Digital Diatribe

Article found here.
Go read it, I’ll wait.
Done? Ok.

“Heindl said she had no objections to people seeding it to BitTorrent download sites, many of which the music industry is trying with limited success – to shut down because they contain vast stores of pirated music.”

Firstly, you can’t seed something to a BitTorrent download site, because a BitTorrent download site is a site where you go to download the BitTorrent client. But then if you knew anything about BitTorrent you wouldn’t have then gone on to so firmly insert your foot into your mouth by saying that BitTorrent download sites “contain vast stores of pirated music.”. Bram Cohen would be proud.

For someone writing for the tech section of a national newspaper, and who claims to be a tech writer in general, I would have expected better. I’m not sure if you are indirectly quoting Heindl here or quite what you’re doing, but it makes you look horribly  ill informed, and if you were quoting her, it’s not obvious, which makes you look like a sloppy writer.

A Torrent site or search engine contains torrent files, which, when downloaded and opened in a client that supports the  BitTorrent protocol, provide metadata relating to the suggested file name, the file size, and the tracker server. Through the tracker the user is then able to download the files from the people who are seeding them. The torrent site simply provides a small text file, and in some cases only a link to the file.
It doesn’t “contain vast stores of pirated music” because that defeats the entire point of a peer to peer protocol.
But then, as a tech journalist, you should already know all of this.

In response to the actual artists:
Would you like some cheese with your whine?
You get to do what you love for a living. And some of you make more money in a year than I’ll make in a decade and you’ll have fun doing it. Contrast that to the rest of us, who have to sit behind desks looking busy from 9-5 in the land of the working dead.

I don’t buy CDs anyway, I listen to the radio, and non commercial radio at that, so by your logic I’m a thief because I’m not paying you anything to hear your music.
I’ll quite happily to pay money to the tune of up to $130 to go to your concert, assuming I manage to hit refresh on the ticketek website within the first 10 seconds of tickets going on sale and make it through to the order confirmation page before all the online scalpers. Oh, that was also assuming you don’t suck, sorry The Veronicas, Jimmy Barnes, Phrase, Human Nature, Mahalia Barnes, Damien Leith, Anthony Callea, Weapon X, Ken Hell and the Dawn Collective.

What I won’t do is pay over inflated prices for CDs which are so poorly mastered due to dynamic range compression that I’d be better off running the needle of a gramophone over them in order to get some semblance of music out of them.
If you released something that was worth listening to then perhaps I’d change my stance on this.

To conclude, if you’re all in it for the money then you’re a bunch of sell outs anyway.
If you can’t afford to pay the rent, then don’t rent out a 5 bedroom mansion while you’re off overseas and “unavailable for comment”.
Go back to snorting coke and not eating anything.

Yours sincerely,
A well informed user of technology and alleged music pirate.