Jan 06, 2016
Bit Torrent website The Pirate Bay's co-founder Peter Sunde claims to have built a "music industry doomsday device". It's name is Kopimashin, and it's aim is to take down music in a way that Napster could have only ever dreamed of.
Sunde claims that Kopimashin can duplicate a track 100 times in one second. In a bid to ridicule music piracy laws, he explains that this device theoretically sets record labels back millions of dollars. "The one running at my home is up to 120 million copies as we speak," he says. That equals $150 million in losses to the recording industry – following their logic,” he said.
“I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy," he explained to Torrent Freak. "The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it’s not a danger to any industry at all.”
The point he's trying to make is that music piracy does not equal lost money. As an example, he has apparently been copying Gnarls Barkley's hit "Crazy" 8 million times a day, which should technically be costing the industry $10,000,000 per day.
“But following their rhetoric and mindset it will bankrupt them. I want to show with a physical example – that also is really beautiful in it’s own way – that putting a price to a copy is futile.”
The device itself features an LCD screen outlining the theoretical costs of the downloads. Sunde has created 13 Kopimashin machines, which he plans to both sell and display in art exhibitions.
Watch this video to learn more:
Image: Critical Commons