This season, a notorious pirate gives the music industry an expensive gift

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay and digital artist.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay, is out of jail and back with a new project whose entire goal is to screw the music industry. It's called the Kopimashin, and it lives to make copies of the Gnarls Barkely song "Crazy."

All it took was a Raspberry Pi and some Python code, and now the Kopimashin is making 100 copies of "Crazy" every second. Sunde posted about the device on Konsthack, a site devoted to art and hacking. He writes, "The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD 1,25 per copied piece." Each copy is "stored" in /dev/null, which is to say, it is not stored at all (/dev/null is a nonexistent "null device"). The point, Sunde says, is "to make the audio track the most copied in the world and while doing so bankrupting the record industry."

Sunde hasn't made the source code available yet. As he told Ars via -mail: "It’s really simple, it’s ugly code and I have no energy to clean it up for the 'helpful' community to make the code 1% faster — and it’s about making a point, not the code itself. If you want to build your own, just start a terminal, find a song to copy and do: while true; do cat file.mp3 >/dev/null; done."