The Sheriff crashes in

During a fairly quiet lunch hour, I was quite excited to come across the Placebo tour dates, and posted them up.

I was a bit surprised logging on this evening to find this in the comments:

WEB SHERIFF
Protecting Your Rights on the Internet
Tel [...]
Fax [...]
[...]

Hi NRaRF,

On behalf of PIAS, Astralwerks and Placebo, many thanks for plugging "Battle For The Sun " (album street date 8th June) ... .. thanks, also, on behalf of the labels and artist for not posting any pirate links to unreleased (studio) material and, if you / your readers want good quality, non-pirated, preview tracks, the title track is available for fans and bloggers to link to / post / host etc until the 13th April at www.placeboworld.co.uk... .. for further details of the new album, on-line promotions, videos and 2009 shows, check-out the band’s site plus www.myspace.com/placebo and www.youtube.com/officialplacebo

Can anything be more calculated to make you feel a little less warm towards one of your favourite bands than something like that? It manages to be patronising, pathetic, presumptive and clunky all in one horrible package.

It'd be one thing if it came from the label, or the band. But from the nutcracking sledgehammers of Web Sheriff? It's a little bit like getting a best keep village prize from the Mob, isn't it?

How, exactly, does Web Sheriff protect my rights on the internet? They might do a good job of protecting their paying customer's rights - although since they manage to piss off so many people, it's arguable they do more in reputational harm than they save in copyright leakage, but that's not protecting me, is it?

What is a "pirate link" when it's got a parrot sitting on its shoulder, come to that? There's a difference between 'pirated material' and a link to pirated material; presumably a pirate link would be one where the publisher had copied the text of the link from another site without permission?

The message ends 'regards, Web Sheriff', raising the horrible prospect that rather than just a self-important brand (making the AA's old claim to be "the fourth emergency service" seem sane), there's someone who really does sit surfing the internet wearing a big hat and a shiny star.

Part of me is, at least, tickled that how-many-years-it-is-now-since-Napster, there's at least some attempt being made to try being nice, and polite, rather than menacing and belligerent, in at least some quarters of the UK intellectual property organisations. But paying some third party to slap poorly-conceived messages up isn't the way to do it. Even if you pay some third party to pretend to be doing it on behalf of the band, that'd be better.