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.

Franz Ferdinand decide they don't like pirates after all

Back in August 2007, the BBC released a collection of cover versions to mark Radio 1's 40th birthday. Franz Ferdinand suggested that, rather than buying it, it would be more apt to help yourself:

"The whole shabang doesn't appear to be for charity so point your browsers towards Limewire soon, kiddies!" the band said in a statement.

It's all fun and games until... oh, it's your own label whose music is being pirated. Now, the band are sending WebSheriff after fans who have posted Tonight onto the torrents:

On behalf of Domino Records and Franz Ferdinand, we would kindly ask you not to post copies of ‘Tonight’ on your site. We do appreciate that you are fans of / are promoting Franz Ferdinand, but the label and artist would greatly appreciate your co-operation in removing your links to the pirate files in question.

Web Sheriff have also instructed the people getting letters - sometimes simply for posting links to other sites which had long since taken down the actual files. Oh, and demanding apologies:

You must also arrange for the following apology to be published on the relevant page of the site for a period of seven (7) days : “RSLOG wishes to apologies to Franz Ferdinand, Domino Records and Web Sheriff for the disruption caused to their sales, marketing and promotion plans by our publishing of pirate file details relating to the unreleased album “Tonight”.

It's not just the complete change in attitude from the Ferdinand camp; but if they do feel the need to chase down filesharers, couldn't they find a less embarrassing way of doing it?

Boo-hoo: Prince sends legal notices to the nasty men

Having made himself something of target by declaring war on his own fans, Prince is now finding that the internet can bit back. Indeed, b3ta launched a Prince image challenge in celebration of his stupidity.

For their efforts, they got a DCMA take-down notice, despite - erm - not being in the US. They've complied with the purple-pissy prissy one's wishes:

Under threat of legal action from Princes legal team of "potential closure of your web site" - We have removed the Prince image challenge and B3ta apologises unreservedly to AEG / NPG and Prince for any offence caused. We also ask our members to avoid photoshoping Prince and posting them on our boards.

Prince's giffinder general, John Gaicobbi of Web Sheriff did his best to try and not make his client sound like a humourless, heavy-handed, technophobic cry-baby:

"I don't think the people who posted them would like to be on receiving end of that kind of treatment.

"There's poking fun and there's poking fun and people are clearly taking it too far and crossing over the boundaries of what is acceptable."

Perhaps these people wouldn't want to be on the end of caricatures depicting them in an unpleasant way, but then since they haven't been sending legal letters demanding - god help us all - that websites remove pictures of people with Prince tattoos - it's unlikely they'd find themselves in such an unpleasant position in the first place.

We've had a quick Google and apparently the Prince-mandated shades of acceptable fun-poking have yet to be made public. Perhaps Prince could let us know exactly what degree of "poking fun" is acceptable to him: can we, for example, draw a small cartoon of him screeching "listen, Charles Windsor, either you take the word 'Prince' off your business cards, or I'll send my WebSherriff round"? Would a photoshopped image of him trying to whitewash a computer monitor be okay? How about if we morphed his head onto an etching of King Cantue? It would be handy to know.

[Thanks to Karl and David Scott who both sent the link]