Sensible Erection | An In-Depth Case Study on the Pretty Lights + BitTorrent Partnership

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

An In-Depth Case Study on the Pretty Lights + BitTorrent Partnership

quote [ "Here we are celebrating hitting #1 on Pirate Bay, while major labels would be kicking, cursing, sending takedowns" ]

Free Music Archive sums it up best: "Great article on one of the myriad alternate models that SOPA/PIPA were designed to thwart."

Love the guy's music or hate it, you have to admit this is pretty damn clever way to get your sound heard.

And if you want to check out his music, all the links are in the original link above.

[music] [by Whowhat@3:24amGMT] [+7 Interesting]

Comments

blacksun said @ 3:30am GMT on 24th Jan [Score:2 Funny]

blacksun said @ 4:30am GMT on 24th Jan
sorry. that's kind of annoying.

rezties said @ 4:51am GMT on 24th Jan

Cakkafracle said @ 5:08am GMT on 24th Jan
this is how you do it

Cakkafracle said @ 5:09am GMT on 24th Jan
*hmph, never mind*

karrdek said @ 5:07am GMT on 26th Jan
kinda

smoug said @ 12:18pm GMT on 24th Jan
It seems to me that as of late that these sorts of gifs and screenshots have somewhat become the new political cartoon of the current generation.

Chop-Logik said @ 5:56pm GMT on 24th Jan
Quite, quite. More brandy, smoug?

smoug said @ 7:00pm GMT on 24th Jan
Brandy?! Do you mistake me for a peasant, sir?

Chop-Logik said @ 7:11pm GMT on 24th Jan [Score:3 Funny]
Ha! Ha! A jest, good sir. Wadsworth! Bring the man his unicorn blood.

Wadsworth said @ 7:28pm GMT on 24th Jan [Score:2 Funny]
Mmmyes, sir. Does sir want his Esquilax slippers, as well?

blibblob said @ 4:52am GMT on 24th Jan
It's nice that there are people taking advantage of progress and technology to leverage their works. It still does not diminish the fact that it is the content creators right to do so or not to do so and that piracy does not give the owner of their intellectual property that choice.

theolypse said @ 5:09am GMT on 24th Jan [Score:1 Interesting]
And yet, rights are given by the consent of the people. This is easily seen when we consider that what rights one has are estimated differently from one culture to another. Even societies that have--choose your own metric, here--successfully prospered and maintained their continuity do not agree uniformly on what rights their members possess. There are, in fact, functioning cultures today where your stern assertion would receive confused stares or laughter.

Now, we can sit here and argue seven sides against the middle to hash out a universal set of ethical first principles so as to rationally derive a set of ideal rights therefrom, but to what end? The fact remains that the particular dogma you just put forward is not necessary, however just or ethical it might be. So when societies can get by with or without a thing, it makes practical sense to judge that thing with respect to its alternatives, rather than by some exacting standard that makes pits good against perfect.

By that metric, then, the permissive stance toward online file sharing without respect to IP-type limitations has one notable advantage over the restrictive, that piracy will happen, anyway. And again, in practical terms, hypothetical ideals should never be allowed to stand in the way of practicable solutions.

More simply, if everyone remained abstinent until marrying one person each, and then remained sexually exclusive with that person until one partner's death, sexually transmitted infections would be wiped out before three full generations had passed. So what?

lilmookieesquire said @ 5:22am GMT on 24th Jan
The music industry does?

foobar said @ 8:50am GMT on 24th Jan
Gravity doesn't respect my right to fly. The world is what it is. It will never get harder to copy data than it is today.

mrklipp said @ 10:19am GMT on 24th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
I'm sorry, but no.

The right to a government upheld monopoly on creative works is directly balanced by the right of the people as a whole to own those works after a certain period of time.

That's fucking gone, the period of time extended away into infinity.

Your claim is like saying that your employer has a right to your labor, even if laws are later changed allowing them to postpone paying you for said labor indefinitely.

v21 said @ 6:07pm GMT on 24th Jan
I'm repeating others here, but intellectual property is not a natural right. It's a government given monopoly, set up to encourage the production of works. You absolutely can argue it should be withdrawn or curtailed.

Cakkafracle said @ 5:14am GMT on 24th Jan
am I weird for getting annoyed whenever someone tries to legitimize my pirating tools? invariably it backfires and a) the software becomes overbloated adware or b) bursts into flames when the spotlights hit it and it is gone :(

not that bittorrent is going anywhere but there is no way in a million years that copying/sharing apps/music/videos was ever anything but stealing.
THATS WHY IT WAS COOL

Whowhat said @ 5:34am GMT on 24th Jan
See I always saw it as a new tool. I mean the caveman just didn't tie a vine around a rock and say, "Hey, I can hack stuff!" Then preceded to merrily to whack away at any and all things within arm's reach. It was actually a device developed to make a task easier. Though I'm sure he hacked the crap outta alot of stuff before getting to business. :)

sanepride said @ 5:53am GMT on 24th Jan
Hey it's rough but keep in mind that Bittorrent was originally developed as a legitimate file distribution tool.

dreamingzephyr said @ 5:50pm GMT on 25th Jan
When dividing your sentence it to A) and B), make sure that the subject of the sentence either A) precedes the division or B) is included within each.

theolypse said @ 10:36pm GMT on 25th Jan
Skew is the new parallelism.

azazel said @ 8:11am GMT on 24th Jan [Score:1 Interesting]
Their success is partly because they're the part of the forerunners. I'd like to see more success stories before I hail TPB as some kind of amazing thing for every artist.

Whowhat said @ 11:19am GMT on 24th Jan
I think it's more about the fact *someone* found a way to make torrents work to their advantage and actually gain something from it legitimately.

happiest_sadist said @ 11:41pm GMT on 24th Jan
Linux distributions have been doing this for decades (well, at least Debian has) to reduce the load on the repository servers, particularly when a new major version comes out. Too bad apt-p2p / debtorrent never really took off.

bluetu3sday said @ 3:43pm GMT on 24th Jan
While I am a fan of Pretty Lights and applaud his success with an alternative business plans, I don't think this article is painting the whole picture.

Pretty Light's tracks use a very large amount of illegal samples that would be in no way profitable if he were to pay the royalties to the owners of said samples (i.e. in one of this biggest songs he used a slightly effected Lil' Wayne verse).
It is far more profitable to give the songs out for free and build a large fanbase of these samples and then make money of merch and live shows.

While he is obviously a supporter of alternative distribution, I can't honestly believe that his motives were based on a desire to progress the music industry into a new era.

However, he does make good beats.

v21 said @ 6:02pm GMT on 24th Jan
Even more of a case then. He couldn't have a career if he obeyed the law. Going outside the norm isn't just useful, it's necessary. If he went a normal route with distribution, he'd have no career, not a diminished one.

bluetu3sday said @ 6:15pm GMT on 24th Jan
I suppose this raises the question, now that more or less everything has changed, how does sampling work?

Are artist that are sampled not entitled to any kind of compensation, or does a new system of payment need to be devised?

With artists such as Pretty Lights it is obvious that a substantial amount of work was put into the songs outside of just the samples, but what about the songs that just take 8 bars of another song, loop it, and add drums and vocals?

Whowhat said @ 4:16am GMT on 25th Jan
Then it'd be a Puff Daddy single.