‘New’ Pirate Bay tries it on with STIM
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- So I see that the ‘new’ TPB is trying to cozy up to something called STIM — one of those pyramid schemes that falsely claim to be performer’s rights agencies.
(Of course, we’re all smart enough to realize where the corporate media oligarchy is concerned, nobody has ‘rights’, especially not the performers and composers who’ve been screwed into selling those corporations their copyrights, or deprived of them outright by way of ‘work for hire’, but I digress.)
I gotta ask:
How stupid is everybody involved in this scenario?
1. The TPB guys are mind-numbingly stupid if they think this is going to get the Copyright Cartels off their asses. Because it’s not. That ‘win’ is one of the vanishingly-few ‘victories’ the corporations have managed to get. (How membership in a pro-copyright organization doesn’t count as a conflict of interest is beyond me. Can you imagine the shitstorm if the judge had been even a lukewarm advocate of copyright reform?)
So if the TPB guys are using this as a way to get the funds to pay the corporate lobbybots, this is a fantastically stupid way to go about it.
Up until this insanity, the TPB guys could have simply asked for donations to help them pay the fines, and they’d have likely gotten at least some donations simply because of their status as cultural heroes to the p2p/copyright-reform scene.
Instead, they just end up looking like complete sellouts, which is essentially what they are, at this point.
(Even if they ARE creating something new and cool, a fairly-large segment of the p2p populace won’t even give it the time of day — just look at Shawn Fanning and Snocap. Talk about irony: the guy who ‘broke’ p2p on the rest of the world trying to sell what amounts to a form of DRM.)
2. Hans Pandeya and the rest of the Global Gaming crowd are stupid if they expect to get a good deal from the corporate media oligarchy and/or it’s various front-groups. History has demonstrated that trying to placate those people only leads to some kind of lobotomized, DRM-crippled bullshit that nobody in their right mind would actually use.
People didn’t really seem to interested in shitty, DRM-crippled junk even when it WAS free, which is why Spiralfrog is dead. But at least Spiralfrog didn’t want to charge people for the ‘privilege’ of seeding files and donating bandwidth, which is basially the only part anybody can actually figure out about the ‘new” TPB’s business-model so far.
Pandeya and company have really misunderstood the culture and values of p2p fans/free culture people, and that miscalculation is pretty much guaranteed to bite them in the ass when nobody much bothers with their crap.
3. But the stupidest ones of all are the folks who will actually bother with the ‘new’ Pirate Bay. You know the type: sheeplike and gullible folks who’ll gladly ‘buy’ DRM infected crap on the foolish assumption that doing so will somehow end up paying the artists.
These are the same people who bitch when something goes wrong with the DRM and they can’t get to the files they ‘bought’, by the way.
Trust me: there’s somebody out there who will gladly pay for the privilege of hosting DRM-crippled content and thus, propping up the otherwise useless and utterly failed corporate media behemoths.
All in all, I predict that the ‘new’ TPB will be every bit as successful as the ‘new’ Napster and the ‘New” mp3.com.
If you can actually call those ’successful.”
Of course, there are a few things that the RIAA member-corporations could do which would maybe — just maybe — have a chance of saving them from the collapse and oblivion they so richly deserve:
1. First, they could actually admit copyright is merely a commercial privilege, and — in a gesture of good faith, actually allow some of their content to enter the Public Domain on schedule, instead of buying themselves a term extention every time it comes up. If they did this, they’d actually be living up to their side of the (faustian) bargain we call ‘intellectual property’.
2. They could lobby for some relatively-small changes to the existing copyright laws, such as a more reasonable term (Ten years?) and mandatory registration with the copyright office (which would solve the ‘orphan works’ problem AND make it easier for rights-holders to get paid).
3. They could stop requiring artists to sell their copyright to the corporations as a condition of being distributed, and completely abolish ‘work for hire’. Then, they’d be admitting that they REALLY are mere distribution-channels.
4. They could take the lead in digitizing and uploading stuff from their back catalogs onto p2p networks, instead of trying (vainly) to kill them off.
5. They could stop using DMCA takedown-notices on stuff that obviously qualifies as fair use, like when corporate-’owned’ music happens to be playing in the background of a video of a small child dancing.
6. They could fire Frank Farian and everybody like him, and get back to *scouting for* talent, instead of manufacturing dishonest knockoffs like Milli Vanilli.
7. They could apologize for the way they’ve handled the p2p thing, refund the funds they extorted, and beg forgiveness for the harm they caused.
Of course, we all know they won’t do any of that, because they’re a bunch of rapaciously greedy, technologically-illiterate vermin, just like they’ve always been.
Henry Emrich – p2pnet
[Emrich says he's, "just some guy," sometime musician, wannabe writer, sporadic blogger, and (hopefully) good-natured person. He and his wife live in Pennsylvania with two cats, and, "entirely too many record albums".]
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cozy up – Entertainment Industry Cuddles Up to The Pirate Bay, August 17, 2009
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August 18th, 2009 at 10:54 am
I just want to make it clear that I had no role in any of these bargains, “faustian” or otherwise.
The whole TPB fiasco is simply a pump and dump scheme to move worthless public stock. It has been from the first breathy press announcements and it still is today. I don’t think GGF really expects to magically cut deals with a bunch of music companies – they’re just “buying” the hype around TPB to drive up their stock price. Is there a plan after that? If there is, without question it’s not the public gibberish that’s been fed to pandering sycophants like Ernesto.
The world has moved past the TPB meltdown – those young men simply got in too deep and couldn’t play at that level of the game. Now, it’s almost like a form of rubbernecking, watching the crash unfold because you just can’t stop yourself.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Hahaha, I love your posts Henry. Unrelated to the content, it always makes me laugh though that every one of them has to mention Milli Vanilli at some point. It’s like Where’s Waldo, I’m not satisfied until I’ve found it. Keep up the great contributions.
August 18th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Abolish Corporate Welfare!
Return copyright to a reasonable time frame.
This is not about artists; it is about corporations wanting a guaranteed profit and manipulating governments to get it. Unfortunately the corporations have the artists in a stranglehold and some (many?) believe they cannot survive without them.
The thing the labels have done is dangle the carrot in front of the ‘artists’ whether real artists or manufactured. What’s the carrot? See MTV cribs. Once you sign with us (the media cartels) you get millions. And some (many) artists now believe they are entitled to that. The corporations love it because they can exploit the artists. Of course it’s pissed off many fans as well, sure we want to see the artists we like doing well, but flaunting how much youâre screwing the customers, because we know that the corps make way more than the artists.
Copyright needs to be set back to a reasonable length of time. Copyright needs to ensure creators are protected from the corporate leeches. Copyright needs to be fair to both the creator and the customers/fans (thats right NOT CONSUMERS, CUSTOMERS & FANS).
A good start would be to separate some of the “steps” between the creators and the customers:
Distribution should be just that distribution and should get paid cost + a percentage to distribute. Not take over ownership of the works. They should be required to show the real costs.
Management/promotion Company should handle promotion and have to show costs as well.
If an artists/creator requires funding that should be separate, say a lending institution… now where can we find those?
August 18th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
ernesto? are you joking? he called the whole GGF plan thing “absurd”
anyone who is following this story knows
1- tpb domain name is only being sold
2- tpb lives on – openbittorrent is already tracking tpb torrents and torrage is stocking them all already
3-screw GGF who cares? they will epic fail the whole shizzle
the tpb men did a great thing, sold a damn domain name for $7+ million and also keep the torrents going
but under a different name
i would do the same.genius
August 18th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I didn’t know i mentioned Milli Vanilli that much (even though they DO piss me off!)
The real villain of that episode was Frank Farian, in that he tried to pawn that bullshit off on what amounted to false pretenses. By rights, it shold have been the session-musicians who REALLY recorded/performed the stuff who got famous, not some talentless pretty-boy dancer/model slobs.
I can understand lip-syncing to your own stuff (Like Britney Spears does at all of her shows) so she can concentrate on the choreography, but lip-syncing to stuff you didn’t even DO? Shit, even the Monkees eventually stopped being totally fake, started playing their own instruments, and took some creative control over their albums (but then again, some of those guys were actually musicians already — Nesmith, for one.)
But yeah, I do mention Milli Vanilli quite often. Glad you noticed
August 18th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
@ Henry
Milli Vanilli
Quite often? heh
Over and over and over and over and over …
Cheers!
August 18th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Girl you know it’s true
August 19th, 2009 at 12:30 am
“Girl you know itâs true
”
AAAAAAGH, nooooooo!
August 19th, 2009 at 7:13 am
Henry,
You need to become a lobbyist….. Your eloquence suprised me.
In seven items you sumarised what it took me years to learn.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
You were lip-syncing that, weren’t you Carlos?!
August 20th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Thanks for the kind words, Tom.
Lobbying isn’t the solution, at least not here in the States, where the whole political process is loaded in favor of the two ‘major parties’. (Yes, before anybody asks, I really DO envy the European approach to things, proportional representation and parties having to form coalitions and such — infinitely preferable to ‘bipartisanship’ that achieves nothing.)
Probably the best approach would be some sort of not-for-profit foundation (unlike for-profit corporations, “nonprofits” are allowed to actually concentrate on delivering goods and/or services instead of just considering such things as ‘externalities’ — regrettable adjuncts to profit.) Maybe something incorporated as a 5013(c). I’d have no idea how to even begin doing something like this, which is why I’m *still* just some guy in PA.
I’ve seen several organized “movements” have real success spreading their message by leveraging the Net in a really “grassroots” way — the Ron Paul folks, the Zeitgeist movement, the various “free culture” type groups, etc.
“Anonymous” seems to have really pissed off the church of Scientology, etc.
I may be eloquent — and again, thanks for saying so — but I really have no idea what to do with such eloquence, except inasmuch as Jon allows me to contribute stuff here — which, interestingly enough, propagates to other sites, thanks to him using CC license.
Anybody got any ideas for how to put together some kind of lobbying or advocacy organization?