The golden era of every single one of us using Pirate Bay every single day of our lives to download entire Joy Division discographies, Owen Wilson films, and cracked versions of any Adobe program may be over, but that doesn’t mean the great war on piracy by the music industry has dissipated. Just last summer, the British government brought in measures to increase the maximum imprisonment of people who pirate music online, from two years to ten years.

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde might have served his prison sentences, but he still owes the entertainment industries millions in damages. And, just incase they were going to forget about it, he’s now created a music industry doomsday device that he feels could "destroy" the entire music business as we know it. Or, in failing to do so, at least highlight their hypocrisies.

His machine – aptly named the Kopimashin – endlessly makes digital copies. Essentially it's an LCD display, a basic Raspberry Pi computer, and a Python code that creates copies of the Gnarls Barkley track "Crazy" - at a rate of 100 tracks a second, or eight million a day. At this point, I guess you're wondering why the guy who founded the Pirate Bay has created an infinite birthing pool of Gnarls Barkley's biggest ever hit? What point is he trying to prove? Will he destroy the industry?

It's a tricky one to explain, but it all boils down to the music industry's steadfast belief that sharing a track online is the equivalent of stealing money from a record label of a value potentially higher than or equal to the record's commercial value – and more often than not, these values are just guesstimates. That's how you end up with stories like the one about the kid from from Newcastle who ran a small time indie music forum, yet ended up being imprisoned for damages in excess of £240 million.

Like others out there, Peter Sunde wants to show the absurdity of the music industry giving excessive monetary value to these digital copies, which is the point he's trying to prove with the Kopimashin. Already, he's technically cost Downtown / Warner (Gnarls Barkley's label) $332 million in reproduced copies of "Crazy", but so what? Peter says there's more to it than that. So I called him up to speak about Kopimashin, piracy, the control of the arts in general, and the music industry apocalypse he is trying to beckon.

Noisey: Hey Peter! So why did you make this Kopimashin thing?

Peter: Do you want a lie, or the true story?

The true story!

For fun. That's the reason. I had this LCD display and I didn't know what to do with it. So, I started thinking about what to display and then I realised, maybe I should make something that is copying something. I started thinking about it and I came to the conclusion that copying one song over and over again would be interesting. I started thinking about the numbers [that the record industry makes claims about], and how stupid it is, and how I could prove a point with this machine – especially since it's so cheap to make. The machine cost €18 to make. It has, so far, caused damages of $332 million.

Why do you think the music industry are hypocrites?

Their whole view on piracy is questionable. When you do the research, the record industry isn't shrinking because of copying, it's because they're still trying to sell plastic discs. The truth is, if you trace the people complaining the most about piracy or music sales being down, it’s the middlemen. If you look at the actual artists that complain about downloading or streaming, it will always be very commercial artists. Show me the young artists that don’t want bigger audiences. Copies of music always means that you get a bigger audience! People that create for the love of the music never complain about stuff like this. They understand they're receiving money in other ways.

There was news that the UK government wanted to increase the maximum sentence for music piracy from 2 years to 10. What do you think about government’s taking that kind of stance against online music pirates?

Sometimes, if you rape someone, you get less prison time than if you copy a song. Is that not fucking insane? The mind-set of the industry is really arrogant, that their things are worth so much, that even human lives are not equal. I think it's disgusting.

What do you think needs to change about the way we talk about piracy in the music industry?

I think that the problem is that we never talk about this stuff properly. Some artists might feel screwed over that someone is taking their stuff, and that they're being treated how they don't want to be treated. I get that feeling. But the rule of the game is that if you want a big audience, you can't really decide on how that audience chooses to participate in your music.

For example: say I listen to 100 artists, and one of them decides that I can't listen on my iPod, that I have to listen to them on this device – I would stop listening to them. We have a mutual language, a mutual way of communicating, and that's listening to music the way we want, and not being limited.

A lot of people would probably disagree with you there though.

Well, a lot of the people that are really complaining about "losing control" of their music are usually the most privileged ones. I often go to talks about intellectual property, and every time I go to countries like Brazil, everyone is so happy with me. Without Pirate Bay, they wouldn't have access to most TV, music, film, no nothing.

In these conversations, we often get so focused on the Western world, so focused on our own community, our own solutions. We should not be listening to the music industry about how we control music. We need to be more open, more inclusive, and we can't do that by having firewalls and geo-blocking everywhere.

What do you think about Spotify then?

I liked it at first, but I don’t use it anymore. I’ll tell you why: I didn't like the centralisation. I was using it, and one day, loads of the songs I’d playlisted had disappeared, probably because they lost a deal with a label or whatever. So, I lost 30% of my music. Then I realised that I had deleted a lot of these songs from my own archive because I had them on Spotify – why would I need two of them? I realised that I'm allowing someone else to control my cultural heritage and my feelings and my emotions. If it's a car, fair enough, it's a fucking car – you can replace it with another car. But people seem to forgot these days that the arts have an inner purpose. It's part of us as beings. It's something that plays with our emotions. It's not something for sale. Music is so much more interesting and important to you than a physical thing.

It is fair to say that music has become more viewed through a business lens than ever before.

Look at something like a public library: it’s really important that we have things like libraries, that we have regulations on how libraries work – that a book can't suddenly removed from the library and no longer allowed to be accessed, because some rights were lost. But we're not doing the same with modern internet culture – we're allowing geo-blocking, we're allowing some sort of class system where the poorer classes don't have the same access as the upper classes.

These services that we're 100% relying on now when it comes to TV, music and movies are capitalist systems. Whether you like capitalism or not, you must realise that there is a problem when people without money cannot access culture and arts. That scares me.

Is this why you’ve become so involved in activism?

I don't want a monopolised world that's based on money – I want a world that has a higher value and a higher meaning. So, I think that that is what we need to talk about, be it about the Internet or music. It's about the sort of society you want to have in the future.

Thanks for your time Peter!