The Internet is a cruel, mysterious mistress. What we have here is the story of a Canadian band called One Soul Thrust, a phony baloney (I refused to believe “bologna” is the proper spelling here; that’s not even how you’d pronounce the town name in Italian…) BitTorrent site, a misguided manager, and a lobbying group that apparently does little to no research. The story goes that this band’s manager wanted to see if any pirated copies of its debut album were available via BitTorrent. His sleuthing led him to LimeTorrents, a site we all know (or at least should know by now) that deals in trickery.
The site generates fake torrent information. For example, let’s search for “snooki” torrents, Snooki being one of the attractions last night at WrestleMania. As you can see, it turns up several “trusted” or “full” downloads, all of which are rubbish. This is exactly what the band’s manager did, and was shocked to discover that several thousand people were torrenting the album.
They weren’t, of course, but that didn’t stop the Canadian Recording Industry Association, in the form of Balanced Copyright For Canada, from freaking out, saying that pirates are evil and that this poor band was Exhibit A of how lives are destroyed, etc.
Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but at least now the band has increased exposure, so I guess everything worked out for the best in the end.