RIAA Attacks Sites Participating in Its Own Campaign

An anonymous reader writes "The RIAA is once again at their old tricks. The band Nine Inch Nails has intentionally 'leaked' songs via USB keys hidden at restrooms during their current European tour. Sites hosting the songs are now being sent cease and desist orders. 'Ironically, with its numerous pirated downloads available, the whole album has not leaked yet. According to a source, the only leaks are the ones Reznor approved himself. And whether he realizes it or not, Reznor may be building a new option for presenting music that augments the existing CD/tour scenario.'"

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Crazy Man on Fire]

Exactly. Just because they authorized the distribution of some promo copies of an upcoming release doesn't mean that the people in possession of those promos are authorized to distribute them to others. Yes, it is stupid of them to be killing the buzz around the album by sending these takedown notices, but I don't think they have a choice but to go after the people violating copyright.

Re:Huh?

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

When lawsuits are brought against copyright violators, the plaintiff is oftentimes the label - NOT the RIAA. The RIAA is acting on behalf of the label. The label signed off on the promotion.

Re:was part of an alternate reality game

[Rob T Firefly]

Yeah, for a few weeks my inbox was peppered with email from friends along the lines of "there's this weird NIN thing, I think it's computer hacker stuff, you're a nerd right?"

Much of it is actually fairly brilliant, the Wikipedia article is worth a once-over if you haven't been following things. I'm especially impressed with the fact that they hid a picture in the spectrogram of one of the songs.

Which brings me back to this article.. NIN wasn't just leaking music tracks, they were distributing clues which were part of this whole ARG thing. As such, they were obivously counting on the tracks being further distributed, unless they really believed that the one person who picked up the USB stick in the bathroom would just happen to be a steganography buff or whatever. People were supposed to throw these tracks around and analyse the crap out of them.