Germany’s Domain Busts File Sharing Host

German Metal Band Domain recently released an album called The Chronicles Of Love, Hate And Sorrow. On this new album they had digital watermarks, as a lot of record companies are doing these days. By embedding a digital watermark it can be traced back to the uploading source. I get promo CD’s every now and then that have my name on the disk and a number. If I were to upload that promo disk to a file-sharing website’s server, or made the files available from my computer, it could be traced back to me and I’d be in deep shit.

Domain found that over their album had been downloaded 35,000 times since it’s release 4 weeks earlier. If that were actual record sales, that band would be sitting pretty good on tour, considering they aren’t exactly a big name (in the States anyway) even though they’ve been around for quite some time. Imagine for a second how many hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of record sales are lost by some of the big names in the industry? Sure it probably doesn’t hurt the big names that already have an ass-load of money and sell out stadiums, but the little guys, the smaller named bands are getting gang-raped in the long run.

Here is the actual message they delivered on myspace:

Illegal Filesharing Organisation Busted!

Hi everybody,
we would like to thank you!

To thank all of our fans, who spent their hard money to buy our albums and download our songs from the legal download shops. Your are the true fans, the real fans, who earn our respect!

This attitude is all the more to appreciate, as we had the chance, by placing inaudible digital watermarks in our songs, to blow the whistle on an illegal filesharer organisation, which downloaded our actual album “The Chronicles Of Love, Hate And Sorrow” over 35.000 times (!) within only 4 weeks by the internet!

You can imagine how catastrophic the financial damage will hit a band like DOMAIN. All the lost money can’t be invested in the music production, in touring or high quality merchandise.

Luckily, by using the watermarks, we brought the persons in charge to justice where they had to answer for their delicts. More investigations are in the offing. As far as we can see, this is the first time that a single music group defended themselves successfully against the abuse of their music.
As a band, we would like to express our gratitude to all loyal fans, who appreciate our work even in hard times, by not supporting the despicable steal of our works. YOU keep the band alive!

We salute you!
Axel, Nicolaj, Erdmann, Steven and Jens

Image: Amazon.com

Story source: Bravewords.com