Sinister: the MP3 Piracy Issue: Why the BPI are evil and should pick on somebody their own size.

[David White]

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 at 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 at belleandsebastian.freeserve.co.uk

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