To link or not!
The bizarre danish story about a mentioning of The Grey Album continues. Story in short.
A danish weblogger Keld Bach posts about the The Grey Album (see his post in english here). Within days he receives a cease and decist letter from the danish organisation “The Anti Pirate Group” run by the Johan Schlüter lawfirm representing basically all danish music rights holders.
They have been known to threaten teenagers and their parents with very strongly worded cease and decist letters to get them to settle out of court for fines around 10,000 us dollars for small cases of piracy like downloading or sharing files on p2p networks even though the damage incurred was a small percentage of that amount and the fact that in many cases the evidence would’t hold up in court.
The only thing he has done is to WRITE about the existence of the grey album (which i also did and national newspaper did with the url of the grey tuesday website).
Through heavy pr work he eventually got them to back off, but has since filed a complaint with the board of danish lawyers for their behaviour to make sure it won’t happen to others in the future – and this is where it gets funny and bizarre.
Instead of admitting their error the lawyers has just submitted their “evidence” of the crime they argue has been done.
Their argument is that you COULD download a copy of the Grey Album from his weblog because he linked to the front page of the creative commons, which had a link to the creative commons weblog, which at that time had a post by matt haughey, which had a comment that linked to the grey tuesday site, which had a link to a “banned music” page, which had a link to a .torrent file of the album, meaning you would have to download Bittorrent to get it to work!
This is about 8 links out from his weblog post – with 30-60 choices per page where the specific link would have to be selected.
What happened to free speech?
And to what absurd levels will the recording industry take it before going where the users and the market is?
PS. Don’t tell the music industry and their lawyers that there’s this thing called Google that easily helps you find things with one or two clicks!