Kopimashin auto-generates $10m daily loss for the music industry

[HEXUS]

The device was created by TPB co-founder using a Raspberry Pi, an LCD and some Python code.

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[Froggywoggy]

This slightly misses the point as nobody is getting the copies (indeed, nobody can get the copies as they are not stored) and so no loss is made by the music industry. The loss is made where someone who would have bought a copy downloads a free one instead.

This is not to say that I don't think the music and film industry overcharge on the goods they sell. But I somehow doubt they will take much notice of this 'art project' (to use the term as loosely as it reasonably goes).

[ET3D]

The loss is made where someone who would have bought a copy downloads a free one instead.

That's the main contention point about piracy. The industry sees each downloaded copy as a lost sale, but it should be self evident that not every one of the pirated copies would have resulted in a sale if it wasn't available.

[jim]

This slightly misses the point as nobody is getting the copies (indeed, nobody can get the copies as they are not stored) and so no loss is made by the music industry. The loss is made where someone who would have bought a copy downloads a free one instead.

That's the whole point of the project from my understanding though.

The industry often quotes astronomical 'loss' figures because they attribute £0.79 to every single track that's downloaded, which completely ignores that it might never have been a sale.

Perhaps the individual downloads the same song 10 times because they keep changing laptops. Or because they want different bit-rate version for different devices and don't know how to transcode. Or they already subscribe to Spotify and don't buy music, but regularly make CDs for the car on a long journey. In each case, music industry says it's a £7.90 loss when actually it's a zero loss.

Likewise, this project is actually a zero loss, but would be considered a multi-million dollar loss if you ascribe a $1 dollar to every copied track.

[kalniel]

Mostly 'the industry' doesn't assign such figures nearly as much as the press likes to

[kingpotnoodle]

Doesn't this totally miss the mark? At best it seems like an over-contrived attempt to labour a point (I suppose that isn't uncommon in art though). What you buy is a personal licence to listen to a track - for example iTunes copies the track to your iPhone/iPod from your computer, you have 2 copies but only paid once. Thus downloading (assuming illegally) and infinitely copying the track to your own personal /dev/null is at most a $1.25 loss on the initial sale, not so sensational at that amount.