Sometimes you have to feel a little sorry for the entertainment industries. Sure they messed up in the beginning when they could have co-opted the technologists to help adapt and improve their business models instead of suing them, but right now they’re facing an eternal and unwinnable war and it’s clear they really have no clue what to do.

Just look at the current status.

BitTorrent Downloads Booming – And Benefiting Musicians. It seems that while the industry is fiddling, the musicians are starting to play the new game and win. Quote from Ed Sheeran, one of the top pirated artists in the UK:

“You can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it’s all relative…”

Piracy is the new radio. Musician Neil Young adopts a pragmatic view of the situation:

“Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around. [...] That’s the radio. If you really want to hear it, let’s make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it…”

Download a copy of the Pirate Bay, it’s only 90MB. So anyone in the world can now download a copy of the Pirate Bay database and set up their own server for free, using magnet links (see below). The copy contains links to 1.6 million torrent files, but there are downloads available which bumps that up to 17 million torrent files. Insane.

And just to show that the tools will just keep on coming, here’s the new Movie Magnet, a search engine to find Bittorrent movie files, not through using trackers, but via magnet links (which are URLs for peer to peer files, and don’t require any indexes or server storage).