The Founder of the Pirate Bay Plans to "Bankrupt" the Music Industry with His New Art Project

His "Kopimashin" is designed to make 100 copies of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" every second, or about 8 million copies a day.

Amid the myriad copyright wars and arguments over music piracy that have been happening over the past 15 years, one thing that has stayed more or less constant is the music industry's steadfast belief that pirated music is worth a shit ton of money, that sharing a track online is tantamount to robbing a record label of a sum potentially higher than even that music's actual commercial value. That's how you end up with insane stories like the one about the kid running a tiny music forum as a hobby robbing the music industry of hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's an issue that Peter Sunde, one of the founders of the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay, is deeply familiar with, as he's been mired in court cases over piracy and asked to pay sums in the millions of dollars over the last few years. Although he's no longer serving a prison sentence, he still owes millions to various music and movie rights holders. However, undeterred, he's out to prove a new point about the value of copied music with an art project he calls Kopimashin.

Kopimashin is a simple setup using an LCD display, a basic Raspberry Pi computer, and Python code that is designed to make copies of the Gnarls Barkley song "Crazy"—100 of them every second, or around 8 million a day. The files aren't stored anywhere, so they effectively stop existing as soon as they're made, but Sunde's artistic point is more about the act of copying, which is what record companies go after in piracy cases. At the rate used by record labels to assess damages, $1.25 per copy, he is running up millions of dollars in purportedly lost revenue for Downtown/Warner, Gnarls Barkley's label.

"The goal of the kopimashin is to make the audio track the most copied in the world and while doing so bankrupting the record industry," he wrote in an artist statement on the website Konsthack. Last week he told TorrentFreak that the computer was up to 120 million copies, or $150 million in damages, as the record industry would calculate them. He said he's reached out to Guinness World Records to certify his attempt at copying the song.

“I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy," he told TorrentFreak. "The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it’s not a danger to any industry at all. 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."

Obviously, the actual effect of the machine on the music industry is zero, but the idea is to spur a debate about what the value of the actual data that comprises digital music is. Let's get philosophical about it!

The Kopimashin is one of a series of 13. Watch a video of it in action below: