Besides Asides

Stemming The Tide

It is getting more difficult these days to be a blogger with file hosts cracking down on filesharing. There have been many blogs like mine that peddle in the obscure, podcasts that don't share any music at all, and bands/labels that use file hosts to 100% legally share their own material that have suffered from overzealous watchdogs. In theory stopping copyright infringement is a good thing, in practice it has shown to be not so much. But don't get it twisted, sharing property you don't have the legal right to is wrong. Infringing on another entity's copyright is illegal but with the recent shutdown of megaupload the notion of illegal and criminal are getting conflated with respect to copyright infringement in an effort by Corporate America to control the way we share information. What I post on here is largely things that aren't financially benefiting anyone but people on ebay and bootleggers. I can't take money away from artists and labels because they aren't selling the things I post. However, there is sometimes songs I put on my b-side collections for completest sake that are commercially available so as of right now I won't be posting anymore collections like that because those 99 cents on iTunes can make a difference over time. I'm going to stick strictly to out of print albums, live bootlegs, radio sets, unreleased albums and the like. If any of that stuff does see a retail release rest assured I will promptly remove it. I like to think I work in a necessary gray area, and until that necessity is no longer there the music fan out there deserves to be provided that space to thrive.

I was recently contacted by Big Ugly Fish Recordings about my Leatherface collection and I offered to remove it. The majority of the songs on it are long out of print but a few were still commercially available. They expressed a desire to possibly release another discography collection in the future and I completely understand that. It sucks that in the meantime people won't get to hear those other out of print tunes unless they go through ebay (which I don't need to remind you the band and label won't benefit from at all and people will be less likely to purchase a collection of songs they have already paid an inflated sum for over time). Still, go out and purchase the band's releases that you can. Either way they went about it the right way and I responded in kind by taking the post down. What is going about it the wrong way? Contacting my filehost and getting my account suspended or contacting blogger and getting the blog pulled offline.

I will continue to try and operate under the radar and provide you readers with content you will enjoy. To those bloggers out there that wholesale post bands' discographies that are still in print or leaks of records: STOP. You are ruining things for the rest of us. As for the long dick of the law: A knife can be used to slice a loaf of bread or stab someone in the chest, so don't go banning knives because of a few psychos out there. It is short sighted and stifling.