Dan Bull Shares His Thoughts On The Pirate Bay Being Blocked Right After Helping His Music Get On The Charts | Techdirt

Dan Bull Shares His Thoughts On The Pirate Bay Being Blocked Right After Helping His Music Get On The Charts | Techdirt
 We recently noted that, in the same week that Dan Bull had his new single hit the music charts because he promoted it via The Pirate Bay, BPI had convinced a court to order UK ISPs to start blocking TPB. Earlier this year, Dan had already written a song, Bye, Bye BPI, for that organization's initial attempt to block The Pirate Bay, and we asked Dan to share his thoughts on TPB officially being blocked in the UK.

The Pirate Bay would seem an odd primary target for the British record industry's hit list. After all, it doesn't host any infringing content, but serves as a hub for people who want to share their own files directly. Sites like YouTube receive stratospherically higher amounts of traffic, and host hundreds of thousands of infringing videos. Perhaps it is not the infringement itself then, but The Pirate Bay's notoriously defiant defense of its modus operandi that has made it a target. Or maybe it's an underlying acknowledgement that to prevent infringement in any meaningful way would require the impossible feat of blocking every site on the internet that contains a hyperlink.

Despite the industry's readiness to insist that copyright infringement threatens the future of musicians - especially those who are lesser known - there are plenty of examples where the opposite is true. In fact, every musician I know utilizes filesharing in some form or another. Let me tell you how filesharing has allowed me to turn my creative ambitions into something real.

I use a program called Cubase to compose my music. Initially I bought a legitimate copy for several hundred pounds. It was buggy and regularly crashed. Eventually it stopped working altogether. Rather than buying a replacement, I downloaded a cracked version via The Pirate Bay. It was far more stable. I also downloaded some industry standard plugins which would have cost thousands of pounds. I was unemployed, so the choice wasn't between downloading or purchasing. It was between downloading or nothing.