For an organization that is completely focused on copyright, you’d think they could at least manage to get the basics right. You would, however, be wrong.

In the August 2012 edition of their magazine, they run an article on video games, including a page indicating what parts are protected under copyright, patent and trademark law. It is on this page that the words ‘Epic Fail’ come to have new meaning.

The top of the page feature screenshots from three different games. Panzer Dragoon II:Zwei, Rez, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

The ‘fail’ comes when all three are tagged “Photos: © SEGA. All Rights Reserved”

While Panzer Dragoon 2 is indeed a Sega game, as was Rez, anyone with even a passing knowledge of games would know that Zelda’s screenshot would be copyrighted to Nintendo, not SEGA.

Ooops

Additionally, the words ‘All Rights Reserved’ has been depreciated for the last 12 years. It arose from the Buenos Aires Convention of 1910, but has not been required since 2000, when Nicaragua became the last Buenos Aires signee to also sign the Berne Convention, which has no such requirement.

You would think that an organization like the World Intellectual Property Organization would not only understand that such terms have been superseded for the last 12 years, but would also bother to check who they’re attributing copyright to. Maybe it’s this level of fact-checking that WIPO was really afraid of when they decided to reject the Pirate Party.

Hat Tip: Brad Hall

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This is strange to say the least. Not only because their label, Atlantic Records, is known to release (and spam) tracks for free on BitTorrent sites, but also because the press release was more about promoting the band than the actual leak. Without any hard evidence, we suggested that this leak may have been set up to get some free promotion and publicity, which BuckCherry seems to need.

Out of curiosity, we decided to follow this up, to see if this was indeed the case. With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme – who happens to live in New York – an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

Epic fail….

Unfortunately Klemme only replied once, and ignored all further requests to comment on this issue. However, the press release, sent out by Atlantic Records and BuckCherry, seems to be a promotional stunt. It could be that the manager acted on his own, and that the band and the record label were not not in on this, but that’s less plausible.

Klemme has been caught with his pants down, and he will probably think twice before he tries to pull off a stunt like this again. A song doesn’t leak by itself and pirates don’t have some sort of superhuman ability to get their hands on pre-release material. No, most leaked movies, TV-shows and albums come from the inside so blaming pirates is useless.

Of course, it’s great that BuckCherry can get some free promotion for the band using BitTorrent, and we encourage everyone to promote their band or movie via this great system too. But wouldn’t it be more constructive if bands embraced the technology and admitted it, instead of playing the injured party and giving the protocol a bad image, just to boost their own? There’s a great opportunity here, don’t waste it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.