Copyright Law

Canadian Pirate Party Launches BitTorrent Tracker

By soulxtc

Wants to prove P2P can be used by music artists as an important marketing tool to showcase their work.

Formed back in early July of this year, one of the main goals of the Pirate Party of Canada is to “reform copyright and facilitate access to culture,” and as part of that it wants to help music artists learn how to earn a living that’s not dependent on the sale of albums alone.

It’s pledge:

We want to adjust copyright so that artists can better build on previous works and chose the distribution and licensing model that allows them to make a living. We will also help music artists educate themselves about earning money through other means than selling records, for example by performing live shows and selling fan articles and where feasible, we will evaluate the introduction of levies to further compensate artists. In turn, we want to adjust copyright for consumers to make private, non-commercial copying of content legal. This will promote artists and help spread culture farther than ever before.

As part of that effort it has finally launched the previously alluded to “pirate-y distribution method” for helping music artists market their work to a global audience. Dubbed “Captain,” short for Canadian Pirate Tracker, The PPCA?s Creative Commons torrent tracker will give them a quick, cheap, and easy access to a global distribution network.

“The current distribution model is dead, the market must evolve,” it adds.

It currently has a number of artists available for download, one of which, interestingly enough, is ZeroPaid’s own Drew Wilson, and is always looking for more. It’s not genre specific and takes about a day to get posted.

“We do have a slight moderation system, which is mainly me going through every track, just to make sure it isn?t a copyright violation, but it shouldn?t take more than 24 hours to get something posted,” said Jake Daynes, a spokesperson for the Pirate Party of Canada, in a recent interview.

It’s a bold move for the PPCA. It’s tough to argue that P2P can be a positive thing for music artists unless one can show them clear statistics to the contrary. With UK pop singer Lily Allen having recently dubbed file-sharing a “disaster” for emerging artists it’s important that the P2P community prove critics wrong.

The PPCA is the counterpart of the international Pirate Party movement, which has gained seats in both Sweden and Germany.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).