For those who download via torrents have probably heard of or even used the website
ThePirateBay.com
It's a torrent site base in Sweden
What you may not have been aware of is the 4 people who operate the site are in court right now for violation of copyrighted laws. The people running the site have always flipped the bird to US and UK companies and their stormtroopers tactics, because unlike the US, the Swedish copyright laws see the difference between a kid downloading a song versus a company selling pirated CD's.
ThePirateBay has a hilarious page on their site documenting all legal threats they have received over the years.
Be sure to read through it when you have some time to kill.
http://thepiratebay.org/legal
One of the best would be from EA Games
http://static.thepiratebay.org/ea_response.txt
I've been known to virtually bitch slap some people over the years but these guys are great.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up is their current legal battle will likely have repercussions throughout the torrent community. So I am happy to report on the very 1st day of court, half of the charges against them have already been dropped.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10165604-38.html

I like the line about Polar Bears...

Another great 1

Just some stats... ... here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes and how long it usually takes to fix: Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days
.. yawn.

Right or wrong
Win or lose
You can't deny they've got balls

http://www.pcworld.com/article/159806/pira...tml?tk=rss_news

they do have a point ,i think they're trying to make this as public and messy as possible. by the way the Enya one made me laugh pretty good.

What really drives me nuts is the claim pirating has hurt the industry.
A few years ago, the MPAA claimed illegal downloading was killing the industry.
This claim is what gave justifcation to their stormtrooper tactics.
Yet here, after a huge explosion of P2P sharing an how is the industry.

"For the year, Hollywood revenues continue to climb, with revenue at $1.44 billion, up 22 percent through the same point in 2008. Movie attendance is running 20 percent higher than last year’s"
http://blog.newsok.com/bamsblog/2009/02/16...fice-report-38/

The music industry has seen a big loss but that can be directly attributed to people being able to download the 2 songs they like off an album for $3.00 from any of the legit service like Itunes versus having to pay $15 for the whole album.
Itunes alone recently hit over 1billion songs downloaded and earned around a half billion last year.
Most companies would die for a 30% profit margin like Itunes.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/03/apple-apparentl.html
This biggest failure of the music industry was their own doing. They could have embraced the changes technology brought. Nope what did they do, drag out Lars Ulrich from metallica to cry like a bitch about some 14 year old kid d/l their song. I still don't understand how anyone could care about metallica now.
It's sad how quickly someone can go from bad-ass hard rock musician to whore for the RIAA.

Want to know what's really funny. The RIAA who cried about illegal downloading, have themselves broken the law in multiple states.
Now the people who the RIAA sued, are suing them right back.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20...y-practices.ars

I think bands like Radiohead and Tool are ahead of the curve. Both bands rely on touring for profits and Radiohead ,upped their own CD on their server saying you can pay what you feel its worth.if more bands did this it would thrust them back to being actual artists AND they would be able to keep the rights to their music. if i lose my dl site ,honestly ,i wouldnt ever buy a cd.

ps-Metalica sucks .

If anyone thinks the RIAA is there to protect the artist, they are idiots.
The RIAA exist to protect the record company.
This is a funny example to prove these laws go to far an need reform.
I've no clue who this band is but it makes a great point.

From Streetlight Manifesto (Official Band Myspace page)

"For some reason our own record label hit us with a cease and desist via YouTube. It seems we were broadcasting copyrighted material (our own music video) on our own YouTube channel. Which is a No-No in douchebag-land. So our video was taken off of our channel forcibly. We'll have a new link up soon. Man, with "friends" like these... One day we'll write a book. Until then, well, you know...
source

with youtube ,myspace and the internet ,musicians have do not need the Record companies and would be better off with out them.

Like Robert said it's the record companies own fault. I just bought a ton of blank cd's for less then $10 (ok, maybe not a ton). Anyway, as the technology became less expensive to put out music on cd's the cost of the music should have gone down. It hasn't. That means the record companies are just making a larger cut off of the cd's we buy.

Musicians generally do not get much from the sale of cd's. They make their money from live shows. What's really amazing to me is how many times I saw Fugazi in the '90's and only paid $2 for most of the shows. Towards the end I was paying $5.

Also, the reason blank tapes are legal (and blank cd's) is because it was found to be legal to copy music you already own. Well guess what, I own a lot of stuff on tape and record but don't have a way to get it onto my mp3 player so I see it as perfectly ok to get it from the internet since I've already paid for the damn music.

The question is, why would bands put up with record companies, especially the big ones? Well, it depends on what the band wants. If you are Fugazi you just want to perform in front of people. It's about the music. If you are some young band that's playing whatever the current pop craze is then you probably are in it for the fame and the money etc. You want your videos shown on TV and your songs on the radio. That takes the money of a big record company. It costs money to make your video, and to pay to have it played and to pay to have it on the radio and to pay to advertise the hell out of your crap cd that teans will then buy solely because they heard it on the radio and saw the video in high rotation on a music channel.

PirateBay has updated their main page with their opinion of the whole illegal downloading argument.

http://thepiratebay.org/

im starting to really love these guys! when Oink went down i almost went into depression ,lol. they just laid down though,these guys are in for the long haul it seems.