Piracy has been one of the music industry's biggest problems since file-sharing sites have begun popping up online. While some sites have been successfully shut down by the law, other websites such as The Pirate Bay have found a way to get around the system, such as going through domain changes and even having proxies providing access to the site.

Artists and record labels have condemned file-sharing sites, claiming that they are the industry's biggest threat and that piracy translates to lost sales. But The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde thinks otherwise, and to prove his point, Sunde created a machine as part of an art project that can make 100 copies of any track in just one second.

Speaking with Torrentfreak, Sunde said, "I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy. The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it's not a danger to any industry at all."

According to the website, Sunde made "the ultimate copying machine" called the Kopimashin using a Raspberry Pi, an LCD display, and some Python code. With these, Sunde was able to make 100 copies of the song "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley in one second, which translates to more than eight million copies a day and approximately $10 million in losses.

The Kopimashin does not make real copies of the track, but they are sent to /dev/null, which means that they are not permanently stored in the device. The machine is part of an art project about the value of digital copies that Sunde is preparing for an upcoming exhibition.

Sunde and his Pirate Bay co-founders first made headlines back in 2009 when they were found guilty of assisting in copyright infringement. Sunde, along with Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundstrom, and Gottfrid Svartholm, was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay a fine amounting to millions of dollars. At a press conference following the verdict, Sunde held up a handwritten IOU and said that's all of the damages that he is willing to repay.

Sunde served his prison sentence last year and has yet to pay the fine. He said that the reason behind his project is to prove that the millions of dollars in losses the music industry claims from him and other The Pirate Bay co-founders are just as fictitious as the number displayed on the Kopimashin LCD.

"The damages in the TPB case are equally ludicrous of course," said Sunde. "The idea behind it is of course never to get that money paid, but to scare people into silence and obedience."

Sunde hopes to make 13 Kopimashins for exhibitions and plans to sell a few units as well.