"The Norwegian party Venstre (socialist liberal) has proposed that all illegal file sharing should be legalized. They haven’t put much thought behind the populist proposal and the rationale is basically that since the music is there people should be allowed to consume it freely...

So, in response to this the Norwegian metal band ENSLAVED took a cab out to the Venstre party leader’s farm (he happens to be a sheep farmer) and "downloaded a sheep" with the same kind of motivation: free roaming sheep are available and should be consumed! The sheep was then brought back to the Norwegian parliament, quite an effective statement."

Video at this link

http://www.side2.no/musikk/article1379093.ece

Haha, that's awesome.

Is there a translation of the whole article somewhere?

brian_dc said:

effective statement?
now, i love enslaved, and this is pretty hilarious, but cmon
this is not an apt metaphor for file sharing
perhaps if they cloned the sheep...

I think it's apt. The logic is that the music is there so people should be allowed to consume it.

How are the sheep not there?


That's really all it takes for this metaphor to work.

haha i saw that a couple weeks ago. fucking awesome. i love how they capture the sheep and walk it around on a leesh.

If it were really an effective metaphor it would have ended with me putting the last few Enslaved-Sheep through a woodchipper and clicking delete.

unlike sheep, people don't CONSUME music. It's called illegal file sharing, not illegal file consumption.

Thinking about Grutle riding around with a sheep in the passenger seat just made me download in my pants.

brian_dc said:

not really,
the key difference is that an mp3 can be copied instantly and an unlimited amount of times. sheep, on the other hand are a zero-sum game, when you take someones sheep, you are depriving them of that sheep. When you download an mp3 you are making a copy for yourself while the original owner gets to keep his as well. The only people being deprived of anything are the record company execs and IMHO they can get fucked with a rusty pole

INFECT said:

Eh, this is the common misconception. Everyone gets fucked by it. Stealing from the record company does not make them want to give better compensation to their artists, it makes them give less. The less money the record company makes the less they are willing to put back into the whole process. Example: 20 years ago even moderate sized labels would give a recently signed band an advance to pay for the recording of their debut album for that label. Now that the industry is less lucrative, all the labels expect the band to finance their own recordings out of pocket. The only exceptions being the really huge labels and recently signed artists on moderately large labels which the label is sure are going to be smash hits.

It is true that the "record execs" get paid too much in comparison to the artists and everyone else along the chain. The problem stems from the fact that the people who become CEOs and executives at record companies are not musicians and do not choose to work there because of their love of music. Most are probably tone deaf and are and always have been businessmen first and foremost.

One thing you should all remember is this: anyone reading this never would have heard of Enslaved if they hadn't been signed. I'm sure some douche will try to say, "well I heard about Enslaved from their NEMA demo back in 1991." No you didn't.

Beorht-Dana said:


an excellent post. I commend you.

Fuck those cheap ass motherfuckers, who the fuck they think they are Metallica?