The industry is currently undergoing a change, a natural change, a change that it must undergo. Although this is not the end of the creative industry, it is the end of a disgusting sector of the industry which has been a parasite on the industry for the past half-century, milking it for as much money as it can, promoting false inflation of the rest of the industry only to increase its own profits.

The criminals here are not the teenagers downloading films and music, but the global corporations that extort money from artists and consumers alike, and who operate in a manner not unfamiliar with sinister global criminal networks.

It is the remit of democratically elected Government to protect the citizens, film-makers, and business-owners from the failing business model which threatens freedom, civil liberty, and creative business’ economic future.

Finally, I take this quote from your statement today:

“…As ever we would need to ensure any such measure fully complied with both UK and EU legislation…”

Disconnecting people from the internet does not fully comply with EU legislation. In fact it directly contravenes EU legislation. I am referring to amendment 138/46 which was adopted on the 6th May 2009 in response to French attempts to implement a system almost exactly the same as the one proposed here. A system which was declared unconstitutional by the French High Court. You will be aware that amendment 138/46 declared that access to the internet was a fundamental human right.

Not only do your proposals directly contravene European Law, but the certainty of wrongful sanctions being taken against citizens opens the government up to legal action. The fact that cutting off an entire household’s internet punishes everyone in that household and not just the ‘accused file-sharer’ is near-certain to breach the government’s ‘Every Child Matters’ directive where children are punished for others’ actions. The probability of cutting off the internet of those who need the internet to survive, the long-term sick, for example, or the disabled, further opens up the government to attack.

Is this the route that my government wants to pursue? Or should the government perhaps listen to its’ citizens’ outrage and stop neglecting them in favour of the power and massive wealth offered by the global corporations who’s only motivation is furthering said power and wealth?

Yours faithfully,
James Monaghan

Monaghan Media

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall begins by saying that Tobias Andersson from Piratbyrån, John Stéenmark and police officer Jim Keyzer no longer have to testify. The Judge asked the Prosecution about Jim Keyzer, but they said they hadn’t been able to get hold of him but had sent an e-mail to try and find out. The defense says they will hear Tobias Andersson tomorrow.

The Prosecutor then further modified the charges against the defendants. He no longer claims that all The Pirate Bay’s components are necessary in order to share files. He further added to the charges that TPB allows its users to upload torrents and that TPB then store the torrents on their server. There was no immediate objection to the changes. IFPI lawyer Peter Danowsky introduced yet more new evidence, but the defense won’t comment on it until they have had a chance to examine it.

First up to testify was Magnus Mårtensson, a lawyer for the IFPI. The court heard that Mårtensson has been working for the IFPI for 15 years, specializing in anti-piracy work. He explained that he worked gathering evidence against The Pirate Bay by downloading various music albums via .torrent files he obtained from the site using the Azureus client.

Mårtensson’s evidence gathering equipment consisted only of screenshots, as quickly became apparent. Mårtensson’s technological ability was called into question and he acknowledged that it was difficult for him to answer some technical questions.

When asked if he had any network equipment logging exactly what was going on ‘behind the scenes’ of any of his sample downloads, he replied that he didn’t. When asked if he verified in any way during the download process that he had any contact with The Pirate Bay’s tracker, again the answer was negative.

Defendant Gottfrid Svartholm questioned Mårtensson on his evidence gathering techniques. The following questions are particularly interesting as they show that the prosecution has no evidence that the Pirate Bay trackers were actually used.

Gottfrid: Before taking the screenshot, did you turn off DHT and Peer Exchange?

Mårtensson: DHT was obviously on. I wanted to be like an average user.

Gottfrid: So in other words, you can’t check if the tracker was used?

Mårtensson: The tracker address was visible on the screen. From that I assumed it was used in some way.

Gottfrid: But since you had DHT on, you have no possibility to state to the court as to whether The Pirate Bay’s tracker was actually used or not?

Mårtensson: No.

It seems unthinkable that the Prosecution has gathered ‘evidence’ in this way. Mårtensson was further asked if he was aware that Google can also act as a torrent search engine. The IFPI lawer seemed to be unaware of that, and he stated that they never had any problems with Google.

After a short break ex-policeman Magnus Nilsson of the Anti-Piracy Office was next up. He described how he downloaded several .torrent files from The Pirate Bay as part of his evidence gathering, and he explained in detail how one downloads files with BitTorrent. Nilsson told that he downloaded several games and movies, all with uTorrent.

Then, Nilsson came out to say that he was sure that a majority of the content on The Pirate Bay was copyrighted. However, he had no evidence that supports this claim. The defense lawyers pressed him on this and he had to cave in, “I have no documentation as to the claim that most material is copyrighted. It is just an opinion,” Nilsson said.

One of the defense lawyers (Carl Lundtröm’s) used the same line of questioning as he did with Magnus Mårtensson. He asked what BitTorrent program Nilsson used. Then he asked if he downloaded that program from The Pirate Bay. When told no, he asked a couple of questions about the download process to show that TPB isn’t involved in the actual transfer.

“So the actual downloading [of the pirated works/files] happens outside of TPB?” Carl Lundström’s lawyer asked. “Yes,” Anders Nilsson replied.

Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the defendants, asked Nilsson to confirm that he is an investigator working for an entertainment industry lobby group, and that the lobby group gave him instructions on what files and works to investigate. This was obviously to clarify to the court that Anders Nilsson is not an objective investigator.

After only two hours the court decided to end the hearings for today. Tobias Andersson of Piratbyrån and John Kennedy of IFPI will be heard tomorrow.

More news tomorrow

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In recent times, the Pirate Party has been more concerned with government actions that affect ordinary citizens. The wiretapping law (FRA) for example, as well as the likes of IPRED, which will give companies chasing an alleged copyright infringer more powers than the police. Worrying for anyone that has followed our stories on Davenport Lyons in the UK. “If IPRED becomes law, then drug dealers will have greater rights and protection than file-sharers,” wrote one news site.

On Monday, the PiratPartiet released their list of candidates for the EU parliamentary election taking place in June. Heading the list is party vice-chairman Christian Engstrom, but the other 19 candidates cover a wide age-range and are of roughly equal gender. This is not a party dominated by geeky teenage boys, but one that’s growing quickly; the Swedish Pirate Party now has only a few hundred members less than the Green Party.

Other countries aren’t so lucky. Spain, Poland and France, are among those with parties that hope to run in the election, but are having difficulty getting supporters. “It’s a sad state of affairs globally,” says Andrew Norton, the coordinator of Pirate Party International. “Most countries have lots of people that just can’t be bothered. They will post on forums to express their anger, but not do anything worthwhile about it.”

However, in Sweden – the home of The Pirate Bay – things are getting better. In the prominent Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, the headline reads “IPRED Favours the Pirate Party.” It goes on to comment on how directives like IPRED are driving people to the Pirate Party in Sweden, people who are concerned over both IPRED and FRA laws.

In their first election The Swedish Pirate Party gathered some 35,000 votes – roughly comparable to a leading 3rd party candidate in a US presidential election, percentage-wise. But, with the heavy public focus on these hot-topic issues, it’s entirely possible they’ll reach 100,000 – the number required in the last EU election in Sweden to get a seat.

The newspaper closed with a comment from political scientist and election researcher Henrik Oscarsson, who identified the Pirate Party as “a classic civil rights movement”. We have to wonder, does this make Brokep and Co. at the Pirate Bay, the digital Rosa Parks?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

So imagine if you will, the amazing contrast between Mr Fish’s predicament and that of Tony Krvaric, chairman of the San Diego Republican Party. At first glance, they seem very different – but look closer.

To better appreciate the gap, here is some background on Tony Krvaric, courtesy of a Raw Story report and the Republican Party website:

Born and raised in Sweden, Tony Krvaric was inspired by President Ronald Reagan to come to America. Though only a youth, he vowed to one day become an American and pursue his American Dream. The first step was to start his own business, and in 1992 when the opportunity presented itself, he moved to San Diego.

After becoming a naturalized citizen in June of 2003, he decided to become politically involved. Having seen, first hand, the devastating effects of socialism in Sweden and the rest of Europe, he was determined to stand up for the traditional, conservative values that helped make America great.

So what does a politician have to do with warez? Well, the strange truth is that Tony Krvaric is none other than a co-founder of notorious warez group, Fairlight. Krvaric -who started his cracking career at the “West Coast Crackers”- was in fact one of the most well-known individuals in the Warez scene at the time. Fairlight remained active after Krvaric left in 1993, and several members of the group were eventually arrested by the FBI in 2004.

During Fairlight’s earlier days and their involvement in the Commodore 64 cracking and demo scene, although cautious, the members couldn’t have imagined the punishments that are given out today. Although Krvaric isn’t shy in letting the world know some of his history and present-day situation on the C-64 Scene Database;

Presently works as a full-service financial consultant for individuals and families who share his values – helping them grow, preserve and distribute their wealth. He lives in San Diego with his wife and four children. Is a member of the Republican Party.

The excellent article goes on to list other alleged infringements by Krvaric over the years, and although he appeared to leave Fairlight in 1992, there are suggestions that he was still in charge of the group as late as 2004. It’s not possible to say if this is true or not, but according to sources, the group appeared to be operational in late 2007.

Apparently, Krvaric has now sent an email out to fellow Republicans, trying to calm the waters:

Apparently there’s a hit piece floating around on me, “exposing” my wild high school, teenage years where I was in a computer club where we swapped Commodore 64 games (similar to how kids swap mp3 music files these days). This was in the 80’s, on a computer that’s long since defunct!

[In] 1990 I graduated high school, grew up and started my own business, and then in 1992 I came to this country, continuing the same business (selling computer and video game chips and accessories as well as some nonperishable foodstuffs, taking over my father’s business for a while after he died in 1994) until I left that field when the profit margins became too thin to make any money , around 1997 or so. That’s when I became a financial consultant, which I remain to this day.

I’m sure glad they didn’t look in to my elementary school years, as there’s some really embarrassing stuff that I did in 4th grade. BTW, I also heard a rumor that another fellow committee member (who shall remain unnamed) once made a tape copy of his friend’s favorite vinyl record.

I don’t know who is spreading this but just wanted to let you know what’s going on out there. Likely it’s someone who wants us to take our eye off the ball in 2008, be it the democrats, labor or someone else. Either way, we’re not going to let them get away with it. Thanks for your leadership.

I wonder which way the newly-convicted copyright infringer David Fish would vote – if he was allowed to? Speaking of voting, Krvaric – running for reelection in 2008 – registered his email address with the Registrar of Voters. No-one can accuse him of trying to hide anything, that’s for sure:

tkrvaric@fairlight.com

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

ACT I: THE SET-UP

Current system is shot to hell. Heads buried firmly in sand.

A few months ago, the writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky told me he thought DRM was a “nostalgic” idea. Nostalgic is the best adjective I’ve heard to describe how most large entertainment companies think about controlling their content in a digital era. Big media continue to view the situation through rose-tinted spectacles while consumers see red. When being a pirate is the easiest way for people to access the content they want in the format they want it in, then something has gone very, very wrong.

There isn’t a moral defense for stealing in most cases. But there isn’t a moral defense for invading people’s privacy and imposing draconian laws to protect outdated, crumbling business models either. Music and movie piracy is rampant because over the last ten years, the market has utterly failed to provide a wide range of preferable legitimate solutions. If this continues as bandwidth increases and download speeds accelerate, the entertainment industry will be left in ruins. Many think that needs to happen for new business models to form. I think those currently in power simply need to grow a set and confront the reality of the situation.

So far the search for new revenue streams by the big labels and studios has only turned up one that they seem to be comfortable with: the legal department. It’s impossibly difficult and expensive for the average consumer to use music legally in podcasts, on websites, in remixes, or in public speeches for example. But if you do decide to use music illegally, it’s entirely possible that a huge team of lawyers will come at you like a troop of rabid spider-monkeys. Instead of looking at real solutions, all the labels seem to be doing is exacerbating their problems.

Pretending the current laws or legitimate options for consuming movies and music online are in some way going to stop piracy from turning the entire entertainment business into a giant anarchic swap-meet is like pretending recycling plastic water bottles will single-handedly end global warming. The problem is the entertainment business doesn’t recognize the giant anarchic swap-meet for what it really is; a great way for them to make a ton of money.

ACT II: CONFRONTATION

Licenses replace sales. Labels accept reality, or die.

CD sales are in freefall, (the arrival of the Mac Book Air this week was perhaps the final death knell for the format) and the legal department is clearly not a viable long-term revenue stream. A more efficient way to monetize how we consume music online (and other goods with zero marginal production costs) is not to think about monetizing them in terms of sales, but instead in terms of licenses.

This is already beginning to happen. Deals like the “Comes With Music” partnership struck between Universal and Nokia last month may feel like “one step forward, two steps back“, but at least we’re finally heading in the right direction. And the fact that all the majors are starting to work with legitimate file-sharing models like iMeem is encouraging.

The solution we are slowly moving towards is a voluntary collective license for music, which consumers could choose to pay, or not. It needs to work all over the world. National boundaries don’t apply to this kind of information anymore. To pretend they do is as nostalgic a notion as DRM.

Organizations such as ASCAP or the BMI could fulfill this role. This system wouldn’t be a tax; there would be no cap on the amount of money an artist or label could earn, innovation would not be stifled. Bennet Lincoff wrote a paper this time last year which I believe could be the answer. The EFF is also supportive of a similar solution, which they outlined in a 2004 paper:

“The concept is simple: the music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to “get legit” in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway—share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer—without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

“In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.”

Under this system, the internet would work exactly as broadcast radio does. As the EFF proposal points out, “songwriters originally viewed radio exactly the way the music industry today views KaZaA users—as pirates. After trying to sue radio out of existence, the songwriters ultimately got together to form ASCAP (and later BMI and SESAC). Radio stations interested in broadcasting music stepped up, paid a fee, and in return got to play whatever music they liked, using whatever equipment worked best.”

We have a system where infringement by many pirates affects the ability of rights holders to license music legally to the few media companies that can afford it. What we need is a model where infringement by a few pirates will not affect the ability for rights holders to license music to the many law abiding broadcasters who want to use it.
Sure, there is good money in making it very difficult to license music, and charging a few people a lot for the privilege. But it’s likely there is a lot more money in making it very easy to license music to a lot of people for very little.

This wouldn’t just allow individual users to share songs legally – it would create new opportunities for a lot of sites to start selling music, which is a good thing. The entertainment industry has made it very clear it would prefer not to be beholden to a small handful of stores like iTunes, an anti-competitive situation which isn’t great for consumers either. It’s a monumental task, but it would create jobs and wealth and probably a lot of opportunities we can’t even see yet.

ACT III: RESOLUTION

A viable entertainment industry unfolds. New revenue streams spring forth.

The truth is we still need middlemen in the entertainment business. It’s just they stopped doing their jobs properly, so we decided to stop paying them. But if the industry embraces the way millions of people have been consuming their products for the last decade, there will be no longer be a reason for consumers to defend piracy. There will be more money for artists. There will be more commercial opportunities to distribute wider varieties of content. Publishing will grow. There will be a larger entertainment industry with more revenue streams, making more money than it does now. Once the benefits of sharing content in a more liberal fashion are widely understood, our definition of fair use will likely change as well, meaning a wealth of new non-profit driven content and culture will be created at the same time. I think that definition will look something like Tim Wu’s: “It is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines.”

Confronting the reality of where the traditional lines really are, and where the new ones have been drawn by the consumers (the people who really make the rules) is the only long-term solution to the pirate’s dilemma the entertainment industry faces. It is, in this instance, the only way the industry will ever stop piracy. It is the right thing to do, and it will force the rest of us to start doing the right thing too. When the entertainment industry decides to grow up about file sharing, the rest of us will have no choice but to do the same.

For those who are interested, my book: “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism” is out now through Free Press, and probably soon on a BitTorrent tracker near you ;).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Rise of Suprnova.
Suprnova.org launched in the fall of 2002. At that time it was one of the few BitTorrent sites on the Internet. Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek. Initially he wanted to name the site Supernova, but that name was already taken.

Suprnova.org started as a fun project, with a very primitive setup. In fact, it was hosted on a linux box at Sloncek’s home in the early days. As soon as Suprnova was ready to go public, he started to advertise the site among friends and on IRC, and it slowly started to attract more and more visitors.

The word about the “universal BitTorrent source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that it didn’t take long before the traffic generated by Suprnova was maxing out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time when other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints, or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors, to guarantee that the site stayed in the air. At it’s top it indexed almost 60.000 torrents and about 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active comminity, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

The fall of Suprnova.
In November 2004 Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers were taken into custody by the Slovenion police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but is was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time Reuters wrote about Sloncek in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press. This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take SuprNova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era.

October 18, 2005, almost a year after the servers were raided, Sloncek received a letter form the prosecutor stating that the charges against him were dropped. This was a great relief, and he later said: “This has been a huge pressure on me and I think it left some permanent marks on me. I hope none of you will ever have to go through something like this.”

Early 2006 Suprnova.org shortly resurrected as a P2P news site, but that project ended after a couple of months.

The here and now
We contacted Sloncek, and asked him about his memories of Suprnova, and his and Suprnova’s future.

TorrentFreak: Suprnova is for sale at Sedo.com, are you really planning to sell this legendary domain?

Sloncek: The Suprnova.org domain is currently parked there, since I haven’t had time to work on anything for the site (Anybody got any suggestions, let me know and ill try to find the time and the team :)). It says for sale because I was interested how much money people would offer for the domain. But unless someone offers a HUGE sum of money, I wouldnt sell it.

TorrentFreak: What are the best memories you have, when you look back at the two years that Suprnova was online?

Sloncek: Hehe, honestly looking back everything looks just great. Although when I really think about it, I spend half of the time worrying about everything that was going wrong. But 2 years later, im feeling nostalgic and everything seems fine. I guess best moments were when the whole team of mods, forums staff, radio team and everybody was just chatting together and having fun. But that was rare :)

TorrentFreak: And the worst?

Sloncek: When nobody wanted to host the servers. There were times when I had no clue how to keep the site up and running. And also (probably the worst), when they raided the servers :)

TorrentFreak: If you had the chance to go back in time, knowing what you know now, would you do it all over again?

Sloncek: You bet, it was all worth it. I loved Suprnova, and it will always be a part of me (it also changed me a lot in real life, made me more independant). But also, if I could go back I would do a lot of things differently, so that the site would still be online now.

TorrentFreak: Do you still use BitTorrent?

Sloncek: Yeah ofcourse I use it, daily :) (only for legal stuff :D ).

TorrentFreak: Which client do you use at the moment?

Sloncek: I use BitComet… I used uTorrent, but my computer just didnt like it. It ate all my RAM. Dont know why but it did. I am used to BitComet thats why I use it. It has everything I need and no reason to change.

TorrentFreak: What is the best successor of Suprnova in your opinion?

Sloncek: There are so many torrent pages out there now that I dont know what to say. I use a Slovenian tracker mostly (partis.si), because it has a lot of Slovenian stuff and its fast. But when I want some more ‘rare’ torrents I use MiniNova, Isohunt or ThePirateBay, thats basically it. But Mininova is lacking at the hardware part, most of the time the site is unaccessable or very very slow. Isohunt has a very bad site design in my opinion. Also I dont really know the site Admin, but I’m not a big fan of him. Dont know why, personally I think going on national TV (link) is not the best move. Especially when he is not a lawyer. ThePirateBay has a great team behind them. Doing a good job in their country trying to ‘promote P2P’, but I also feel it is lacking somewhere, maybe in the amount of torrents they offer. I dont even know if they offer TV-Shows. But overall it is a great site and heads up to them. I dont want to be mean to anybody, I’m happy that people are willing to put torrentsites online and I am probably being unfair towards Isohunt, but just my opinion.

TorrentFreak: What are you doing at the moment, and what are your plans for the future?

Sloncek: Right now I’m a student at slovenian Arthouse Collage and I am studying for becoming scenographer. But my plans are (If i am really lucky), to move next year to San Francisco, to study Film and TV acting, since I always loved acting (although many people think I’m a geek :D ). Besides that I party alot and am overall having quite a good time.

Suprnova, the one and only universal BitTorrent source…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close (Finnish report). This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site.

Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines.

With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA (Teosto) shut down Finreactor in late 2004. It was, at the time, possibly the largest Finnish BitTorrent tracker with more than 37,000 registered members.

The Keskusrikospoliisi, after getting the go-ahead from Teosto, raided the administrators’ homes and seized computers and hard drives. The evidence they found was condemning.

Niko adds that at least one admin avoided the lawsuit because his hard drive was encrypted, and that there were more people on trial:

Alltogether 32 people were on trial. 21 of these 32 were declared guilty by the court. The eight admins mentioned here were probably only the ones represented by Turre Legal. The others were represented by another law firm.

Update: The IFPI just released a press-release which confirms that 21 admins were convicted. They have to pay compensation, damages and expenses of approximately $700,000 (in total) to the copyright holders.

21 operators of the Finreactor peer-to-peer-network were convicted yesterday by the district court of Turku in Finland. Finreactor was a BitTorrent network that had 10,000 registered users. Fourteen operators were convicted for copyright offences and seven for aiding for copyright offences. The operators were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control.

It is sad to see under-age BitTorrent fans get sentenced in court. The reality is that the content industries have decided that they are going to sue to compete with illegal filesharing. However, if a phenomenon like filehsaring is taking place at such an extraordinarily large scale, maybe there’s something to it. Maybe we need to find a new business model. Either that, or soon fans aren’t going to have enough money to legally buy the content they normally would, let alone the stuff they’re “pirating.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Reboot8 conference is “a journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas”.

The Grey Commons

Intro
There has been a lot of grey zone activity the last few days. You know that if you’ve followed the story about the Swedish police seizing the servers of the BitTorrent indexing site The Pirate Bay, a raid initiated by Hollywood’s MPAA and probably through several more than dubious stages of political influence, raising more question marks for every hour.
Anti-piracy is operating in its their own grey zone. But I would like to start this talk from another direction, the positively grey, which was what was I originally was invited to talk about here at Reboot, to sum up some of the crucial points in copyright’s current crisis.

We are the many shades of the Grey commons
DJ Danger Mouse took the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and re-mixed it with the Beatles’ White Album and in his creation, The Grey Album, he was ignoring copyright law.
The whole circulation of the Grey Album would never have been possible without P2P file-sharing. These networks exists in the same space as remix or mash-up culture; a space of production, of inspiration, obtaining, downloading , remixing and reinserting distribution and up-down-loading of data. This grey zone is fading in and out of historically dominant forms of circulations, slowly tearing them apart and replacing them with new ones, through rapidly multiplicating small habits.
It is not a grey commons in terms of the law, but inscribed in the technical habits we use every day. The grey is not optional, it is not here by an effort but rather as the shortest way to make life work with technology. The test, the query, the shading, the tuning and twisting is omnipresent; it is not something you can wish away. This is the way we live and come alive.
The Grey Album could escape the claws of copyright owners, because the channels of distribution where there and rather untouchable. But this claw is stretching to bring us all back to a time before internet, P2P file-sharing and the universal computer. Two days ago, there was a major clampdown in Sweden, with the police seizing a large part of the world’s filesharing infrastructure, The Pirate Bay, as well as silencing the voice of PiratbyrÃ¥n. Of course only temporarily. We’ll get back to that. But below such dramatic outbursts, the copyfight is raging on a conceptual level, where the permanented crises of copyright is masked by images grounded in a one-way mass-medial logic, images with no room for greyscales.
In this dislocated situation piracy is about reestablishing connections that has been lost or cut-off. By developing the tools and discourses of file sharing, we try to expand the grey zones and make room for the unforeseeable. Instead of talking about things in the copyright industry’s universal terms, and instead shift the focus to the diverse reality of cultural circulation: what we call The Grey Commons.
On this Grey Thursday I would like to present som thoughts that have been cooking around projects like Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay. About pirate ontologies, geneaologies and strategies for the grey commons.

Some words on the projects
Piratbyrån (The Pirate Association or Bureau of Piracy) in Sweden and Piratgruppen (The Pirate Group) in Denmark are sister organizations that tries to develop and deepen the questions about intellectual property and file sharing, through discussions, events, media appearances, publishing, lectures; developing and deepening
Piratbyrån was born in late summer 2003, emerging out partly from an integrated internet radio broadcast community and partly from IRC channels populated by the Swedish hacker community and demo-sceners. Piratbyrån was initiated to support the free copying of culture and has today evolved into a think-thank, running a community and an information site in Swedish with news, forums, articles, guides and a shop and has to date over 60000 members.
But two days ago, it was closed down by the Swedish police seizing the servers, that stood in the same server hall as The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. It was started by PiratbyrÃ¥n in november 2003 but grew faster than anyone could imagine, therefore it was naturl to branch it off and today, The Pirate Bay is a fully independent entity, but in a very friendly relation to PiratbyrÃ¥n.
[Presentation about the razzia and current events left out in this version.]

It’s not about downloading, stupid!
For a long time it was legal to download copyrighted files in Sweden, while the uploading of copyrighted material was criminal. But with the 2005 implementation of the EU copyright directive in Swedish law, also downloading was turned illegal. The anti-piracy lobby of course wanted everyone to believe that it suddenly has become very dangerous to be a file-sharer. While many voices have spoken up against the supposed “mass-criminalization of teenagers”, PiratbyrÃ¥n has tried to present a more realistic picture.
Most file-sharers use BitTorrent, where every downloader is also an uploader, and thus were probably in a formal sense criminals also before this law, that doesn’t really seem to have changed anything.
It is of big importance not to accept this terminology where “downloading” appears as some kind of activity completely separate from the uploading. We instead insist on talking about file-sharing as an horizontal activity.
Just like the activity of breathing includes both taking in air in the body and letting it out, filesharing has the same symmetry between up and down. Taking them apart, if even only through language, can only fill the purpose of replacing open exchange with centralized control.
Talking about “downloading” obscures the fact that horizontal P2P-communication is essentialy different from vertical mass-distribution. It is not the same “content” taking different paths to the “consumer”. It is about different archives and different architectures.

There is a constant buzz, driven by mass media, about so called “legal download services” for digital movies and music, presented as an alternative to P2P networks.
But the aim of “legal download services” is not primarily selling movies or music. It is rather about selling language, selling ideology, appropriating the very notion of “legal download”. In that ideology, “legal” is understood as “for payment”, and “download” as an up-down-transfer from a central server offering a limited range of so-called “content”, to a consumer.

So, we are totally mistaken if we think that we are criticising the content industry by saying that “offering legal downloads is good, but DRM sucks and prices are too high…” etc , because with that terminology we have already swallowed the ontology of undifference.

Horizontal exchange or vertical distribution? Open and unstable archiving, or centralized and limited? Those are the fundamental questions. Much more fundamental than the questions asked in the discourses about accessibility, consumer rights, social justice or compensation.

Metadata, not copyrighted material, is the war on piracy’s target
Pirated copies will be produced, no matter the fate of file-sharing networks. We’re all too often today equalising unauthorised digital copying with file-sharing networks, but it’s a fact that a lot of the illicit warez arrives at the hard disk from a physical storage medium, like an usb-device, a borrowed cd or a burned dvd.
To the extent that some people may avoid P2P networks, research shows that they just reconnect to other sources of data , be it physical copying from family and friends or files exchanges with mail and chat clients. It’s all a piracy performed in a grey zone outside surveillance.

So the question is not piracy or not, nor if darknets are desirable or not, but what infrastructures piracy will take use of.
Burning cd’s or gmailing files or giving them away with services like Yousendit.com, means quite much that piracy is stuck in the same infrastructure that it had during the era of the cassette tape and the photocopier, only multiplied by digital effectivity. There is still a dependence of finding someone (a friend, a library) with access to the source. File-sharing networks, however, connects every private archive that in one particular moment is connected, into the largest and most accessible archive ever.

The war against file-sharing is essentially a war against the distribution of uncopyrighted metadata, not against the distribution of copyrighted material. It is about hindering the ever-present piracy from globalizing and open indexing, pushing it back to the family and the schoolyard and the workplace. Scaling-down, not in quantity but in network scale, from peer-to-peer to person-to-person.
The result is not less piracy, but less plurality in piracy. More dependence on personal contacts means that more iPods will be filled with mainstream music that is exposed through mass media, while less people will curiously sneak around shared folders just to try out stuff.
But the iPods will no doubt be filled anyway. And you can forget that it will be according to an “one copy – one payment” formula.

Mental rights management
The grey zone also becomes visible if we consider how arbitrary the very definition of “copying” is. How it is based upon outdated technical cathegories.
We emphasize and affirm the tendency that it is getting harder to distinguish between local transfers of data and “file sharing” between different systems, for example in wireless environments. Digital technology is built on copying bits, and internet is built on file-sharing.
Copying is always already there. The only thing copyright can do is to impose a moral differentiation between so-called normal workings and immoral.
For the copyright industry, it is of extreme importance to keep people uninformed of the real workings of networked computers. They want to make an artificial distinction between “downloading” and “streaming”, as equivalents to record distribution and radio broadcasting.
But , and we should keep insisting that , the only difference between “streaming” and “downloading” lies in the software configuration on the receiving end. However, copyright law will never be able to acknowledge that. It has to rely on fictions, on a kind of cognitive mapping, where notions valid for traditional one-way mass media are forcefully applied to the internet. We call it Mental Rights Management (and it is the very precondition for DRM).
It is essential for the copyright industry to keep the majority of computer users trapped in the belief that the “window” of their web browser is exactly a window, through which they can look at information located elsewhere, under someone else’s control. Then our job is to clarify that everything you see on your screen or hear through your speakers, is already under your control.
Zeros and ones have no taste, smell or color , be they parts of pirated material or not. Therefore it is impossible to construct a computer that cannot reproduce and manipulate these zeros and ones , as such a machine would no longer be a computer, but something as grotesque as a digital simulation of the machines of the last century.

From one-way to read/write
But of course the aim of copyright is to do exactly that. Copyright was born in 18th century England in order to regulate the use of one specific machine, a machine that was expensive, few in numbers and that could write but not read, namely the printing press. Ever since, copyright laws have tried with varying success to make other machines imitate the characteristics of that one-way medium.
The concept was pretty easily adapted to the first technologies of sound and image recording, as grammophone and film entered around the turn of the last century, both being one-way media.
But in the seventies, machines that could both read and write, like the Xerox photocopier, the audiocassette and video recorders, came into the hands of a wider population. This transformed the production of culture, as well as the distribution. Remix, cut-up and mash-up cultures flourished, with early adopters like William S. Burroughs.
The record industry started to claim that home taping was killing music. Initially, they wanted to stop the cassette technology altogether. However, the common compromise solution in Western Europe gave the introduction of a special tax on magnetic tapes, in order to “compensate” the copyright holders for a calculated loss of sales.
Since that time, the sampler, the CD-burner and portable memory devices has continued to make the possibilities greater. Now we’ve got the combination of home computers, broadband, network protocols and compression algorithms that together define what we know as P2P file sharing.
As we stand here today a fair question must be if a principle that was implemented for controlling printing presses in 18th century England should be the hole which our present world must circulate through.

The threefold division: A parenthesis in musical history
In the beginning, copyright was simply a regulation of the reproduction of printed matter. Anything that was not made with printing presses, was not really under copyright’s domains.
Sound was something essentialy fleeting and intangible, something that happened in real time. In particular cases, musical notation was used, but primarily as a simple memory-helper for musicians. The Western classical tradition, however, evolved on its on way, more and more dividing the role of the composer from the role of the performer, by making notation more and more exact. But music and musical performances had nothing to do with copyright. Only the printed graphical representations of music was affected.

But things changed with the new reproduction technologies for sound and film, some time roughly around year 1900. Legislation transformed as a response to the possibility to reproduce sounds and not only symbolic representations of sound. Copyright went from covering texts to covering Works.
A Work can be defined as the abstract product of any artistic creation, existing independently of its material forms.
Now, composers not only owned the symbolic representation of music in form of a musical score on a printed paper, but also the melodies themselves. The realm of copyright conquered two new territories: public performances and recorded music. But it was still based in the concept on written music.
The symbolic score secured its power over the real vibrations stored in records, as well as over the live music experience. That meant that a lot collecting societies had to be funded, responsible for channeling money to composers and publishers, who still were the only musical copyright holders.
Radio broadcasting meant a growing cake, and soon some musical performers and record companies demanded their share from it too. And they got it in the early 1960s, when the Rome Treaty gave international copyright two new layers: performer’s rights and producer’s rights.
Music copyright, and the whole phonogram economy, is still built on this threefold division between the composer, the performer, and the producer. Those are the three main roles, each one represented by a different collecting society, each getting their own share of money for every song played on the radio and every CD-R sold.
But since this system was institutionalised, the division itself has shown clear signs of dissolution, and in quite many cases, one can observe how all those three roles are converging into the figure of the bedroom producer.
A convergence driven by the development of recording and mixing technology, from the multitrack tape recorders of the 1960s, to the contemporary average computer able to simulate what only some years ago demanded very expensive studio time.
But lowered production costs wasn’t saluted by everyone.

Mechanical music menace
At first, synthesizers were marketed as a substitute for living musicians. Advertisements presented the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer as a huge orchestra. No wonder that the musicians’ trade unions, all over the world, depicted electronic instruments as a threat. They preserved the traumatic memories of when the introduction of talking films created mass unemplyment amongst cinema musicians, and held a strong belief that technical reproduction of music was a threatening rival to live performances.
During the early eighties, the American Federation of Musicians fought against use of synthesizers to mimic string and wind instruments, in the name of employment. One idea, seriously considerated in several countries, was to impose a special fee on synthesizers, to make them less attractive and to support orchestras with “real” instruments.
The London chapter of the British musicians’ union went one step further, demanding a complete ban on synthesizers , which caused a split in the union, where musicians affirming electronics started their own Union of Sound Synthesists (USS).
Both electronic musicians and DJ:s were being labelled as sell-outs who played the game of commercial interests. The unionist resistance against the synthesizer, was rooted in ideas about how capitalists tries to lower production costs, just for their own profit.
The basis for that argument, was the hegemony of a very narrow definition of a musical performer: Only people mechanically controlling the production of sound in an instrument, like a violin or a saxophone.
But that narrow view was soon to be undermined by a number of experiments in hacking and indeterminacy, that explored the sonic machines as something else than just representational technologies. DJ:s hacked the turntable, transforming it into an instrument of musical production, and the discjockey became a cathegory of creators not fitting in any of the roles in the tripartite division of composers, musicians and producers.
The Roland TB-303 was designed to reproduce the sound of a bass-guitar, but was hard to configure and made interesting mistakes. Soon the misuse became the norm, as the unique squelching sounds produced by its filters came to define a whole genre of music , acid house.

Music is, as it were, performance
When making electronic music, the bedroom producer is programming patterns that are interpreted not by musicians but by machines, and then mixing the components together. But the bedroom producer is not really a composer and not a producer , but truly a performer.
In contrast to the institutionalised image of the musician interpreting the symbolic notes of a composer’s score, the bedroom producer interprets not symbols but real sound samples and the imaginary musical styles.
Recombining, refining. Redefining bugs to features. Performing a beat, that in real time is performed again by the dancing crowd, interpreting sounds into bodily movements. Or maybe recorded, encoded as MP3, copied though Soulseek, and psychogeographically performed by playlist fanatics. Music is, as it were, performance. Even the uses of recorded sound must today be understood as real-time experiences , if we are not to be stuck in a dead-end road like the musician’s unions fighting the synthesizer.

Similar tendencies , with selection and recombination as an ever more important creative role , can be seen everywhere on the artistic fields. Without openly confronting copyright law at all, these practices subtly marks out a line of flight. Along that line, creativity and artistic interpretation migrates out from the realm of copyright, leaving its gateways to the realm of semantics wide open and leaking.

Beyond the consumer/producer-dichotomy
The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a way for so-called “consumers” to get so-called “content”, and that we now just got to have “a reasonable distribution” of money between ISP:s and content industry. But we must never fall in that trap, and we can avoid it by refusing to talk about “content” altogether. Instead, we talk about internet as communication.
Therefore, it is totally wrong to regard our role as to represent “consumer interests”. On the contrary, it’s all about escaping the forceful division of humanity into the two groups “producers” and “consumers” that copyrights produces in different ways.
An obvious example is the movie industry’s bizarre lobbying to “plug the analog hole”, by introducing a law banning video equipment able to rip analog media. The law proposal put forward by the MPAA mentions that so-called professional producers of course should have a license to use these video cards anyway. The effect would of course be an extreme consolidation of the split between producers and users.
But so-called “alternative compensation systems”, that some voices put forward as a progressive alternative to DRM and mass-criminalization, they are no less reproducing this split. The idea is usually to impose a special fee on every internet connection, so that a bureaucracy could channel the money to publishers and other rights holders.
This way we can save both the copyright system and file sharing, says amongst others Lawrence Lessig, the EFF, and the Swedish Green party. However, none of them likes to specify exactly how it should be decided which creators that should get money. If book authors should get compensation when their books are digitally transmitted, why should not bloggers get a part of this compensation as well? So, for the very notion of “compensation” to work, there must be someone filtering out the “worthy” forms of artistic creation from “unworthy”. (Or the system could give every internet user money for every line they are writing in a chat, but that would maybe better be called an universal basic income.)
This dilemma also illustrates the schizophrenic nature of industry. Companies like Microsoft and Sony on one hand tries to use DRM to block out independent cultural production. But on the other, they are already totally dependent of what they call “user-generated content”.
Clever entrepreneurs of course do understand that internet business is not about selling information. It is about selling the possibility to interact. Overcoming the split between producers and consumers is not some utopia of a world to come, but a necessity to let communication media be communication media instead of simulating one-way media.

Copyright’s three points of crisis
I have mentioned two key points in copyrights’ permanent crisis, points where concepts that where evolved to handle the separated flows of one-way mass-media clashes with the reality of networked computers.
One was the fact that the very concept of copying is rather arbitrary when it comes to digital technology, as using digital information already implicates that it is copied. Another was the extreme problems with institutionalizing a producer/consumer-division, inside a media technology used for horizontal communication. Both anomalies seems totally unsolvable, from the perspective of copyright, and indicates that the copyfight is very unlikely to cool down. Now I will go on to the third point of crisis: the form/content dichotomy.

Three key points in copyright’s permanented crisis
• RAM/ROM; the very definition of “copying” is arbitrary
• Consumer/producer; impossible to institutionalize, especially in communication media.
• Form/content; the distinction can only pass a digital cable as simulation

The form/content-division belongs in the age of postal distribution
Year 1793, Johan Gottlieb Fichte wrote a piece that for the first time clearly separated “form” and “content”, with the specific and successfull goal of establishing literary copyright. While an author’s ideas are the universal content of writing, he gives them an unique individual form, which is his intellectual property. Then, on another level, the copyrighted material itself usually is described as content, then understood as abstracted artefacts, not bound to a specific media form.

Communication media are, on a kind of third level, also logically divided between form and content; or, more specific, in address and message, or instruction and information. That division could seem totally unproblematic at Fichte’s times around year 1800, at the dawn of modern copyright and a couple of centuries after the postal system got public. The postal system has always built upon the physical separation between the address outside the envelope, and the message inside it, the latter hidden and legally protected.

Already with telephony, however, this separation wall started to leak. The “hole” between form and content was signified by the frequency of 2600 Hz, used by phreakers to insert information that the central servers interpreted as instructions to connect calls for free. But, as the servers were still centralised, this tiny hole never grew to be a huge gap in the wall.

Networked computers, however, are not only media, but universal semiotic machines. Computers makes no difference between information and instruction, they’re storing text and code in just the same way: Form and content cannot be distinguished objectively.

But that distinction is what European politicians today are trying to resurrect, in the implementation of the data retention directive. What they say and probably believe, is that data retention has nothing to do with supervising what people say to each other on the net , it’s not about the content, only about who is communicating with who.
And that is maybe possible if this is restricted to e-mail communication using the SMTP protocol. But what for, if every criminal knows that they can just communicate in chatrooms or with community messages?
Either politicians must give up their stated ambition, or they are bound to go into ever more detailed regulation of specific internet protocols. But Sweden’s judiciary minister thomas Bodström, that has been spearheading the European plans for data retention, still talks about supervising only the address layer and not the content layer.

The important point, in criticising data retention and similar surveillance measures, is not about so called “privacy” or “personal integrity”. We would like to stress the importance of different media logics. The distinguishing of form and content is a physical part of an postal letter, but it cannot pass a data cable. The only way for it to pass, is as a simulation.
And every single regulation that is based on such a simulation, will inevitabely kill one thousand other possible simulations. It will block the exploring of one thousand paths.

Instead of assuming the holiness of privacy, we are questioning the technological consequences of data retention, in terms of detailled regulation of communication protocols, and the ban on anonymous internet connections.
The main problem with surveillance and with the war against filesharing, is maybe not about an unfair trespassing on what should belong to the individual subject , it is about an unfair and absurd attempt to turn networked computers into individual subjects.

A vital experiment of complexity
Maybe what is most important now, is to bypass the urge for solutions, for victory in battles or for compromise and stability.
For example, talking about how to “compensate the creators” is to obscure the truth about the social production of culture. Such talk establishes the myth of copyright as some kind of “wage” for artists, and the strange idea that real-time performative aspects of culture are secondary or unimportant.
And while some of the Creative Commons licenses can of course be usable sometimes, it would also be a wrong to believe in that a “some rights reserved”-approach would do anything to cool down the three anomalies mentioned before. Instead, that approach sometimes just seems to move the problem to another field: Instead of the producer/consumer-dilemma, you get something quite similar, namely the commercial/uncommercial dilemma.
Making general statements about the alternative to copyright always brings the danger of strengthening copyright’s universality claim. On the contrary, trying to keep the grey zone as open and wide as possible will almost automatically produce better conditions for cultural production to go beyond prevalent economic imperatives.
We think that our projects have generally succeeded in escaping the most obvious re-territorializations, like explaining file-sharing just as a response to expensive records. Instead, they aim is to open up and explore new grey zones.
The Pirate Bay is one example , a grey zone currently under attack. Much of the mass-medial reporting are still blind to the grey. Paradoxically, they represent the binary world in an all-too-binary way. In their black and white picture, the conflict is about certain “content”; the picture is painted with The Pirate Bay on one hand and “the rights holders” on the other. Everything that is not juridically plain white like a penguin, is in that picture black.
But we would like to direct the attention to the grey zone, that is all the movies and music and text on The Pirate Bay that no rights holder ever thinks about trying to stop, either because they affirm it as a possibility or because they really don’t care or because the works are actually orphaned.
The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.
The drive of discovering, thinking and inventing alternative processes of production is the affirmative power of life as a vital experiment of complexity. Internet piracy is all about desiring-production, and its long-term effects are beyond our human capacity to compute.

Rasmus Fleischer

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.