Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UK Police Busts Karaoke 'Gang' For Sharing Songs You Can't Buy (arstechnica.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the keeping-dangerous-karaoke-enthusiasts-off-the-streets dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The London Police have an Intellectual Property Crime Unit. They just issued a press release bragging about "dismantling" a "gang" running "commercial-scale copyright infringement." But if you look into the case, it turns out to just be three old guys who stream karaoke tracks that mostly aren't available from karaoke manufacturers. "This means that far from losing 'a significant amount of money,' music companies were actually deprived of little or nothing, since there were no legal copies that people could pay for." This "gang" didn't even sell any of the tracks they streamed — it seems to just be a hobby for some karaoke enthusiasts. "So why is Hodge calling what seems to be an extremely low-level operation 'commercial-scale?' It's probably because 'commercial scale' is a key legal concept that the recording industry has been trying to redefine to include activities that don't involve financial gain."

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. City of London != London by flopsquad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just FYI, TFS saying "London Police" is misleading. This sham of a "bust" was undertaken by the City of London Police, which is 728 guys with a square mile jurisdiction, who serve as wink wink enforcement arm for Big Content.

    The 31K police that actually police London are known as the Metropolitan Police Service.

    --
    Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.
    1. Re:City of London != London by Trevelyan · · Score: 5, Informative

      In case the difference between London (City) and the "City of London" is not clear to some, here's a great video on the topic.

      It's a city within a city, within a country that's within a country.
      It's also semi independent of the UK and its laws; an artefact of existing longer than the UK does.

    2. Re:City of London != London by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Despite Americans assuming that all famous British TV series were produced by the BBC, "The Prisoner" wasn't.

  2. Re:Age ain't nothing but a number by flopsquad · · Score: 5, Informative

    The oldest is 60. And what difference should their age make anyway?

    The implication when your press release uses the term "gang" is young males with violent tendencies involved in criminal enterprise.

    Revealing that this "gang" is in fact three karaoke-enthusiast grandfathers who derive no financial benefit from their activities is, I think, a reasonable rebuttal.

    --
    Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.
  3. Re: Protecting financials to the detriment of cult by Goglu · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... Most DVD-Rom drives allow you to change the region DRM only 2-5 times. In other words, you must buy specific equipment by region. Most people will just give up and satisfy themselves with Disney crap, giving up on broadening their culture.

    In the end, I did the illegal thing: bought a cheap DVD player with a region hack and... hacked it!