#teampiracy

An article on the remix culture and the lines blurred between piracy.

I stumbled on this article a couple of years ago and the writer brings up the interesting notion of the remix. 

The remix culture is definitely thriving and as Laurence Lessig often writes, it's becoming very much a need in the way new content if reproduced. If you consider the remakes of novels into films like this year's blockbuster, 'The Great Gatsby' could we then argue that it was copyright infringement or 'unoriginal'?

Fair enough we hear you say they got permission to reproduce the story into a filmic experience, but then sampling into new music has gotten quite the stir lately and we're not entirely sure it's fair to label it as outright intellectual property theft.

#teamPiracy: The team that supports P2P file sharing users and Torrent downloaders.

Lets slide away from our free music countdowns and focus on some film. Here are the top 10 most popular films that are being illegally downloaded this week. From the data collected by Torrentfreak, the statistics show that the robots vs. monsters epic action film, Pacific Rim takes the leading title, followed by White House Down and my personal favourite of the list, Elysium with The Internship remaining on this list for the second week in a row.

Album leaks are an everyday thing now. Record stores, label executives and music insiders are able to get their stick hands on upcoming albums of recording artists and illegal upload them onto file sharing servers. Leaks occur SO often that artists seem to lack compassion and hype for its digital and physical release (as spoken before under the James Blake post.) 

'Has It Leaked?' is a music community and online magazine which informs the public with upcoming albums and its current release status. Under each album's page is given its own separate release and leak status, hype rating and comment section. As a product of piracy, the demand and popularity for album leaks have birthed such a website, which goes to show the ambitious, impatient nature of society for information. 

This is further exemplified from a Blog article from Property of Zack where the leak of an album is inevitable. It is questioning WHEN the album will leak is what fans want answered.

Forget about if entirely— when has become the new standard.

Album leaks have become such a common intervention within the music industry, musicians have implemented particular timeframes that constitute whether a leak is too early or not. According to Dave Stephen, the lead singer for metal band, We Came As Romans states that a week early release is considered 'perfect.'

A recent example is Drake's 2013 release, Nothing Was The Same, which was due out on the 24th of September but was leaked eight days earlier on the 16th.

So get amongst it and find out when your artist's new album is going to leak!

This TechDirt article, written by Mark Masnick questions The Copyright Act (1968) and its effectiveness within today's digital age.

The 'draconian' enforcements of current Copyright Laws show no evidence of improvements on music sales as these policies continue to bring down piracy. In fact anti-piracy laws and regulations which have been recently implemented in Japan have shown staggering results that show the complete inverse. Since its initiation on the 1st of October 2012, Japan's anti-piracy laws have actually caused music sales to fall, with total music sales decreasing by 7%, as well as digital sales plummeting 24%.

If... an artist could make more money and have a bigger fan base, but the "trade off" is also knowing that a large group of people would effectively "free ride" and not pay for your content, why is that a problem?"

What Masnick is suggesting here is that attacking piracy networks and enforcing harsher copyright policies are quite problematic as to its key purpose to promote creativity within the arts.

Furthermore, he exemplifies his confusion by questioning what exactly the problem is if the artists are gaining revenue and compiling a larger fan base, as well as fans discovering new artists and music through these pirated mediums.

According to the article published by The Artifice, the season finale for the hit television series, Game of Thrones peak on pirate servers at 171,572 simultaneous shares during the 24 hours after the episodes official broadcast on HBO. 

And the award for most pirated downloads goes to... Australia! Now this might comes as quite a shock to you, but yes fellow Aussie men and women are the biggest contributors to illegal downloads, particularly for various television shows.

Now the real question is, can you blame us? 

Australian television has had a reputation in the past for being slow with broadcasting upcoming episodes, lagging up to a year behind other countries such as the US, Canada and the UK. However, cable networks have really picked up their game and started to quicken things up by implementing broadcasting campaigns such as 'Express from the US' showcasing new episodes a day or two after its release in the United States. From the advancements of technology and the Internet however, that short timeframe may still be too late for our informatively eager minds. Social media has connected various people around the world, and for Australians to be given even a days worth of plot-based ignorance could risk being victims of spoilers, we all know that is a matter of life and death. Therefore we turn to the Internet to give us Aussies the ability to watch, talk and keep up with the rest of the world.

So, who is to blame here? The television networks? Or the pirated networks. 

A controversial piece on what the music industry is currently doing wrong within the social contexts of technology and communication. The music industry has been in search for years to find a financially competitive business model that can contest the free costs of P2P file-sharing network such as The Pirate Bay by using, "how can we compete with free" as an excuse for their large loss of revenue. Thörnkvist states that it is very possible to compete with free and it will take a few tweaks within their business models for labels to adapt to the digital age.

Music should be about the reach, not the money.

I rather have 100 000 listeners and 100 buyers than 100 listeners and 100 buyers.

What the recording industry should be doing is finding research and insight into what listeners want. Where and how they are receiving their music. What they are willing to pay for and reasons as to why they should give their hard earned money to something they can get for free off the Internet. Instead this time and energy is spent on lawsuits and lobbying tougher policies and laws.

As a business you must develop and change when reality does.

Therefore the record industry must embrace the technology, digitalisation of music and decentralisation of distribution by moving on from their traditional methods. The MP3 is the new CD!

The article's most powerful statement expresses how music should not be contained and over regulated by copyright laws lobbied by record labels. Music itself is referred to as the 'carrier of emotion' and should be distributed to everyone and everywhere without the harsh bounds of legislation. Therefore increasing music's reach and distribution as well as offering fans a stronger incentive to pay, are the methods and strategies the industry must embrace to compete with piracy.