FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Founder of Pirate Bay Is Copying 100 MP3s Per Second to Prove a Point

Peter Sunde's Kopimashin has created $150 million in losses that are purely theoretical.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde has built the perfect perpetual piracy machine, to demonstrate a point that file copies on their own are meaningless.

Using a Raspberry Pi, an LCD screen and a Python script, Sunde's "Kopimashin" has already made 120 million copies of Gnarls Barkley's 2006 hit "Crazy," at a rate of 100 copies per second. The copies aren't stored, but so far the number of copies made by the machine adds up to a theoretical $150 million in losses to the recording industry.

As TorrentFreak reports, Sunde is calling his Kopimashin an "art project." Sunde told TorrentFreak "I want to show the absurdity [of] the process of putting a value to a copy. The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it's not a danger to any industry at all."

Sunde is bitter about the current state of the Internet. As he recently told Motherboard contributor Joost Mollen, "the Internet is shit today. It's broken…we have already lost." Having already gone to jail in 2014 over his involvement with The Pirate Bay and owing millions in damages to various companies, his feeling of defeat is understandable.

But even though Sunde said he's "given up" fighting the piracy war, the philosophical point he's trying to prove with the Kopimashin says otherwise. "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," he says.

Sunde plans to make several Kopimashins for various art exhibitions, and sell a few as well. Maybe that'll help make up some of the damages he owes.