Wait a minute, wait a minute

edclear

edclear

Invader
I received an email from Perun threatening to ban me as I post links to a streaming concert of Maiden way back in the early days with Paul DiAnno and a few others with Bruce, but here's a section for bootlegs. Are you guys selling these or giving them away? Those links I posted were not for any form of profit. I was just sharing some old footage of concerts that I found available online. This just seems like complete double standards to me.
 
I left the streaming link to a Paul era bootleg there. The rest were links to sites where you could not only stream official live releases - that would be borderline - but where there were active download links to the files. That is clearly against our rules. If you can't tell the difference, I'm sorry.
 
Still seems like double standards to me, it's not just the recording that has copyright but the actual composition. So if you take offence at some old footage (okay Rock in Rio is official, but I would claim the fair use policy of copywrite as the quality was pretty shoddy and merely an intro to the real thing), why not take offence at those selling bootlegs on this site? Barter is still a system of selling. My point is that it's the songs which are under copyright so surely the selling of bootlegs is breaking the copyright law.

It's like the youtube videos. Anyone can download them and there are tons of youtube links on here. I've posted a few myself as I don't consider that to be a breach of copyright but fair use. The copyright thing has gotten totally out of hand, big business dictates way too much. And maybe your threat of a ban was just a bit heavy handed.
 
The band has no problems with fans getting bootlegs of concerts. Steve has collected these himself for years and understands what it means to be a fan.

Sharing links to official releases is a different matter.

The forum policy towards link sharing is intelligent and easy to understand. Most of us understand this within the minute you want us to wait.
 
edclear said:
Still seems like double standards to me, it's not just the recording that has copyright but the actual composition. So if you take offence at some old footage (okay Rock in Rio is official, but I would claim the fair use policy of copywrite as the quality was pretty shoddy and merely an intro to the real thing), why not take offence at those selling bootlegs on this site? Barter is still a system of selling. My point is that it's the songs which are under copyright so surely the selling of bootlegs is breaking the copyright law.

It's like the youtube videos. Anyone can download them and there are tons of youtube links on here. I've posted a few myself as I don't consider that to be a breach of copyright but fair use. The copyright thing has gotten totally out of hand, big business dictates way too much. And maybe your threat of a ban was just a bit heavy handed.
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Only that we don't allow bootleg selling here. As you may read from the forum name, this is explicitly a trade forum - i.e. we only allow people setting up the trade of one bootleg for another, no money or profit made. We are very strict and cautious about this, and if you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to post here.
 
The Moderation Team recognizes that in the digital era, a website cannot be too cautious.

My personal feeling about copyright law aside, our job is to protect this website from the possibility of legal action - fair or not. Most legal action is not fair. That's how it goes. If this website is suspended or removed due to copyright law, or other legal manners, we all lose. We have to protect the forum, site, and posting body from that possibility.

Edclear, you were warned with agreement from the Moderation Team in reference to our guidelines. They are part of the requirements for posting here. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me in PM.
 
While it's not my place to question owners and administrators of this fine establishment, I think this is taking things too far.

1. Maiden's management has a pro stance towards digital distribution, they even shared their negative opinions about Metallica vs. Napster case. Steve even acknowledged that their early success is contributed to cassette copying and sharing between fans, so it's only logical to embrace downloading of MP3s. There are videos of every single Iron Maiden official concert recording on Youtube, in full length, and in high definition. They don't care and they support it. Metallica showed that suing would only bring bad rep. 

2. Legal cases that were based on linking to external content have failed in recent years, and essentially stopped. There are tons of sites around that index files from file serving sites, where you have above 50% of "illegal" material, running normally. Filestube for example, even has a Facebook and Google+ cross-site stuff and uses Google AdWords program.

So, unless you turn this site into a one-click lossless official material download depot, you are not getting sued by nobody.
 
Perun said:
Only that we don't allow bootleg selling here. As you may read from the forum name, this is explicitly a trade forum - i.e. we only allow people setting up the trade of one bootleg for another, no money or profit made. We are very strict and cautious about this, and if you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to post here.
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But it appears that links to sites where people sell bootlegs are in fact allowed?: http://forum.maidenfans.com/index.php?topic=21698.0 Just not direct selling on this site it seems.
 
Zare said:
1. Maiden's management has a pro stance towards digital distribution, they even shared their negative opinions about Metallica vs. Napster case. Steve even acknowledged that their early success is contributed to cassette copying and sharing between fans, so it's only logical to embrace downloading of MP3s. There are videos of every single Iron Maiden official concert recording on Youtube, in full length, and in high definition. They don't care and they support it. Metallica showed that suing would only bring bad rep. 
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That maybe the bands and their managements stance - but not necessarily EMI.
 
Albie said:
That maybe the bands and their managements stance - but not necessarily EMI.
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Indeed. Take South Park for instance, they have repeatedly stated (and made episodes about) illegal downloading and stated they don't give a flying f*** about it. That frankly as far as they're concerned they just want people to see it and don't care how. The whole "The artist may stop producing it if people keep ripping it off" argument they believe to be retarded, as an artist should do it because they ENJOY IT. They also stream the episodes on their website, all of them.

BUT... in the UK you cannot watch those streams on their website because of legal issues from (I believe) the network.

I've moderated/administrated a council forum in the past and we liaised with the police a fair bit, generally the stance was do not allow postings of anything that has the potential to be taken as copyright infringement, whether the owner minded or not. Or in other words, better to be safe than sorry.

Bootleg trading, that's another thing as they are not making profit. Bootleg SELLING.. well, that's making profit from someone elses work. Linking to a website with bootleg selling on it is a hard call to make, as you have no control over what is on another website - it may not be there one day then be there the next etc. Ultimately you are not responsible for displaying the content of someone elses website by linking to it, but they are responsible for it existing so they would take the heat. Linking directly is a lot more of an issue than linking to a site which happens to contain a link... but it is a bit of a grey area.
 
Sorry, but this "linking" talk is bullshit.

Google also "links" to sites with illegal material, and all that copyright owners can do is to politely ask Google to blacklist those sites.
However sites are a dynamical medium, you link to a blog for instance, and the next day blog owner puts up some copyrighted material up for download. What, so now you need to check every link from your site on a daily basis because someone might put somewhere something "illegal"? Bullshit.

And now back to the real world, and everyday example.
If you linked here to a site containing download links for Flight 666 DVD hosted on some file sharing service, and EMI staff happens to stumble on those links here, they're going to send a copyright infringement claim to ones hosting the file. Not the blog, not us.

If you want a summary of whole legal procedure, have it; you can't just e-mail some site owner and say, we're EMI and blah blah. Legal case needs to be established. Companies from different industries have groups representing and "defending" their copyrights, BSA on the software field, and for instance, RIAA in the music field. That groups have legal representatives, and after securing the case (ensuring that hosted files really contain copyrighted material), their lawyers send a formal cease and desist.

The Pirate Bay received hundreds of cease and desist letters and denied all of them. Nothing could be done without a trial.

There are a few catches in agreements between web hosting companies and web site owners. The company can explicitly prohibit linking to sites that contain download links to illegal material, but that's a request that company wishes you to follow. They can also take your localized site down if they demand all sites hosted by them to be English.

...etc. All of this is going too far. Really. I'll personally compensate for any damage this site could get if it allowed those kind of links / posts. I mean, there are tens of thousands of posts on this site and there could be like 10 of em in "linking" grey area.

Get real people.
 
Zare said:
Google also "links" to sites with illegal material, and all that copyright owners can do is to politely ask Google to blacklist those sites.
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Err? Just a side comment (and I don't mean to take this out of its context in your post) but Google is one of the (if not the) most powerful companies on the net. You're not going to start a lawsuit versus Google as easily as againt this forum.
 
It boils down to this: The owner decides what's allowed and not allowed at his website. If Jon doesn't want links to copyright protected official releases then that's how it is. It's that simple.
 
Let's clear this up a bit. The mods have been discussing the matter on the side, and Wasted summed it up nicely.

Wästed The Great said:
IIRC, where we stand is:
1) No links to download official releases.
2) Trade all the boots you want here.
3) We don't want selling of boots [directly on this forum], but posting links to those sites is ok.
4) <redacted>
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The other matter is streaming. As long as the stream isn't also offered as a download, it's fine.

Hope that helps.
 
@Yax, of course this house has its rules and they're to be obeyed. But I must call bullshit on the whole affair, I like to question everything and that's how my mind works. Since I consider myself to be quite educated in this topic, I'm speaking out loud. However, that's as far as I go, won't force the issue or protest in any way apart from simply showing my viewpoint of this topic.

@Foro, Google or not, they don't have legal background to harass someone without a clear case in court.

There's a famous European directive 2000/31/EC which clearly separates information service from information provider and the client who seeks information. It has an American DMCA law counterpart. Responsible parties for the legality of that distribution are the client and the provider. Information service is out. Thus; I am the client, the owner of some illegal downloads server is the provider, and this site is the service which links to the provider. If authorities find about all of us, they're going to press charges against me, and against the server owner. This site cannot be held responsible for just passing the word.

A decade ago I was involved with an emulation site, the biggest then, and one of the biggest now. I won't link here because I'd break some house rules, but if anyone is interested in the name and address, contact me privately. Anyways, we had big problems running the site because webhosts would close us down once in a few months because they received a letter from someone. For years. The games we were putting up for download weren't placed on our servers, they were all around the globe and we linked to them. That stopped once we rented a dedicated server. Lawyers that were sending e-mails on behalf of Nintendo and Capcom contacted a netblock owner that was housing our server and providing us with an internet connection; guys at M5 Hosting responded with contact details of the owner and noted they require a legal order to sever our internet uplink. Lawyers sent a cease and desist threat to our owner, which he simply "flagged as spam", got around 5-6 same e-mails in a following year. I don't know how many they've sent in total, because I stopped working on that site sometime in 2005, but let's just say that site was never down again.
 
Zare said:
I like to question everything and that's how my mind works.
Click to expand...

Same here... most the time I don't mind it as I can get more indepth with things, but it does play havoc when you reach questions that cannot be answered... brain can't get any confirmation so just replays the question over and over and over, generating more questions.. and thus, more headache. Bane of my life.

In regards to the rest of what you said, I agree (and said something similar but not quite so well put) on your basic point: If you link to a site you cannot check it every day forever to make sure it is still a 'clean' link. But, you can of course check these things WHEN you link it. So linking something and then the site changes? Not your fault you can't predict it... linking something that you already have evidence is a dodgy site, that's where I'd say the problem lies.

Ultimately, as you said, the legal issues lie with the person who is hosting the problem site, not people linking to it. But it really is better to be safe than sorry, the website I used to work for wouldn't allow linking to anything potentially illegal, or even mentioning it. For instance someone was asking about software for (I believe) composing music, asking if there was any free drum-tool type things and someone responded "Sure, piratebay and search for xyz" .... the post got removed because it was basically saying "Here, have some illegal stuff" with direct intent of that being its purpose. Linking to a site for another reason and the site has something dodgy in it somewhere, is a different state of affairs. He didn't give a direct link to the torrent, but he told them how to get it. There was a different case which we had a debate over when someone said something along the lines of "There are places you can get cracked versions", and we let it go because whilst he was saying you can find it if you look... he wasn't directing the person, so if someone took it upon themselves to look for it, that's their fault.

You have to draw a line somewhere otherwise any and every post could be interpreted as suggesting misuse if you look hard enough.

That of course, is where site rules come into play... they state what the line is. Someone owns the website and want's things to be kept within certain boundaries, the mod's felt it was outside the boundaries, so it went.

So, I certainly understand and agree with what you're saying.. but at the end of the day, whether it's sensible or stupid (it will vary from incident to incident, and for what purpose the offending site was linked to begin with etc etc) .. it's the rules.

These are the kind of topics I like.. proper discussions on things and sooner or later someone will throw in some legal quotes and you learn something ;)
 
Yax has put this beyond doubt. It's up to the owner what links he wants to allow or not.

I agree with you Zare that it is extremely unlikely that EMI will prosecute Maidenfans for having a link, but if the site owner does not want that link in the first place (even if the site has bootlegs for download as well), then we should agree to that. It's not at all difficult for anyone to get hold of official releases if they looked hard enough, so links to those sites need not be posted in the first place.
 
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