Web Sheriff Vs. The BitTerrorists, Round 4,392: Nobody Wins (Especially Not Franz Ferdinand)

Since the leak last week of Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight, the overly polite anti-piracy outfit Web Sheriff has been in full-on overdrive, policing leak sites to make sure that any links to Rapidshare or Megaupload go dead faster than you can say “draw.” One of those sites, the popular “release news site” (translation: aggregator for said R’share/M’upload links) RLSLog, is crying that the Sheriff done took his mission too far, because the site has been vaporized by its Web host:

Sites like SceneReleases and RLSlog did their regular reporting on the leak of the album, with the usual links to sites like Rapidshare that briefly hosted the album. Very quickly these external sites removed access to the album, rendering the links still displayed on SceneReleases and RLSlog useless.

After making threats to SceneReleases, the anti-piracy outfit turned its attentions to RLSlog, demanding that the site display a full apology to Franz Ferdinand on its homepage. Of course, RLSlog wasn’t about to apologize but did remove the links, as a look at Google’s cache of the ‘offending’ page reveals. However, that wasn’t enough for Web Sheriff, and he decided to teach RLSlog a lesson.

Two days ago, RLSlog went down. Initially thought to be the victim of a DDoS attack, the site fired off emails to its host in the Netherlands to find out what was happening. Since it was the weekend, responses were expected to be less sharp than during the week, but it took the host a full two days to reply. When it did, the news wasn’t good.

Following complaints sent to the host and the host’s bandwidth provider, RLSlog’s host completely disabled the site. There was no discussion and no checking the validity of Web Sheriff’s claims. If the host had bothered to check any supposed links to the album, they would have seen that the links were gone. Indeed, the links were all dead before we reported on the situation last Wednesday. Nevertheless, the host completely disconnected the site, with no warning.

Why do I have a feeling that there have been other warnings in the past to these guys, which they’ve summarily ignored? Call it a hunch. Anyway, this all resulted in a bit of wahhhmbulance-chasing from an admin of the site, in the form of an open letter to the band:

Hi guys,

just wanted to tell you you probably succeeded at this. I am admin of RLSLOG (www. rlslog. net), which is a fairly popular weblog informing about new movies, games and music. The website was visited by more than 350 000 unique visitors a day.

Recently, we received a takedown request from Web Sherrif because someone in our comments posted download links for your new album. We removed the links but this Web Sherrif sent the request to our hosting and bandwith provider as well – and they didnt bother to check anything. They just completely turned off all our servers without any notice. It’s offline for 3 days already and they don’t even bother to talk with us anymore.

Quite a turnaround from your recent appeal to pirate music and admitting you do it too.

I and other 8 editors lost a website and 3 years of daily work. 350 000 people lost their favourite daily read.

Hope you are happy.

Martin, (former) RLSLOG admin

The irony of some dude who runs a “release news site”—i.e. an aggregator of links to downloads of other peoples’ work—complaining that his work has been “lost” because of people being kind of fed up with his leechy ways does not escape any of you, I hope. Something tells me Franz Ferdinand won’t exactly be sympathetic to this guy’s plight. (If only he’d apologized!)

And now for a bit of debunking: That bit about Franz Ferdinand “appealing” people to pirate music? Not true. Yes, their Web site briefly encouraged fans to download their 2007 cover of David Bowie’s “Sound & Vision,” recorded for a kinda-awful BBC-curated comp. But that little bit of pro-Limewire propaganda may not have been due to any encouragement by the band, but rather because an admin of their site got a little overexcited:

Franz Ferdinand lead singer Alex Kapranos said: “I don’t know who put up that embarrassing bulletin on our ff.co.uk site. It wasn’t anyone in the band.

“Fortunately we still have the keys to turn the bloody thing off.”

Later Kapranos added: “The message that appeared on the band website was put there by someone who maintained the technical side of the site, but who is not a representative of the band.

“The message reflected their personal views. While we don’t have a problem with this person attempting to think, it’s not cool if their thoughts are presented as ours.”

Of course, I can find one source for this particular quote, and it’s the bloody Sunday Mirror from two years ago. Whether it’s because that quote was actually a bit of PR presented as a quote from Kapranos, or simply because artists not advocating piracy is a bit dog-bites-man as far as Stories About The Exciting New Music Model goes, is left to you, reader, to decide.

Web Sheriff Takes Down RLSLog [TorrentFreak] WHAT A FF-UP [FindArticles.com]

(Also, 350,000 uniques a day? Yoinks. No wonder “web sheriff” showed up on Google Trends this morning!)