While doing some research for my Intellectual Property class, I came across a few amusing articles about Pirate Bay. For those of you who don't know what Pirate Bay is, here's a quick rundown. They were started in 2003 by a Swedish anti-copyright organization, Piratbyrån, but have since separated. The site, thepiratebay.org, is a bit-torrent tracking website that basically enables LOTS of people to easily find and download files from other users sharing them. However, most of these files are copyrighted and so obviously, many bodies around the world have serious issues with the site. However, they've withstood many legal attacks so far.
Here are a few links to some recent articles about them:
- Pirate Bay laughs off three-pronged legal assault
- The Pirate Bay hopes to buy its own country: Sealand
I found the first article interesting just because this is one of the few organizations able to withstand the legal assaults regarding copyright infringement that seem to be becoming more and more prevalent. The current administrators are quite confident in their ability to fight these attacks off, which I think is pretty cool.
For being such a huge part of our society, music prices are ridiculous, especially for music that's increasingly worthless. Artists, who in my opinion, are making increasingly repetitive, monotonous, and overall pathetic music are making MILLIONS. Not to knock on one specific genre, but main stream rap is a great example. I could write the lyrics to most of those songs in 2 minutes. Not only that, but do you seriously want to pay for and condone crap like "I'm gangsta cuz I kill people, have a million girls all over me, I'm so cool"? I for one don't. Again, in my opinion, junk music like that is only polluting the airwaves and not doing any good for anyone. You can already see the effects everywhere too- I'm only 22 and I already think kids nowadays are being surrounded with garbage. Granted, some music is great. Many artists put a lot of hard work and effort into their pieces and the result is music that enriches a lot of peoples' lives. THOSE artists are the ones that deserve the money. However, no one deserves the millions of dollars that the big time artists are receiving.
I don't think the solution is Pirate Bay (or stealing music in general), but I think they're giving some power back to the consumers of music and helping to make a statement in general. WE are the ones that control prices, not the media companies. Our society has demonstrated its inability to control its consumption and companies play off that factor a LOT. At the same time, I think people should still buy an album if they really do enjoy it. Currently, I don't buy much music because I can't afford it- I have far better things to spend the money on. Once I've graduated and am making a decent amount of money though, I fully intend to purchase music from the artists I think came up with worthy material.
