Combat Piracy – A DIY Approach · Nov 13, 01:49 PM

It’s you against the pirates. At the heart of your attack is a hot new LP, freshly mastered and sounding great. Your mission is to release the LP, through legal channels and shift as many units as possible. The pirates’ mission is also to release your new LP, but illegally through free channels. These channels are filled with other pirates that will help the distribution in a spider fashion until it’s available on p2p networks, torrent sites and blogs and the job of trying to do anything about it is practically impossible.

If you are to have any hope against these pirates, you need to have a battle plan to implement from the date you send out your first promos until at least the date of release. The only way to stop pre-release propagation of your music is to catch it at an early stage.

Everyone’s favourite search engine

Start with the homepage of the internet, Google. A day of two after you’ve sent out your promos, search for the name and title of your new release. This is a quick and easy way to give an indication of if / how far your music has propagated into the free file sharing community. Go through the search results to see if your pre-release, freshly promo’d music is being shared without your permission.

Check the Blogs

Search the blog aggregators (Hypem and Elbo being the main ones) and search Google’s own blog search. If you find MP3s available for free download, decide how to deal with it. Often a simple email to the author is all that’s needed to get the tracks taken down. Take the opportunity to get in touch with anyone writing reviews of your music and give them information about where and when it will be available to buy and ask them to publish that info. (See Music Blogs – friend or foe?)

Physical Promos

If you send out physical promos, search Ebay. If you find your release on Ebay, notify them that it’s Promo only – not for sale and they will remove it.

1-Click Hosting Sites

These are the sites like Yousendit and Megaupload and several others that allow you to upload large files and share the link for anyone to download.

Tip: To check if your audio has been uploaded to a 1-click hosting site, you can use Google’s domain search functionality. For example, searching for: site:megaupload.com Michael Jackson gives you all of the files on Megaupload that have Michael Jackson in the name. Try it with the names of your artists.

If you find your music on any of these sites, notify them that it’s copyright material and they will remove it. Some of the sites make it even easier by providing a link to remove the file yourself.

P2P Networks

Check out the p2p networks too (e.g. Soulseek, Emule and Limewire). It may be more difficult to get your music off these networks but you can send a private message to the person sharing it and ask them to remove it. It may be the case that they are not even aware that they’re sharing it in the first place.

Torrent Sites

Lastly, there are the torrent sites (e.g. Torrentspy, Torrentreactor and the recently shut down Oink) The invitation-based Oink may have been shut down but having seen the rapid growth of the service, new sites like What.cd and Waffles have already sprung up to fill the gap that Oink has left. If you find your music on these sites, it is simply a matter of reporting it to the site admin and they will have it removed.

This may all seem like a big pain but if you don’t want to sit back and watch your audio files spread all over the internet, these are some of the things you need to do to prevent it.

— Alex FATdrop

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