Pirate Bay Block Inspires Crowdsourced Song – Bye Bye BPI
5 March 2012
More and more regularly, TorrentFreak has been turning over its Sunday front page to people who have an opinion on copyright, file-sharing and other related issues. From Rick Falkvinge to a member of the European Parliament, from lawyers to a filmmaker, we’re happy to share our platform. Today we have our very first musical contribution from talented UK artist Dan Bull, who is distinctly unimpressed with the BPI.
Earlier this month in a case brought by several major recording labels including Sony, EMI and Warner, a judge in the UK’s High Court ruled that The Pirate Bay and its users breach copyright “on a major scale.”
This ruling means that it’s almost inevitable that the UK’s major Internet service providers will be compelled to block The Pirate Bay in the coming months to serve the members of the music lobby group BPI.
While there can be no doubt that some users of The Pirate Bay are indeed engaging in copyright infringement, for others the site is their gateway to the world, the mechanism by which their own work can be distributed – for free – to the masses.
A block of The Pirate Bay will not discriminate – all content will be blocked, infringing or not, and artists relying on the site to reach their fans will be unjustly penalized.
Just hours ago and after working throughout the night, UK artist Dan Bull finished his latest track which was inspired by the recent TPB ruling.
“The BPI claim to represent the interests of musicians like myself and the people in my video, but the fact is that only the very elite few at the top of the music business will see a benefit. The rest of us are having our internet censored and are being ushered into an age of guilt until innocence is proven,” Dan told TorrentFreak.
“The tech sector is being damaged in order to prop up a comparatively tiny and irrelevant industry which the vast majority of musicians have absolutely no need for.”
So without further delay, here’s Dan’s musical message. ‘Bye Bye BPI’ is the follow-up to the hugely successful track SOPA Cabana which has been viewed nearly 1.3 million times. Both songs were created with material crowdsourced via Dan’s Facebook page.
Bye Bye BPI
.