Copyright about control, not economy: Pirate Bay founder
September 4, 2009 in News by Alastair Otter
The ability to copy is at the heart to human nature and is part of how society evolves. This is according to The Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde who was speaking at the iWeek 2009 conference in Johannesburg this morning. “Human behaviour and nature is about copying. Everything is re-interpreted from what you see and everything is learning from others. [With the Internet and digital distribution] we can do this on a wider scale,” said Sunde who has regularly faced the wrath of Hollywood media giants eager to close down The Pirate Bay bittorrent site.
Posing the question “Who owns culture?” Sunde said that nothing created is solely attributable to just one person. “Everything is built on other things. When no-one is censoring your expression what happens is that you evolve.”
In his characteristically lighthearted manner, Sunde said that the battle over copyright was about control and not about economy. He said that the recording and film industries are determined to maintain control over distribution of music and films through which it made huge profits and wasn’t purely in the interests of artists making more money.
The reality, he said, was that in today’s world small artists don’t actually make money while big artists and industry giants make all the money. He said that it was time that artists looked at other models to make money. “I’m not against people making money [and] it’s scary to go from somewhere safe to somewhere that you don’t know the rules [but] it is important to fight all control enforcement.” Sunde said that by loosening the grip of media conglomerates over media, artists would benefit. “What you see today is the US-Hollywood culture. If even 1% of the users on the Internet created content there would be much more than now.” With greater freedom a greater wealth of talent can be allowed to flourish, he said.
Sunde said that copyright control needs to be overhauled, suggesting that perhaps only commercial use should be charged for. Radio-play income, he said, was a major source of income for musicians which would fall under commercial use. He also said that with lower prices musicians could be exposed to a wider audience and potentially gain more fans which could in turn lead to larger live performance audiences which would generate income for the musicians.
This is a threat to the major studios, however, which has prompted countless demands from the likes of Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sega and Apple to “remove” links from The Pirate Bay. Sunde and The Pirate Bay are known for their humorous responses to these demands.