Here's the back story:About 5 years ago, my friend Brian and I were having a middle-schooler discussion and said, "Hey, you know what? It'd be funny if someone made a song about a war on the international space station." Not really true, but I decided to make it true. "I will, I said," and so I made an entire fake band, with three completed albums, of songs made up by me, using only my voice. I had a very high-pitched voice at the time, and the songs were completely ridiculous. The whole thing was a joke between me and him, and it died not long after, until last year.
Another person who had copies of the CDs was a kid named Tyler. I'll leave his last name out. So, anyways, last year (Junior year), he decided to bring the songs into school, play them really loud during lunch, and then give the CDs away to a bunch of people. Needless to say, I was pissed. When he started playing the songs, I asked him to turn it off, and he wouldn't. It was one of the few times in my life I've been angry to slam a door and storm out of a room angrily. Then, I found out he gave the CDs away to a bunch of people. I reported him to the school, claiming it as harassment, and mild copyright infringement. He was warned.
Then, about five months ago (the whole thing happened about that time), I find out that he not only did that, but he put all the albums up on the internet. WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! I contacted him personally, and told him that I wanted everything he had put up taken back down. He was kind about it, apologised, and took it down. A few days later, I find out a kid named "Robby," who's a douche bag anyways, put them back up. As of about four months ago, I found out one of the sites he had put it up on had over 15,000 downloads. Fifteen thousand! What peeved me more, was that I had put up Industrial Platypus on torrent sites about three months prior, only to find that the downloads were barely in the hundreds after that time...This was out-downloading my actual music project by over 30x. Besides feeling like trash, I offered one more warning, to which I received an "okay."
So, for the story:
Today I found out that rather than pulling off everything they could, they put them up in even MORE places. So, now, the songs have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and can be found on nearly every torrent site, AND last.fm. The **** has hit the fan.
I called the U.S. Copyright offices today, but received no answer. I then called the police station, and after being forwarded to a bunch of people and discussing what happened, I got a police officer to come to my house and get all the stuff down. Basically, I want the police to be the ones to go to them instead of me and say, "Hey. What you are doing is illegal and harassing, and Dustin is DEMANDING you take down everything you can, and not upload them anymore, or else he is filing against you for copyright infringement and taking serious action."
It may be a little extreme, but I've lost countless hours trying to stop this ********. Whether the original thing was a joke or not, I am still the copyright holder, and I have sole permission to distribute the work. I specifically asked them not to distribute them, and they did anyways. At this point, it is beyond harassment, a waste of my time, and copyright infringement.
I wanted to blow off steam. So now, the question:
Am I being too hard? Am I going over the top? Are they within their rights? As a musician-in-progress, the last thing I want is my personal information and full name attached to some stupid thing I did in Middle School, for the world to see. That's on top of me not wanting it anywhere in the first place. I do not feel I am over-reacting at all...What do you guys think?
