Anti-Piracy Watchdogs Take It To The Comments Section

Brian Raftery
Apr 4th, 2007 // Comment

We were excited to see a few new Dinosaur Jr. tracks pop up on the Hype Machine, but when we clicked through to Faronheit–the site that was hosting the MP3s–we’d seen that the tracks had already been removed, thanks to the anti-piracy SWAT team known as the Web Sheriff (you might remember this organization from last fall, when they tried to prevent the Shins’ Wincing The Night Away from leaking on to the blogs–and we all know how well that went). Anyway, what’s interesting to note is that the Sheriff posted the cease & desist in Faronheit’s comments section–a practice that’s apparently been going on for a while now.

Here’s the letter as it was printed:

Web Sheriff
Protecting Your Rights on the Internet
Tel 44-(0)208-323 8013 / Fax 44-(0)208-323 8080
websheriff@websheriff.com www.websheriff.com

Dear Faronheit,

Kindly remove the unreleased Dinosaur Jr tracks from your site IMMEDIATELY, failing which – regrettably – a DMCA notification shall be forwarded to you and legal action by our clients’ lawyers and the BPI / RIAA shall follow : naturally, however, we trust that such a course of action shall not prove to be necessary.

On behalf of the artist’s label, we do appreciate that you are a fan of / are promoting Dinosaur Jr but, by the same token, you must also appreciate that, by posting a pirate copy of the album pre-release (or linking to a pirate copy of the album), you are potentially causing considerable damage and we are sure that you would not want to be held to be personally liable for all of the lost sales that could ensue.

We shall look forward to hearing from you BY RETURN.

Thank you for respecting the artist’s creation and copyrights and, for your info, the label are making certain tracks from the forthcoming album available for free download from its own site.

As you will appreciate, this e-mail – containing, as it does, a position that is potentially prejudicial to our clients’ open / formal position – is written on a without prejudice basis and, as such, all of our clients’ accumulated, worldwide rights remain strictly reserved : please excuse this required formality.

With Thanks & Regards

WEB SHERIFF

It’s very polite and apologetic; you can almost imagine Dudley Moore stammering it out to you. Anyway, what we don’t know–and maybe some bloggers can fill us in–is whether the Sheriffs do this in lieu of emailing the site’s administrators, or do it only when a formal C&D letter isn’t acknowledged, or do it just because it’s sort of fun for them to call people out in public. No matter what, you can still hear the Dino songs on the Hype Machine’s pop-up player, so power to the people, etc.

Maybe Now It’s Dinosaur Sr. [Faronheit]

idolator
  • KeBove

    Web Sherrif left me a few comments when I first started my blog. Since I don’t check the comments that often, I accidentally ignored them. They emailed me, and were much less polite. I told them that if they needed to contact me, email is the guaranteed only way to do so. That was about a two months ago, and I haven’t heard from them since. The whole comment-leaving thing is really a horrible way to deal with things.

  • j clicky clicky

    They sent me a C+D a month ago or so for a Dino track I had explicit permission from the label to post. Left hand, meet right hand.

  • matthew

    I had the same thing happen to me with The Shins…no comments, but this “Web Sheriff” sent me an e-mail with all sorts of vague threats. I told them off in my reply, cc’ing Sub Pop, and I never heard from them again (though Sub Pop was very apologetic!).

  • Niles

    So much wrong with this… First off, is Fat Possum even part of the RIAA?
    Secondly, look at websheriff’s site. It’s just sad. He’s preying on the insecurity of record labels, celebrities… he implies that he can stop rumors from being spread about his clients. Good luck, pal.
    Third, all of his work seems to be in britain. does he even have any jurisdiction here to say the sort of things he’s saying?

    I wonder if he’s just some loose cannon trying to prove himself so Daddy RIAAbucks will start paying him to go after blogs.

  • Fresh

    My understanding is that Web Sheriff uses a system similar to the spiders that search engines like Google are based on. They go out to all sites and automatically download any mp3s that are linked on the site, then a program goes through the mp3 tags (artist/title/etc) and if it matches anything in their clients’ catalogs they send out a warning. There is no fact-checking on their end to see whether or not you have been given permission to post the track, which is why they don’t immediately file a DMCA notice.

  • Kois

    I think that many companies and law firms that do work like this prefer to leave a message in the comments before they file notice with the ISP — because, as you guys have noted before, ISPs will often just delete a whole site willy-nilly, and because comments are often the fastest way to get a blogger’s attention.

    I hope if I am ever dinged for copyright infringement, they contact me through the comments rather than through my ISP. After all, I can delete a comment, but I’m much more screwed if my ISP deletes my whole site.