The Web Sheriff paid a visit..
Posted by admin on December 5th, 2008Animal Collective are about to release the much-anticipated ninth album Merriweather Post Pavilion in January and the hype around the release has reached fever pitch on the web. As is near unavoidable these days, a song called ‘Brother Sport’ from the LP was inexplicably leaked on a French site’s podcast. Subsequently, someone ripped the song and music bloggers enthusiastically posted it on their blogs. One of those bloggers was Ed Droste of the band Grizzly Bear, themselves a well respected band signed to Warp Records and who recently toured with Radiohead.
Domino Records then hired Web Sheriff – a company whose self-appointed goal is to “protect your rights on the internet” to quash the leak. Web Sheriff spends the next day or so posting hamfisted comments and emails with their request to take down links to the offending song.
All comply except for Droste because Web Sheriff’s email lands in his spam folder so he initially does nothing. A day later, Web Sheriff’s then accuses Droste of being the global source of the leak, and threatened to sue Grizzly Bear “for all commercial and other losses arising from this blatant act of piracy” . They went on to demand a full apology. This time, Droste received the email/comment and duly had to publicly apologise to Animal Collective, Domino and Web Sheriff himself, bringing the whole incident to a rather heavy-handed resolution.
Droste later explains that he thought the song was officially being used to promote the album and calls the incident “an overblown and rather silly manifestation of what I thought was an innocent and encouraging endorsement of Animal Collective’s song”.
Read the full blog post here.
[...] and a takedown and full apology was demanded. You can read a more in-depth chain of events at the Day and Night mag site or from the bear’s [...]