Band Leaks Own Album, Blames Pirates 243
A Cow writes "When the hard rock band Buckcherry found out their latest single had leaked on BitTorrent, they didn't try to cover it up or take the file down. No, instead, they issued a press release. After a bit of research, TorrentFreak found out the track wasn't leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band. In an attempt to cover their tracks, the press release was pulled, but it's still available through Reuters and Google's cache."
Re:Who does the RIAA represent? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia edits (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article: "It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page."
Well, a certain person, who has coincidentally both edited the BuckCherry page, and added a name to a radio station page, has also added a couple of questionable contributions [wikipedia.org].
License To Download (Score:2, Interesting)
Since the band put the album on bittorent, sounds to me like they implicitly gave everyone a copyright license to download it. No reason to buy it now; it's free. If they didn't grant a license, I'm going to record myself screaming into a microphone, burn cds of it, then hand it out a Walmart and then sue people for copyright infringement for taking it. Sounds like almost as good of an idea as the Underpants Gnomes scheme.
This was prone to backfire. (Score:4, Interesting)
No matter how it ends up.
The "direct" damage, by having the tracks downloaded, is easy to keep under control. Having a torrent means jack if nobody seeds. Just because there's a .torrent file doesn't mean the file is available on BT. It only means someone created a hash.
But, well, to recoin an old phrase, imagine it's torrent and nobody leeches. What does that mean, essentially? That nobody wants the crap! It's available. For free. To be taken. And NOBODY bothers to do just that! It ain't even worth the bandwidth necessary to DL it.
If there's any lesson in this, it's don't do that! The first thing a (reputable) record mag would have done when this info came out, provided it was genuine, was to check with BT. And see that nobody uploads/downloads the tracks. And then write about a band that nobody wants. Not even for free, delivered right to your computer.
Re:That's not piracy, that's *Marketing* (Score:5, Interesting)
If that's the case, then if the band are the copyright holders of their own work (a fairly safe assumption) and their agent is making it available in the public domain, I'd have thought it legal to download.
No black mark there. I'll be looking out for it on BitTorrent, as they've granted me the right to peruse the download link, I presume.
Re:Up Until... (Score:2, Interesting)
They played some damned good punk rocking stuff. Then people labelled them as fascists (accusing them of being aligned with the British Movement, a UK Nazi organisation), and it wasn't cool to like them any more - even though they were still playing the same music. After that, the band published a statement saying that they weren't fascists at all, they just liked a good fight on a Saturday afternoon with (basically) anyone who was up for it.
So then it was okay to like the music again on the basis that they weren't fascists, but you couldn't enjoy them if you were a pacifist, I guess!
Following the script of "The Heavenly Kings" (Score:5, Interesting)
Never was quite clear just how much of the film is real, and how much is fictional (the actors in the movie did in fact start a cheezy boy band, as depicted in the film, and seemed to, on one hand, draw inspiration for the film from their experiences, at the very least).
Anyhoo, the second I read the blrb, I instantly realized these guys have probably watched the film in question.
http://www.lovehkfilm.com/reviews_2/heavenly_kings.htm [lovehkfilm.com]
Re:Wikipedia edits (Score:4, Interesting)
My god - the edits to the Zoophilia page are gold.
Re:That's not piracy, that's *Marketing* (Score:0, Interesting)
Help me out here. In your third-party proxy server example the third-party isn't a human. It's just a repeater station for HTTP. But with the Bittorrent example it's a redistributing service for human clients. So from a Judge's perspective (having to rule on existing laws) placing a work on Bittorrent intends people to download and distribute, while placing on a webserver only intends download. Right?
This happens a lot in South Korea ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Many of the major talent agencies in South Korea regularly leak entire albums of their artists onto the Internet to build up advance publicity, too.
It makes sense to do so because music sales (especially physical disc sales) have, well, imploded there. Hit albums once moved as many as 2 million copies each as recently as 2000; these days, even sales of 25000 copies are pretty respectable. The talent agencies--who scout for, train and produce just about all the major artists in the country--have high overheads and cannot survive with sales figures like that.
So, the music has become just a loss leader for the agencies to build up their artists' popularity, with which they can then bank on to land as many drama roles and product endorsements as possible. Those are much more lucrative than selling music. Failing that, many artists (even A-list idol groups like SNSD, the Wonder Girls and Big Bang) will sing live anywhere and everywhere--at university fairs, sports events and trade shows.
Re:Up Until... (Score:1, Interesting)
Buck Cherry were one of my favorite bands. I would kill to have Josh Todd's voice. Alas, they are one more thing for me to boycott. Fuck.
Man, I used to boycott things this easily too, but I ended up with nothing left to buy and then had to go live in the woods to survive. And then the woods almost killed me, so I had to boycott them. And then I got mad at myself for being so stubborn, and so I had to start boycotting my own thoughts. Next thing I remember was waking up in the asylum for petty boycotters, where I now sit.
Let this be a warning to you.
Re:That's not piracy, that's *Marketing* (Score:3, Interesting)
Clever legal arguments aside, does it really matter in the bigger scheme of things? Countless numbers of songs and software are released in this way by their own copyright owners. And yet, only a tiny fraction of those copyright owners are caught doing it (or will admit to doing it).
By releasing their materials in this way, they're effectively putting their "intellectual property" in legal limbo. They probably won't enforce their rights to this one particular track they just released (but I can assure you they'll release every other track they own, if they haven't done so already, they won't get caught in those other instances, and then they'll be sure to play both sides of the law).
Microsoft has done this. Macromedia has done this. It pays to release your stuff through the back door, and then yell bloody murder afterward, especially because the civil damages are not awarded based on actual real damages.