Hello there people, You may have read the post earlier from Trish Delish regarding the events surrounding www.belleandsebastian.freeserve.co.uk so here's the story from the top. As you're all probably well aware, my site has been hosting MP3s of the band for nearly 2 years now. All the tracks I had were either unreleased session tracks (the Peel tracks and the Black Sessions for example) or live tracks (Middle Distance Runner etc) so in terms of a commercial threat, they are/were virtually nil. In fact I would say that they did a hell of a lot to get the band exposure around the world where the bands CDs are not widely available. Anyway that's beside the point for now. Last Wednesday I received a rather serious looking email from Freeserve, my ISP who host the site, saying that after a complaint about the MP3s, I was in breach of my contract with them and that they were going to remove my site as of Friday afternoon. I sent them a reply pleading that I would remove the MP3s in order to save the site but to no avail and true to their word, the site disappeared. Obviously this did not please me much after spending so much time and effort on the thing and having reached a fairly respectable hit-rate of 200 per day, I didn't want to see my efforts go to waste. I sent a pleading email to Freeserve telling them that I would remove all the MP3s if they allowed me to have the site back which, I'm relieved to say they agreed to and the site returned after a weekend out, unfortunately without the MP3s though. At this point they told me who it was who had complained and kindly gave me the email address which I should correspond to the complainant with. It turns out the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) are the people who took it upon themselves to act as judge, jury and executioner with regard to my site. The BPI (www.bpi.co.uk) has a slogan "Protecting and Promoting British Music" and apparently they think it's their job to go around bullying people who have no means to defend themselves. They are apparently there to see that those who write music and sell it get the money they're due from their work. Fair enough, no harm in that and if I was selling hundreds of bootleg CDs down the local market I'd understand their desire to put me out of business. I'd also be mightily pissed off if I'd written music that people were stealing at my expense BUT let's not forget here that I wasn't actively letting people download the entire back-catalogue of Belle & Sebastian, I was letting them download a few rare and unreleased tracks. The Black Sessions: a French radio session (in other words it was broadcast to the entire French nation) which I myself received as a bootleg CD, so it's hardly a money-spinner for the band. The Peel Sessions: A British radio session which incidentally was available for download from the BBC's site after the first broadcast, (take note BPI, I expect www.bbc.co.uk to be shut down for this). Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner: This track was broadcast live on British TV. Spot a pattern here anybody? It's not like I'd stolen the master tapes for the bands new album. The tracks had all been broadcast on mainstream media and anybody with a video recorder or cassette deck could have (shock, horror) illegally been listening to these for years if they were fortunate enough to be around to hear them. As to whether the band and record label encouraged/discouraged the presence of the MP3s on my site, I couldn't really say for sure. I've never had a complaint directed to me from either about the issue and both have had links to my site on their own sites, so I presume they are aware of it's existence. I'd be interested to hear from either party as to where they stand on this issue. By the way, it wasn't my site which the band asked for MP3s to be removed from, wasn't it somebody who had posted some duff quality MP3s of their Glasgow Uni gig which the band didn't want the world to hear because the sound was so bad. Anyway, it's antipiracy@bpi.co.uk for those of you who feel the need to vent your frustration. I can only hope that those of you who wanted to, managed to download all the tracks before this happened and can continue to enjoy them. In the meantime, the site is still alive and kicking (although rather quietly now!) and you can still enjoy all the usual features as they were before. If you've read this far, I appreciate it and I'm glad that the MP3s brought pleasure to those who heard them. Dave david@belleandsebastian.freeserve.co.uk +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+