There have been many cases where bands and music labels have been publicly vocal about the fact that their album has been heavily pirated. Complaining that their business has been torn apart, most of them appear to ignore the link between accumulating many unauthorized downloads and the retail success of their product. Short and sweet – if your product is good, thousands will buy it. If your product is good, thousands will pirate it too – the two scenarios go hand in hand.

One band who thought that evil pirates were taking all their money are Sweden-based Stockholm Stoner. In a recent interview picked up by brokep of The Pirate Bay, the band explained that since releasing their album on January 21st this year, they had sold a pretty-unimpressive 379 copies.

Apparently, however, their music is a smash hit on BitTorrent, racking up an impressive 80,000 downloads. This ratio of legal to unauthorized downloads seems unprecedented and the band were quick to express their dismay. While noting that they aren’t specifically against P2P networks, the band said it “would be fun” to get paid for their work and that “adults must understand that they can not steal,” while saying that the Internet should be filtered – “..the Chinese can do it after all,” they said.

But this is the Internet, and not everything is how it seems. What could be worse than getting pirated 210 copies to every one sold? How about… not getting pirated at all? Unfortunately for the band the download stats for their album were gathered from entirely the wrong place, via scammy links on a torrent meta search engine. As can be seen from this search for Stockholm Stoner, the site shows many thousands of downloads. They are fake – you can type anything in that search box and the site will return ‘stats’.

Rather than being relieved, I can’t help but think that having found out that they’re not popular with pirates after all, the band would be hugely disappointed. Searching in the usual places, TorrentFreak couldn’t find any significant downloads of this band at all. Better to be popular and downloaded, than not downloaded at all, surely?

Another artist who claims to be hugely popular with pirates is Indiana “The Internet Police Are Coming” Gregg. In an interview with the BBC, Gregg claimed that one of her albums had been downloaded 250,000 times – a figure we found just too outrageous to be taken seriously, with our own calculations indicating this assessment was inflated by around 240,000 downloads.

Using the publicity from her spat with The Pirate Bay to great effect, Gregg went on to create Kerchoonz – a site paid for by £250,000 of public money where people could download and listen to music for free. Trying to convert ‘pirates-with-morals’ to the site, every listen or download would result in the artists getting paid, emphasized Gregg.

Indiana Gregg herself is touting her own music on the site and is actually the #4 artist in the Kerchoonz ‘Top 100′ list. Since she’s so popular with pirates (250,000 downloads remember?) she must be tearing it up on Kerchoonz. Wrong. Current stats indicate that her tracks have been streamed 1180 times and downloaded just 310 times. Presuming she’s getting paid at the same rates as the other artists on the site, Gregg netted $2 for this effort, which is exactly $2 more than she accused The Pirate Bay of giving her.

Overall it seems that getting heavily pirated is an indication of success, and a pointer that good money is to be made at retail – The Dark Knight was pirated at least a million times but has already made over $1 billion dollars worldwide.

If no-one wants to pirate your music or download it for free, don’t expect to be able to sell it either. Come back pirates, the music industry needs you.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Later she reflected on her rant, sometimes contradicting her earlier claims such as her millionaire status. So, considering the dismal status of torrents of her work, she needed another way to cash in.

Enter Kerchoonz.com. From what we can gather, it aims to be an online jukebox, mixed in with a music download service, maybe something like Jamendo. Ms Gregg’s husband, music producer Ian Morrow, explained the service to the BBC, saying “If you’re a musician you’ll upload your music to the site. Anyone plays it, you get paid. Anyone downloads it, you get paid. That’s it, simple. Everything’s free for the user.”

The main question then, is where the money will come from. Currently, they have a £250,000 investment from the Scottish Co-investment Fund. While this can fund the website initially, with a free end-user model it’s going to be incredible hard to gain any revenue. Advertising will be the only alternative, so until the site becomes popular, it will hemorrhage money. It doesn’t help that the site promises “no adverts attached!!!” which simply means that the site will be smothered in pop-ups and sponsored links. The payouts will probably be minuscule as well, so anyone expecting this to be a major source of revenue will be left unhappy.

Of course, over-exaggeration is nothing new for Gregg and Morrow. They claim they got the idea for the site after the release of Gregg’s album, “Woman at Work”. In an interview with the BBC, they claimed it had over 250,000 downloads. Our own research shows the upper limit to be more like 10,000 and the current activity of the torrents supports that. The name (Kerchoonz) appears to be derived from the word Gregg used whenever she talked about the Pirate Bay making money , kerching.

Another point to ponder is that while they claim there will be no DRM, watermarking will be used. One of the press releases for the site states “Kerchoonz tracks downloads and streams through a combination of the ISRC and play counts by utilizing unique coding and encryption within the application.” With this approach there could be privacy and profiling concerns, as with all watermarking.

Will the project succeed? At this stage it seems extremely unlikely, as there are already better services out there and any proposed rewards are likely to be extremely small. The recommendation and similarity aspects of both Pandora and last.fm have been the key to their success, letting people discover new artists. As to whether Kerchoonz will have it, who knows?

Right now, they are collecting emails and names, and a link to their privacy policy, but no actual policy. It’s polish like that that will make this public funded website go all the way…. to titsup.com. In the end, it sparks the phrase “Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa seneca!” in that the only difference between Kerchoonz and The Pirate Bay, is that with Kerchoonz, you have a much smaller audience, but with some distant hope of getting some money back.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Leaks of pre-release material onto the Internet are pretty normal events these days. Even the mainstream media are happy to cover the big leaks, usually while portraying file-sharers as the son of the devil. In the past many file-sharing news sites have covered such leaks of movies and music as a matter of course, but as they become more prevalent, less people report on them.

Normally the approaches of the mainstream (and the bands, artist and labels) and that of the file-sharing community are pretty much opposite. On the one hand piracy is killing everything it touches. On the other hand, the file-sharing hand, it’s something totally different – free promotion and all-important publicity for the artists.

Our regular readers will know that the relatively unknown Indiana Gregg did rather well from her recent experiences with piracy, thanks largely to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak and dozens of other sites. And she’s not on her own, many other artists have benefited from piracy.

Some of these people are openly happy with their ‘piracy’ successes, others complain like crazy. Interestingly (and this is an opinion piece so feel free to disagree) we now appear to have a third type of piracy complainer – the complain-like-crazy-but-secretly-love-it type.

Enter ‘BuckCherry‘. I haven’t been (un)fortunate enough to hear anything from them but according to Wikipedia they are a hard/alternative rock band. They claim to be pretty mad that a track entitled “Too Drunk…” from their latest album “Black Butterfly” has started cropping up on BitTorrent sites, way in advance of its September 15th release date. This is what the band has to say:

“Too Drunk…,” a featured track from “BLACK BUTTERFLY,” recently appeared online at a number of BitTorrent sites. Buckcherry has released an official statement regarding the song’s unscheduled arrival, declaring, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

There is an old saying, “Least said, soonest mended“, but clearly BuckCherry have never heard of this saying or the concept, since they didn’t just comment casually on the leak, but shouted it from the rooftops in a fully-blown Atlantic Records press release. They mention the leak in the opening paragraph:

Buckcherry Reveals “BLACK BUTTERFLY”; Platinum-Certified Hard Rockers Announce New Album as “Too Drunk…” Appears Online;

…and then go on to mention the actual network (BitTorrent) in the second paragraph detailed above, which is not a particularly smart move if you’re trying to dissuade file-sharers from the inevitable free download. Adding further fuel to the already smoldering pile of suspicion is the fact that it’s possible for fans who preorder to get the “Too Drunk…” track for free.

I may be completely wrong in coming to the conclusion that BuckCherry has (cleverly?) manipulated 30 million world-wide file sharers into sampling their work through their faux displeasure in this press release. I may be wrong that Indiana Gregg is quietly enjoying all the extra publicity afforded to her by piracy.

But of course, the BitTorrent community wouldn’t fall for such a cynical publicity attempt and the file-sharing press wouldn’t fall for it either, we’re not that stupid.

Hmmmm….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

TorrentFreak heard that Indiana had a message for The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent community and file-sharers in general, so we caught up with her to find out exactly what. She told us that although she agrees with the concept of file sharing, she believes that musicians and writers need to make a living or at least enough money to enable them to re-invest into their creation. She also gave us her opinions about how file-sharing will be ‘policed’ in the future and notes that the methods may not be 100% fair. “With all forms of change, there are always the up-sides and down-sides,” she told us.

It’s not very often an artist will speak as openly or at such length on this subject as Indiana has. Some people are going to like what she has to say. Thousands, maybe millions are going to hate it, but there isn’t a debate when only one side speaks – so here it is – uncensored, controversial, outrageous and thought provoking.

Something tells us this debate is far from over…..

I felt misrepresented in the first article and obviously, my attempt at humor by stating I’m a ‘millionaire’ wasn’t appropriately quantified. Am I a millionaire because I have millions of ants in my garden? Is it because I have had millions of people listen to my music on sites like MySpace or YouTube? Is it because I’m grateful to be healthy? How people quantify ‘richness’ in their lives depends on how people perceive value. And, yes, I’m guilty of fueling Peter Sunde’s fire and animosity. I can image it’s not easy in his position just now considering the amount of angry artistic people who are fronting against his cause. I’m sure he has his core values that he wants to defend… I have mine… and I’m not afraid to speak about them… for the sake of music.. and the common good.

The Pirate Bay: The Sinking Ship…..My Response

The Wild West of the Internet seems to be getting seriously out of hand and i’ve been wondering if and when the Internet Police will come and sort it all out. I mean… this is the new Wild West…

We’ve all heard and read every form of complaint about the Internet. From cyber-bullying, to child pornography sites, to copyright theft in the form of ‘file-sharing’.

Imagine….What if the Internet had ‘frontiers’. Why can we go all over the world on the Internet without a passport? Why are cybernauts allowed to steal goods from the store ‘shelves’ and ‘shop windows’ and justify it as ‘sharing’? Since the birth of the Internet, people have been hacking software, stealing music, books, films, television shows, credit card numbers, eBay accounts, IP addresses… you name it, if it’s out there and can be downloaded, it’s being virtually stolen from under your nose.

So, why is this Wild West so hard to monitor? Why are people up in arms and waiving their guns wildly… … Are these new pirate ships sharing other people’s goods for gold? Of course they are… yes, I’m speaking about the torrent sites… and all the other sites who are making money on other people’s back…

Is the Internet really that much ‘bigger’ than the ‘real’ world? I think not. I believe that in the near future, we will all be using our Internet passports. If the government can do it in the real world, what’s stopping them from monitoring this new ‘Wild West’ phenomenon of the Internet in every town, city, state and country. I mean… Don’t we have just as much right as citizens to be protected on the Internet as we would be anywhere else? And really, the only people who would disagree with this idea are people who either are engaging in illegal activity or people who claim ‘civil liberty and freedom of speech’ on the Internet, but remember guys, those freedoms are only good until you begin to harm other people.

You don’t have freedom to shout from the rooftops at 3am outside your neighbor’s house…. and it’s certainly not your civil right to steal from your local baker and share his cream puffs outside his shop window…either, is it? Allow me to explain.

Let’s take one of the major forces on the Internet for example. Let’s look at all of the big music content sites (such as MySpace, Yahoo Music, etc) who seem to be huge driving swarms of traffic on the Internet. When you see the amount of advertisements per page and click, you know you can almost hear the ‘kerching’. These sites are like interstate junctions at rush hour (24 hours a day) so to speak. Torrents are no different…. Kerching kerching… They are giving away things like films, music, tv programs, software…. If it can be downloaded, it can be found… for free…

Thousands upon thousands of websites, sharing sites, and torrent sites exist. These websites are making a constant steady flow of income by using other people’s goods…they are pointing people to the goods (music) for free and selling masses of advertisement because people come to ‘leech’ the goods…these sites are basically allowing people to steal and destroy the music industry (which is in fact like shooting themselves in their own foot). The sites themselves claim to be ‘legal’. It is the user’s responsibility not to share copyrighted files.

So, you’d be silly to think that the Internet police are not planning on coming. How easy would it be to simply find all these people who are illegally ‘sharing’ and slap a lawsuit on them. They can do that with a virtual push of a button. How hard do you think it will be for the ISP’s to hand over your Internet passport over to the new frontier police? They can see how much you’ve ‘shared’ and potentially fine every single torrent user. I bet the torrent sites wouldn’t like that very much. Suddenly all their users would disappear.

Last year, in an article on Sky News, I read that a woman received a massive fine for file sharing on the KaZaA network. I thought, great! The police are coming.Then my husband sent me a link to another article titled “Should You Pay For Music?” I instantly thought….eh? Has the world gone mad? It’s like saying “Should you pay for petrol?” or “Should you pay for bread?” Hey, maybe I was being too ‘traditional’? I guess you could compare it to you, yourself, working all week long. You go to the bank and cash your check, and the banker takes your money without putting it into your account.

But, it’s much deeper than this. Whether or not the public is offered music for free or at a cost is not the real issue. The real problem lies in the fact that ‘share’ sites are making money by pointing to other people’s copyrighted content… The end user gets it for free… the torrents make money…. And the musicians and artists?? Well, they get to live off of ‘fresh air’. Put simply, musicians will not be able to exist financially in order to create music if income streams are cut off (whether or not a record label comes to play).

And this is exactly what is happening.

As a musician and an independent record-label, I see my livelihood being sucked away every day through file-sharing and torrent sites which are allowing copyright material to flow in and out of their sites. All they have to do is claim that it’s the responsibility of the user to make sure the content they are sharing is not copyright protected material. Last year, in a period of two weeks, we tracked and found over 100,000 leechers of my album alone. Since then, we’ve found about 150,000 more, of which I, the artist, who put my heart and soul, time and sweat into an album and raising money to market that album, haven’t received a dime, not one red cent. Full torrent files of a complete album! Since it’s so easy to ‘share’ the music….

In the real world, if everyone walked into HMV and took as many albums as they like… and said they were ‘sharing’…errr… shoplifting? I really don’t see how people think they can give music or any other form of media for ‘free’ without it hurting the livelihoods of musicians. Sharing of copyright protected material is 100% illegal. However, since it’s not being regulated, it’s as if all of us musicians have just left the shop door open so that anybody can lift our guitars and gear out on the street and drive off with it. Isn’t that what’s happening? If you can’t make a dime from that album you just spent all your money, time and effort on because everyone is ‘sharing’ it, then how are you going to buy your guitar strings, pay your landlord, or eat? You’ll be selling your gear soon and asking the boss for overtime. Right?

Torrent sites are claiming that they are creating ‘free promotion’ for musicians…. that’s right.. they claim that by giving all these people the opportunity to “share” the music, they are doing all of us musicians a big huge favor. In fact, they think that musician’s, songwriters, sound engineers, mastering companies, etc… should all live on ‘pure fresh air’. They blatantly state that they think it should be enough for a musician to make music out of their ‘passion’ for music… and well, since it’s ‘art’ it shouldn’t have a price….. er, ok….. maybe we should go and see if Fender will start giving away free guitars? Free gear for everybody!!! Yipppeee…. Free strings, free amplifiers, free microphones and drum kits……awww… how novel.

Here’s another funny one…the torrent site’s answer to how musicians are supposed to earn a living is: .. well, musician’s will just need to go out and gig some more in order to make a living. Maybe the band can sell a few more T-shirts, etc. etc. They rationalize stealing by stating that they go to gigs and buy tickets…(or that they plan to do so if ever their favorite band can finally afford to come and do a tour in their country). They claim that by allowing sharing, they are ‘leveling the playing field’.

Well, torrent sites are absolutely NOT leveling the playing field. They are just moving the field and reaping the benefits due to a temporary loophole in the law. I’ll bet that when all their users get slapped a fine for ‘sharing’ in their respective countries the torrent sites won’t be there to support them. I doubt that they are planning to send all their users a bunch of ‘gold’ off of their pirate ship. So far, there have only been a few ‘examples’ made with users being slapped heavy fines. I have a hunch that this will CHANGE.

Aww, now there’s a word “CHANGE”.

Well, let’s talk about CHANGE for a moment. The torrent people even go as far as to quote Charles Darwin in an effort to justify theft:

“In nature, it’s not the strongest nor the most intelligent who survives. It’s the most adaptable to change.” (a quote from a torrent fanatic referring to Darwins theory).

Hmmm………..well, I assume that the torrent sites are planning to be adaptable pretty soon then, considering the number of pending lawsuits from pretty strong and intelligent companies who have not only proven their adaptability to change, but have changed the world as we know it (companies like Microsoft, for example).

Please.. spare us this kind of rhetoric guys. With the likes of Microsoft, Prince, and the IFPI going after you, any outsider might begin to wonder when YOU plan to adapt to ‘change’. It’s becoming evident that your business model is a sinking ship. Pretty soon, your users will be slapped with fines and more big companies will be slapping on lawsuits. Why not just sink your ship yourselves..eh? That’s really what you’re doing.. Your resistance to ‘change’ is in complete conflict with your very survival… Oh the irony. “Let’s have all our users quote Darwin”.

“Sharing is caring”, so they say. Torrent sites are promoting the idea that if people are taking the time to ‘share’ other peoples copyright material it means they care. So, what’s stopping the torrent pirates from ‘sharing’ the revenue from the advertising on their sites? Funny how it’s ok for musicians to live off of ‘fresh air’ but these pirates are meanwhile filling their boat with loot on the backs of other people’s hard work. Let’s see how adaptable to ‘change’ they decide to become… and put their Darwin theory where their mouth is….

Free promotion? Basically, torrents are promoting music that has ‘already been promoted’, so it’s not ‘free promotion’. There will be a small percentage of people who go through the millions of songs that are being seeded and perhaps discover something new because they searched for something they had already heard about. So, torrents are not only ‘moving’ the playing field, they are, in reality, making the playing field so un-even that bands are going to be the new “Sysiphus’s” trying to roll a ball uphill for eternity – although the sites would like to fool us all into believing otherwise.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Most people know that The Pirate Bay doesn’t like to remove torrents at the copyright holders request, in fact they claim they have never removed any. Instead, when a copyright holder enters into dialogue with the staff, instead of removing the files in question the site posts the discussions up in the ‘Legal Threats’ section. Most of the discussions are entertaining to a degree, with some even extending to personal insults.

However, during the last few days, another copyright complaint and subsequent discussion has been posted and although many might find it funny, personally I found it quite embarrassing raising the question: Should copyright holders just keep their complaints to themselves to maintain some dignity – at least where The Pirate Bay is concerned?

The complaint comes from Ian Morrow at UK based label Gr8pop Ltd, representing American vocalist Indiana Gregg. Morrow requested the removal of a .torrent linking to the album “Woman At Work”, but the request was worded in an unfortunate way which appeared to betray a lack of legal understanding:

We request that you have the file removed immediately as this is legal copyright and has not been authorised to be released as an illegal download.

Of course, it didn’t take long before Peter Sunde, aka brokep, decided to start tearing it apart:

Is it possible to authorise something to be an illegal download? That would be a legal download if it would be authorised now, wouldn’t it. Also, i’ve never heard of “legal copyright” (nor illegal copyright for that matter). I think you need to re-check your intentions of the e-mail and try again. We do not respond to messages that do not make 100% perfect sense. You’re confused.

The response back to Peter starts the farce ball rolling, as it always seems do with these complaints. Ian Morrow starts by insisting that BitTorrent or any other form of sharing is illegal, “full stop”, but of course, that’s not true. Not really a good start, but Ian is just warming up, informing Peter that “..having sat on cross parliamentary committees, resolved to regenerating music and culture in my country, I’m afraid you may just have picked the wrong person to cross swords with on this occasion.”

Indeed, the email to Peter was copied to many other people including many people in the Scottish parliament, the MCPS, the PPL, the late Roy Orbision’s wife and many other people, including Indiana herself.

However, things take a turn for the strange. Ian goes on to state that due to people sharing the album his company is almost bankrupt (along with him personally) and Indiana herself – despite her current position of No.1 in the MySpace charts and the 4th most viewed artist on YouTube. The inevitable response from Peter is what we have to come to expect:

You’re a hoot, that’s what you are :) I want to hug you in a non-sexual way and tell you that you make my heart burst of joy and cuddle up like a cute little cookie monster and ask for more milk…. and btw, to be in a business you have very little knowledge on what you’re doing. I would actually see you as a retard, but it’s hard when you’re so cuddly and manly! I wish I was just 20 years older and a girl… oh my..

Sadly, instead of realizing where all this is heading, Indiana Gregg herself steps in with a response of her own (including a lesson on copyright law – United States law), which basically gives Peter more ammunition to respond in his own inimitable style. It is all very messy and very embarrassing – and it gets worse.

Undeterred and armed with a shaky understanding of the scope of the law she’s trying to enforce, Indiana writes to Peter with a fairly detailed explanation of a torrent site’s obligations under the DMCA, but makes the same mistake as so many others. The DMCA is a US law and The Pirate Bay is not in the United States, leaving herself wide open for further ridicule.

Indiana goes on to explain that she’s actually a millionaire after all, contradicting Ian’s earlier bankruptcy comments which were clearly designed to tug on Peter’s heart strings. Unfortunately when it comes to copyright, Peter’s heart is made of stone.

Which brings us to the point I raised at the start of this post. What actually is the point of complaining to The Pirate Bay? They aren’t going to take down any torrents and they will publicize all of these copyright discussions with the aim of making the sender look badly informed. Despite the deliberate (and probably calculated) juvenile tone adopted by Peter Sunde, the senders of the complaints always seem to come off worse, due to their very apparent lack of understanding of the law.

So, are these complaints down to sheer desperation or are these labels really that badly informed about the law? Maybe when Ian’s friends in the Scottish parliament see the correspondence they will be suitably outraged and pledge seriously to do something. Trouble is, if the law in Sweden can’t do anything about The Pirate Bay crew right now, what can be done at all?

As the complaints pile up and the stakes increase, The Pirate Bay continues on, treating the anti-pirates with contempt and offering them continuing public humiliation. It seems now that the only thing that can stop the site is a defeat in court, but since servers are scattered right around the world, all the signs point to the likelihood that even that won’t bring a halt to the torrents – or the complaints.

You can read the exchanges here: One, Two, Three and Four

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.