HOUSEQUAKE GETS ANOTHER LETTER TODAY

http://www.housequake.com...adid=30765

it would b so much easier if he released the vault stuff...well...until then I'd be buying bootlegs...

Funny how all this happens AFTER the tour...after we all shelled out all our hard earned cash.

Not sure that it was timed or anything...but it's strange timing.

superspaceboy said:

Is this a coincident? I think not.

fucking hell,
now i can understand them putting on pressure to close the bootleg trading section. And i can also understand why they would want the bootleg discussion section shut down, but how the fuck can they enforce this in law!? 'Discussing' bootlegs- how can this be a crime..!?

Sly said:

Had you ever been to the housequake bootleg "discussion" page? It was a thinly veiled way of having bootleggers exhange items in a don't ask don't tell kind of way. They were less strict at housequake than they are here with that stuff.

Not only all of that but they closed the avatars because they cant even post his pictures!!!

if a man is guilty for what goes on in his mind then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes.

skywalker said:

You are wrong. It wasn't about "bootleggers" exchanging items.

As a mod at HQ I can tell you that that statement is completley false.

All trading happened in a public forum, so how is that a "don't tell kind of way"?

skywalker said:

Pathetic.

Prince can be a very small, petty man at times.

"You are wrong. It wasn't about "bootleggers" exchanging items."

Really? Read what a mod from Housequake wrote-----


"As a mod at HQ I can tell you that that statement is completley false.

All trading happened in a public forum, so how is that a "don't tell kind of way"? "


Well, you have these trading trees right? You can exchange email/info right? I could contact someone via email (whom I know wants some bootlegs) and say "Hey give me $50 and such and such bootleg is yours-I'll mail it to you."

I am not saying I agree with what has happened, however, I can understand why Prince's lawyers viewed it as a breeding ground for illegal activity. If you wanted to obtain Prince bootlegs that was THE place to go.
[Edited 9/30/04 17:01pm]

Am I the only one who thinks the lawyers are not being unreasonable this time?

They are not trying to close the site.

They are not trying to control the legal output.

Most of all, they are asking nicely! Not like Londell (what happened to him??)

They seem human, and are offering a way out without a fight.

They don't want bootlegs discussed or promoted. Who can blame them! I buy them, but it doesn't make them right.

People are confusing site loyality with obvious law breaking.

SquirrelMeat said:

Didn't Prince sue him?

bananacologne said:

You wicked child! Go to bed!!!!!

as a member of HQ. No we didn't trade boots in the discussion forum. also there was never any money exchanged for boots. It was free trading. i repeat FREE. if u have never traded boots on this site maybe u shouldn't comment. plus the site is a little more than that. its a place where we as prince fans can meet and kinda hangout. I've met prob 4 guys who i would consider friends. i've also seen a lot of princes fans helping each other out there. granted i've only been a member there for a few months i have made friends who i will keep for life. i'll post it here as well as ther

Thank you Aaron for running a h=great site and we all need to stand together against this not as 2 seperate entiies....watch out org i'm sure he's linning u up in his sites

thepurpleaxxe said:

That's already been mentioned publicly as well as privately 2 Aaron, so don't presume.

Hey board,


There is a law that was just passed regarding bootlegs. It involved a record store in Manhattan.

Check it out and see if it applies to this. I think it does. I think the judge ruled that bootlegs are ok.




Five

fiveorange said:

Interesting - where's Matt. maybe he'd know where 2 look...?

bananacologne said:

there was a thread about it here...somewhere.

bananacologne said:

apparently this article's been posted into the ground at HQ, so i didn't wanna bother anyone with it here. but here ya go, and pardon me if you've seen this one before....



Judge Strikes Down Anti-bootleg Law

By ERIN McCLAM
Associated Press Writer

September 24, 2004, 8:42 PM EDT


NEW YORK -- A federal judge Friday struck down a 1994 law banning the sale of bootleg recordings of live music, ruling the law unfairly grants "seemingly perpetual protection" to the original performances.

U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. dismissed a federal indictment of Jean Martignon, who runs a Manhattan mail-order and Internet business that sells bootleg recordings.

Baer found the bootleg law was written by Congress in the spirit of federal copyright law, which protects writing for a fixed period of time -- typically for the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death.

But the judge said the bootleg law, which was passed "primarily to cloak artists with copyright protection," could not stand because it places no time limit on the ban.

Baer also noted that copyright law protects "fixed" works -- such as books or recorded music releases -- while bootlegs, by definition, are of live performances.

A federal grand jury indicted Martignon in October 2003 for selling "unauthorized recordings of live performances by certain musical artists through his business."

The business, Midnight Records, once had a store in Manhattan but now operates solely by mail and Internet. It sells hundreds of recordings, specializing in rock artists, from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin.

An e-mail message to Martignon from The Associated Press was not immediately returned Friday, and a phone number could not immediately be located.

Megan Gaffney, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney, said federal prosecutors were "reviewing the decision and will evaluate what steps ought to be taken going forward."

The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that fights piracy and bootlegging, also disagreed with the ruling.

The decision "stands in marked contrast to existing law and prior decisions that have determined that Congress was well within its constitutional authority to adopt legislation that prevented trafficking in copies of unauthorized recordings of live performances," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA.

The bootleg law calls for prison terms of up to five years for first offenders and 10 years for second offenders, plus fines. It requires courts to order the destruction of any bootlegs created in violation of the law.

The law did not apply to piracy, which is the unauthorized copying or sale of recorded music, such as albums.

I looked at "Housequake" for the first time the other day. They had a thread on there about the org supporting them on this situation. The thread started out really nice and then it made a turn for the worse. Everyone started talking about us and how we are all closet MJ fans.

Anyway, I checked out some of the other threads. I didn't stay too long so I can't really make a fair judgement, but from what I've read, everyone on that site agrees with everyone and never disagrees or has their own opinion. It's like everything Prince had ever done is cool with them and no one ever disagrees. It got pretty boring after awhile. The org is MUCH better, in my opinion, and I would like to commend everyone here for being Prince fans and not Prince worshippers and for speaking their minds.

PEACE4ALL said:

Gawd, these lawyers and their purple client are being fuckheads. "There is little doubt that hosting messages and discussions about bootlegs promotes the illegal trade of them." Ooh, there is "little doubt." Scary. These lawyers know they don't have a leg to stand on (just a pile of P's cash). In another thread in this forum (which was closed), I wondered whether Prince's lawyers would go after Rolling Stone for doing an expose on bootlegs, or after Time Warner for writing an article about people downloading music, because said article mentioned Kazaa and other places you could download Prince music from. Of course they wouldn't, because they KNOW that, under the First Amendment, Rolling Stone and Time have the right to write and publish these articles; even if they do inform some people who didn't yet know about a popular boot or a program that allows them to download a Prince song. The argument from these lawyers is weak and without merit. They're hoping to scare Aaron into obeying them. I highly doubt they'd do anything more than write another letter, if he refused to comply with their ridiculous demands regarding DISCUSSIONS on Housequake. When GeoCities had their lawyers send me scary letters for the GeoShitties parody page I put up, I emailed them back asking them to either A. stop writing me or B. take me to court. I never heard from them again. That was at least 5 years ago.

Luv & Peace,
Alex
Clubbin' in Mpls/A Night w. Prince

superspaceboy said:

People wouldn't be quite as eager to shell out $300.00 for concert tickets, aftershows, transportation, merchandise, etc. if Prince's lawyers were threatening them.

Luv & Peace,
Alex
Clubbin' in Mpls/A Night w. Prince

SquirrelMeat said:

That's because they don't have a case, and they know it.

Luv & Peace,
Alex
Clubbin' in Mpls/A Night w. Prince

I don’t care what these lawyers are saying. It cannot possibly be illegal to talk about bootlegs. Not in the US or in Holland.

If we started a thread about drugs where everyone discussed what drugs they had taken, what they liked/disliked etc, there would still be no grounds for legal action. Sure, drugs are illegal, taking them is bad, even trading them for free (as if) would be illegal. But talking about them aint illegal at all…

Prince is right royal wanker in this instance and I hope he sees a consequence of this at some point in the future.

How on earth can he presume to think that he, a US citizen, can take legal action against a dutch site over things that are talked about freely?

Fuck him, he’s a prick.

Wasn't Prince's wife a fan before she found a job @ PP? I guess that she owned some Sabotage/ Moonraker records too
just my imagination running away with me..

Ive just been reading an online book by a guy that is pretty upset by the record industry in general. Its not really relevant to the bootleg argument, its more about P2P, copyright, ownership and corporate greed relating to the "big five". The very stuff Prince has been fighting against for years.

It makes some interesting reading - Here it is for anyone with some time on your hands...

http://www.azoz.com/news/truth00.html

Anyway, whilst reading it I spotted something about a case in the Netherlands regarding Kazaa. Whilst not directly connected to bootlegging and Housequake, I think the legal ramifications may still apply. - It was written by a student who was writing a paper on the internet and music.

This is a link to the paper (scroll down a bit if you dont want to read the introduction).

http://www.azoz.com/news/truth14.html

Here is the paragraph in question.

"The American - indeed the global consumer, had already attained a taste for what MP3 audio and the internet could do for music aficionados. In the wake of Napster's rise and fall there raised a number of alternative programs, made immediately available by programmers to internet users. AudioGalaxy was perhaps the first, and was largely based on the Napster model. The RIAA soon filed suit against AudioGalaxy and won based on the precedent set forth by the Napster decision. But programmers persisted, making vast improvements on the Napster model with every new generation of P2P software. For example: the latest versions of P2P programs, such as KaZza (http://www.KaZza.com), i-mesh (http://www.imesh.com), and Morpheus (http://www.morpheus.com) use distributed network technology. Unlike Napster's central server model, this technology spreads the P2P networks across a vast number of servers, many of which reside off-shore in places like the Netherlands. In a 2002 the company behind KaZzA won an important ruling by a Dutch district court, which held that P2P software developers are not responsible for what users do with their software. This effectively makes the Netherlands a safe haven for P2P software companies"

Although not specifically related to the legal argument between Prince and Housequake, I think it may be relevant in how Dutch law would view anyone trying to take action against HQ regarding the people using the software and what responsibility HQ has as to what is said on their site.

There was also a paragraph on a ruling about making copies on video tape of copyrighted 'stuff' and then sharing with friends...

"Napster never disputed that nearly all its users were in violation of U.S. Copyright. Instead, it sought protection from the RIAA suit under the "Fair Use" provisions of U.S. Copyright, specifically citing a Supreme Court Decision referred to, ironically, as Sony. In the Sony decision the U.S. Supreme Court found that manufactures of video cassette recorders could not be held responsible for contributing to copyright infringement "because, while the machines can be used to duplicate copyrighted material without authorization, they also have non-infringing uses, such as duplicating free material, or making archival copies of copyrighted work." The Sony decision is significant in that by acknowledging that under fair use individuals may re-broadcast for private use a recorded broadcast or make a back-up copy, the Supreme Court undoubtedly recognized that back-up copies may be exchanged between friends, and that the recorded broadcast may be viewed more than once, which is the maximum number of times allotted by law."...

Anyway, sorry for the long post....

I find princes stance on this totally bizarre. On the one hand, I understand him wanting to control his output, and simultaneously not harm the sales of his offical releases. His artistic integrity would mean that if a song remains unreleased it does so for a reason that is personal to him. I can understand this, while a lot of unreleased tracks are brilliant, some are dire.

However I remember reading an interview with prince in which he said when he was younger he felt like he HAD to own every single note James Brown every laid to record, so from his point of view as a fan of music, he is not showing much empathy to his own fans and their insatiable hunger for prince stuff.

In many ways bootlegs have helped prince immensely. Think of it like the addiction of an over eater. Prince fans consume bootlegs and it only serves to increase their hunger for more stuff. In many ways one could actually question whether princes lesser works would have sold at all, if his hardcore "bootleg" buying fans had not had that collector / completist mentality that is fed by bootlegs. How much would records like NEWS, Crystal Ball, NPS, Exodus, Rainbow Children all have sold if Princes fans not have been hungry for more. The NPGMC was sold on the promise that as fans we'd be given exclusives, that it was going to be a revolution in the way we'd have access to his music, and whilst it is getting better, we've still not seen the ends to justify this claim.

Most importantly even if bootlegs dont help boost sales of his work, it is debatable, they certainly dont harm them. If anyone can name a single prince fan who doesn't buy princes official stuff simply because they buy bootlegs, id be very interested to hear from them.More than this, from what i can tell, the majority of bootlegs are of live recordings. Live recordings can only serve to enhance his reputation as a versatile performer and musician, in a way that his official ones never could.

My message to prince is that if he feels that all music should be free, then make it free. I dont mean give it away, even prince fans understand the simple dynamics of the costs involved in making music, but free the music up, make it available. Give us downloads of your live shows, your aftershows. release your bootlegs, or at the least the ones you're not ashamed of. The reason bootlegs exists is because there's a hole in the market that you aint plugging and like all free markets, people should be perfectly entitled to fill this if the demand is out there. You play your game in a public environment, you cant expect to have complete control. You accept our adulation and applause when we buy your concert tickets, why dont you accept that we are your fans and we dont want to rip you off. We simply want MORE.....

Who cares? Housequake suck. I've never seen a forum so completely devoid of personality.