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

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."

Comments

City of London != London

[flopsquad]

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.

Re:City of London != London

[Trevelyan]

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.

Worse than pirates!

[Anonymous Coward]

music companies were actually deprived of little or nothing, since there were no legal copies that people could pay for.

Uh, WHAT? Those are the worst. Proper "pirates" at least have the decency to side advertise commercially available materials. But those guys hooked people on materials not for sale. They deprived music companies of people listening to commercially available tracks. The time those people were listening to these karaoke tracks could have been spent listening to commercially avaliable trash. And all the time the listeners try finding and acquiring copies of music no longer available could have been spent buying commercially available stuff.

They are filthy parasites on the total music mindshare, almost as bad as buskers playing their own compositions. Record companies invest billions of dollars in order to kill the interest in old artists and get people to buy new recordings to keep the dime rolling. Preserving interest in old recordings is like digging up the bones of one's parents and making love to them instead of the person herself.

Re:Age ain't nothing but a number

[flopsquad]

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.