In the early days he became somewhat of a cult figure thanks to his polite style and trademarked letterhead. This set him apart from other anti-piracy crusaders who usually sent DMCA takedown requests with a more aggressive lawyer-like style.

The Sheriff once had a lively discussion with The Pirate Bay folks, who then sent him this invoice fax. Not much later relationships deteriorated even further after Giacobbi announced he would sue the site’s operators in the US, France and Sweden, but not much came of that.

In recent years things have quietened down a bit, but The Web Sheriff and his deputies are still active. In recent years they have taken down over half a million URLs from Google alone. Most recently, the Sheriff has been targeting several Reddit.com pages.

In one of the most recent complaints the Sheriff demands the takedown of a submission in the r/megalinks subreddit, linking to two parts of the movie Nymphomaniac hosted on Mega.co.nz.

The request for removal was sent to Google last week but the search engine decided not to remove the URLs. It’s unclear why, but one reason for the inaction may be that the Mega links are no longer active.

Not all links reported by the Web Sheriff are “infringing” though. Another recent submission shows that he also tried to get this submission take down, which points to a perfectly legitimate news article from Variety.

This year copyright holders have increasingly targeted allegedly infringing Reddit links, Google’s data shows. The Web Sheriff is currently ranked second in number of URLs sent, placed after LeakID and before Disney.

Even the MPAA went after Reddit a few weeks ago. The Hollywood group tried to take down the subreddit r/fulllengthfilms, but failed and drove hundreds of thousands of eyeballs to the page instead.

Thus far the Web Sheriff hasn’t booked any real successs either, but Reddit users are warned. The Sheriff is watching and will shoot down your submissions whenever he can.

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

Rather than hang lowly bloggers by the neck until dead for sharing the latest pre-release warblings from Beyonce or GaGa, the company prefers the gentle touch and the art of persuasion, often delivered with a sharpness of wit rarely seen in swashbuckling circles.

With most of the company’s targets the approach seems to work quite well. Unless you’re The Pirate Bay or RLSLOG that is, then you just ignore them.

Nevertheless, while anti-piracy companies such as MediaDefender have in their time been both loathed and despised, head sheriff and company founder John Giacobbi is secretly loved by all of his enemies.

His friendly tone, multitude of media appearances and comedic manner never fail to impress pirates. One only has to look at the company’s immaculately edited Wikipedia page (and the almost completely positive tone throughout) to realize this is a very well-loved and respected outfit.

It will come as no surprise, then, that others should want to emulate the Sheriff.

“A digital Cold War has manifested itself as Web Sheriff, www.websheriff.com, the world’s leading anti-piracy protection agency, fires the first shots in an international legal battle against an alleged Russian imposter,” said the Sheriff yesterday.

“The rogue website, operating under the WebSheriff.ru banner, has not only copied Web Sheriff’s trademark, but also poses to offer similar services.”

A quick surf over to the page in question reveals a shiny robotic cyber-sheriff, touting services which do indeed seem similar to that of the carbon-based humanoid Sheriff we all know and love. Name aside, we saw no other graphical or trademark similarities apart from a star they used in the middle of a sheriffs badge back in February 2008.

If it came to an age-related revolver shootout, Web Sheriff UK would be quicker on the draw. Giacobbi founded that company in 2000, Web Sheriff Russia came along 2 years later. Why it’s taken 9 years to spot these Moscow-based pirate-hunters is anyone’s guess.

In keeping with his usual style, we presume that Giacobbi initially sent over a cheerful email to his Russian counterparts in the hope that their dispute could be settled amicably and at minimal cost. If he did, however, it didn’t work.

“These Russian imposters have picked the wrong company to try and rip-off. They’ll be cracking rocks in Siberia by the time we’ve finished with them,” he declared yesterday with menacing tone and a glint in his eye.

Without a hint of drama Giacobbi adds that he’s hired lawyers in both the US and USSR Russia to launch an “intercontinental legal attack” on his .RU namesakes.

“Even though we have become established as the world’s Web Sheriff, ironically we’re now fighting the same battle as we fight on behalf of our clients – who said the Cold War was over?!”

In the meantime, users requiring the services of the UK-based pirate pin-up should Google “Web Sheriff”. Those looking for services thousands of miles away in Russia, in Russian, against Russian file-sharing sites, should search for this term instead.

“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Giacobbi concludes.

Time will tell what XMediaDigital, the company behind the Russian WebSheriff, has to say about that.

Here at TorrentFreak we love the Web Sheriff but we can’t help but notice that a golden opportunity for getting some free exposure was missed here.

Note for next publicity stunt press release: Don’t release it on a Friday/Saturday. Most of the tech press have the weekend off, getting coverage during the week is much easier.

Fortunately TorrentFreak never rests, especially if there’s an intercontinental anti-piracy bloodbath looming.

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

The Sheriff’s resume includes big shot artists such as Prince and the late Michael Jackson, and in his high times Giacobbi went as far as taking a stab at The Pirate Bay founders, who have mocked his actions extensively in the past.

Although he might not be particularly well-liked by many operators of torrent sites, he and his team have earned respect over the years by staying polite where other representatives of copyright holders tend to display arrogance, frustration and hostility.

This week, however, the Web-Sheriff slipped up and dented his badge. Acting on behalf of Magnolia Pictures, a batch of take down requests was sent out to various sites, trying to take down torrents of the movie Warlords which will be released by the movie studio in a few weeks time.

In order to track down all infringing copies of the film, the Sheriff probably searched through a few dozen torrent sites to send DMCA notices for all infringing torrents. For some reason the ‘legal’ torrent site Legit Torrents was also included in the batch, wrongfully, because the “Warlords” torrent hosted there is one of a free MMORPG Kungfu game.

En3r0, the owner of Legit Torrents told TorrentFreak that he pointed out the mistake to the Web-Sheriff, but thus far hasn’t heard anything back. The notice was obviously sent out in error and the description of the files as well as the site’s url should have made some alarm bells go off.

This is the first time that legittorrents has received a DMCA notice, En3r0 said, and hopefully the last. The Web-Sheriff, who signs the notices with “the information in the notification is accurate” might have to reconsider putting that in, as he’s clearly off his A-game.

Perhaps it’s time for a new Sheriff in town?

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

Unlike the Pirate Bay operators, Oliver didn’t host any torrents on his website. No, he committed the crime of dressing in clothing similar to that worn by The Village People thirty years ago, but without their permission.

In a promo trailer for the show, Jamie’s American Road Trip, the British cook dressed up as the 70′s style icons. The clip ran on TV, accompanied with a poster campaign in the London Underground, all featuring Jamie dressed up as each of the six members of the hit disco band.

According to the Web Sheriff, Jamie Oliver’s actions are blatant trademark infringement, seriously hurting the revenues of the Indian chief, cowboy and the four other members of the band. “The Village People are still a huge, multimillion-dollar global business,” the Sheriff commented.

Much like the Pirate Bay, Channel 4, the broadcaster of Jamie’s show, is not impressed by the Sheriffs threats. “We are confident that the promotional campaign for Jamie’s American Road Trip does not infringe any copyright/trademark rights which the Village People may have. No parties have received a formal legal claim from the Village People and, if one is received, it will be vigorously defended,” a Channel 4 spokesperson said.

If the case does indeed come to court, it could be risky for the Web Sheriff to dress up in his usual outfit, as that is more than likely trademarked by a third party who might also wish to issue similar frivolous legal threats.

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

After making threats to SceneReleases, the anti-piracy outfit turned its attentions to RLSlog, demanding that the site display a full apology to Franz Ferdinand on its homepage. Of course, RLSlog wasn’t about to apologize but did remove the links, as a look at Google’s cache of the ‘offending’ page reveals. However, that wasn’t enough for Web Sheriff, and he decided to teach RLSlog a lesson.

Two days ago, RLSlog went down. Initially thought to be the victim of a DDoS attack, the site fired off emails to its host in the Netherlands to find out what was happening. Since it was the weekend, responses were expected to be less sharp than during the week, but it took the host a full two days to reply. When it did, the news wasn’t good.

Following complaints sent to the host and the host’s bandwidth provider, RLSlog’s host completely disabled the site. There was no discussion and no checking the validity of Web Sheriff’s claims. If the host had bothered to check any supposed links to the album, they would have seen that the links were gone. Indeed, the links were all dead before we reported on the situation last Wednesday. Nevertheless, the host completely disconnected the site, with no warning.

At this stage it’s still unclear if RLSlog’s host will reactivate the site but if they don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. RLSlog is fully prepared for disaster recovery and has everything in place to simply move to a new host, should that prove necessary. Of course, this might take a little time but the site will return. In the meantime, although RLSlog is down, their forums are up at RLStalk. They are running a little slowly at times but appear fully functional.

This takedown is quite the metaphorical ‘feather in the cap’ for the Web Sheriff, using their pages of legal jargon to great effect and successfully intimidating a weak host into a knee-jerk takedown. However, there is an unintended side-effect to these ‘cut-and-paste’ warnings. While researching Web Sheriff’s attempted takedowns of ‘Tonight’, I discovered a very easy way to find dozens of release sites and music blogs that i’d never heard of before, using a simple Google search.

Despite being very active in getting links to the album removed, Web Sheriff’s old nemesis The Pirate Bay still tracks ‘Tonight’. As far as we know, they didn’t ask them to remove the torrent. No point really, they already know the answer.

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

Last year, the band were working on their yet-to-be-released studio album “Tonight”. Like many other albums, however, a copy of “Tonight” leaked out before the official release date, and it is now widely available online. Given the previous pro-piracy stance of the band, which got them on the front page of Digg, you wouldn’t expect that they would make a big deal out of it.

The contrary is true. The band, together with the record label, have instructed the one and only Web-Sheriff – who also works for Prince, Michael Jackson and Village People – to take on the sites that posted the album, or links to it. One of the sites that received a takedown notice recently is Scene Releases. Web-Sheriff wrote in an email to the site:

On behalf of Domino Records and Franz Ferdinand, we would kindly ask you not to post copies of ‘Tonight’ on your site. We do appreciate that you are fans of / are promoting Franz Ferdinand, but the label and artist would greatly appreciate your co-operation in removing your links to the pirate files in question.

Web-Sheriff, who sent similar emails to dozens of other sites, is known for his politeness – if you cooperate, that is. Normally, this takedown request would hardly be newsworthy, but this one is special. Only a few months ago, Franz Ferdinand openly encouraged its fans to pirate one of their new tracks, advocating downloading using LimeWire. They even confessed to being pirates themselves, by admitting copying CDs for use on their iPods – currently illegal in the UK. So, understandably, the partnership with Web-Sheriff comes as quite a surprise.

Faolan, one of the editors of Scene Releases, was as baffled as we are, and decided to ask the sheriff for an explanation. Instead of explaining why Franz Ferdinand performed this 180, Web-Sheriff replied with a list of threats, claiming that Scene Releases could be held liable for putting links up to the unreleased album. He replied:

Joking aside, you are currently acting as a de facto digital distributor of this (unreleased) album and, if you do not remove / de-activate the links that you have published, our clients shall be obliged to take legal action both to stop what you are doing and to seek compensation for the (extensive) commercial losses directly arising from your illegal activities.

Furthermore, the sheriff stressed that the email should not be shared with third parties, a tactic also employed by UK lawyers Davenport Lyons, in an attempt to stifle discussion. Faolan told TorrentFreak that the reply from the sheriff inspired him to keep the conversation going. He believes that he didn’t break any laws by merely linking to files that are hosted on other sites. In fact, the links that Scene Releases posted at the bottom of their article were already dead (removed by the associated hosting sites) by the time Web Sheriff sent his reply.

Scene Releases was not the only release blog that was contacted by Web-Sheriff, the conversation that he had with RLSLOG is just as entertaining. After RLSLOG pointed out to Web-Sheriff that he misspelled the domain name, he didn’t back off, and sent the following demands:

You must also arrange for the following apology to be published on the relevant page of the site for a period of seven (7) days : “RSLOG wishes to apologies to Franz Ferdinand, Domino Records and Web Sheriff for the disruption caused to their sales, marketing and promotion plans by our publishing of pirate file details relating to the unreleased album “Tonight”.

Yes, you’re reading it correctly, the Web -Sheriff is asking RLSLOG (or RSLOG) to make an apology, and he repeated his spelling mistake. The admin ignored all his requests, and replied with the following email:

Thanks for good laugh, i will probably publish this whole conversation somewhere, it’s too good to remain unknown! Once again, learn to type instead of drinking brandy in saloon.

Yours, Old Shaterhand

The question remains – does Franz Ferdinand know about the involvement of Web Sheriff and his threatening tone towards the site admins, or is it all orchestrated by the record label? We hope that it’s the latter, but thus far the band hasn’t responded to our inquiries. Franz Ferdinand’s new album Tonight will be available in stores on January 26th.

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

Pirate Bay’s Brokep commented on the announcement by saying: “The common thing for all of these artists of course is that no one listens to them anymore.”

This is not the first time the Sheriff, aka John Giacobbi, has clashed with the Pirate Bay folks. Last November he announced that he planned to sue them in the U.S., France and Sweden for infringing the rights of Prince.

Web Sheriff will demand $100 million dollars in compensation, slightly less than the MPAA asked for last week. Adding them both together amounts to a record breaking claim. “The good thing about this is that we just broke TorrentSpy’s lawsuit. Maybe time to call Guinness, we like to break world records and we just broke one I think,” Brokep writes.

In the meantime, The Web Sheriff is still trying to get ABBA on board. “It would also be good/appropriate if the members of ABBA could take up the fight against these pirates, as they personify the Swedish music industry’s successes and are renowned ambassadors for Sweden, contrary to The Pirate Bay.” he said previously.

Again, Brokep disagrees, he sees The Pirate Bay as Sweden’s true ambassadors. “All over digg.com and other cool social networks there is always the comment “last place on earth with true freedom is Sweden” or ‘I really want to move to Sweden’,” he wrote a few months ago.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, for now, all the Web Sheriff has ever done is making threats. You would think that he must know by now that this has no effect on The Pirate Bay team.

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

The big, gold Web Sheriff badge is worn with pride on Giacobbi’s chest but with an almost comedic quality which may help to tip the balance with a site admin as he laughs at the situation, rather than panics. “We’re trying to be more civil,” Giacobbi told CNet last year. “We have good relationships with most of the file-sharing and blogging sites, and when we ask them to take down material, the vast majority of them respond straight away. In some cases, the sites give us access to their databases, and we remove content ourselves.”

One site that does respond to them right away is The Pirate Bay. You can read their hilarious exchanges here, but the real point is – when does a ‘civil approach’ turn into something else? Well, as it turns out, as soon as you refuse to comply.

“There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy” said Giacobbi, as he announced legal action against The PirateBay on behalf of the artist, Prince. “They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”

Essentially, “See you in court”. Back to business as usual for the anti-pirates, then.

Now, John Giacobbi, CEO of Web Sheriff has said in an interview with e24.se that he’s hired lawyer Lars Sandberg from Stockholm law firm Södermark to work on the case in Sweden. “We are suing for damages of millions of dollars, and they will be filed at both Swedish as well as US courts.” he added.

Interesting is Giacobbi’s attempt to recruit Swedish (I think I can use the words) mega-group, ABBA, to become some type of positive, cleansing influence to counter the dark forces of The Pirate Bay. This is good versus evil on a scale never experienced before, or at least the chosen imagery implies as much.

“It would be also be good/appropriate if the members of ABBA could take up the fight against these pirates, as they personify the Swedish music industry’s successes and are renowned ambassadors for Sweden, contrary to The Pirate Bay.”

Then, as if dragging ABBA into this bloodbath wasn’t enough, to level things up against The Pirate Bay ‘Four’ – the Sheriff has recruited a police officer to fight them – and he’ll be bringing some friends: an American Indian chief, a cowboy, a construction worker, a man dressed head to toe in black leather and even a guy from the military. Oh boy.

Yes, the Web Sheriff is teaming up with Prince and style-icons The Village People to claim back damages for every one of their albums that have been made available via The Pirate Bay. The Village People want compensation for losses on their single ‘YMCA’ and Prince wants compensation for about 40 of his albums (including some Greatest Hits albums).

When faced with the quote from U2 manager Paul McGuinness who told the Financial Times that the industry should focus on ISPs instead of filesharers, Giacobbi said: “I totally agree. For years, we have said that web hosts, who earn millions and billions in hosting sites, must take responsibility and control these sites.”

When it was put to Giacobbi that public opinion on filesharing had changed and that generally people feel it should be legalized, he responded: “People ask themselves why they should buy something when they can get it for free. But then they aren’t taking into account that someone has created the music or the movie and has invested big money in it. It is also the producer that owns the rights themselves to decided how and to whom their creative work should be distributed.”

It didn’t do ABBA’s image any good when their label was accused of picking on fans in 2006, so you have to question why they would get involved when The Pirate Bay is so popular with music lovers, especially in Sweden.

If you line them all up – The Pirate Bay Four, The Web Sheriff, Prince, ABBA and The Village People, if nothing else, it’s certainly a memorable image.

But you knew that, didn’t you John ;)

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

The Sheriff is convinced that he has a strong case and told CNET News: “There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy. They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep was not impressed by Web Sheriff’s expressed confidence, and told us earlier: “He’s welcome to try and sue us in Sweden, there’s no basis. And it’s so funny that he’s teaming up with the joke of the anti piracy world – Web Sheriff.”

In addition to suing The Pirate Bay, Web Sheriff also told CNET News that he will go after the companies that advertise on the popular BitTorrent tracker and that he will be involved an investigation into The Pirate Bay’s money streams.

This is not the first time the Web Sheriff, also known as John Giacobbi, clashes with The Pirate Bay. Some hilarious email correspondence is still available on The Pirate Bay’s legal threat page.

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

Most people who have been exposed to his music would agree, Prince is a truly great artist having written and produced literally hundreds of mostly good tracks.

Back in May, Prince announced the “Earth Tour” consisting of many concerts at the very reasonable price of £31.21 – priced deliberately low so that everyone could afford to go. All attending also received a free copy of Prince’s latest album, ‘Planet Earth’. In June, the UK’s ‘Mail on Sunday’ newspaper announced that it had struck a deal with Prince to give his new album away for free with its July 15th edition, in a never-seen-before groundbreaking deal.

After being forward-looking with this giveaway, Prince has now reverted back to the usual anti-piracy stance and according to MediaGuardian he is going to take action to protect copyrights “not just for himself, but for all artists in the digital age” and is aiming to “reclaim his art on the internet”.

So, exactly how does Prince aim to do this? Apart from an attack on commercial physical pirates operating out of eBay, his main focus will be YouTube and of course, The Pirate Bay.

Prince’s spokesman explained further: “Prince believes strongly that as an artist the music rights must remain with the artist and thus copyrights should be protected across the board. Very few artists have ever taken this kind of action over their rights. Yet, Prince has showed time and time again he is ready to challenge the system in new ways to put artists and music first”

In a move which shows that Prince (or at least his advisers) have a sense of humor, they have hired the infamous Web Sheriff (a division of Entertainment Law Associates), headed up by John Giacobbi to deal with the enforcement. They send out letters like this one – the site in question is of course, still up and running.

Apparently, following Web Sheriff threats, more than 2000 Prince clips have been removed from YouTube and 300 eBay auctions taken down but understandably, after Web Sheriff’s last contact with Pirate Bay ended in complete humiliation, they have decided to deal with them last. After they unsuccessfully demanded that PirateBay take down some ‘White Stripes’ torrents and unwittingly laid themselves open to mountains of ridicule on the infamous legal page, one can assume they plan to tread carefully next time.

TorrentFreak spoke to Brokep from The Pirate Bay to see how they feel about Prince’s plans, backed up by the fearsome Web Sheriff: “Well, ‘way to go on losing all your fans’” he said. “I truly respect the son of a king’s work as a musician but he seems like he has some kind of problem in getting to deal with his fans.” Commenting on the free CD album giveaway brokep continued, “And he’s desperate for media attention..

Earlier in the year, Web Sheriff ordered some torrent sites to publicly apologize for their activities by taking out half-page advertisements in Billboard Magazine, Music Week Magazine and Music & Media Magazine so maybe this will happen to The PirateBay?

Characteristically unfazed by the threat of Web Sheriff intimidation, brokep says: “He’s welcome to try and sue us in Sweden, there’s no basis. And it’s so funny that he’s teaming up with the joke of the anti piracy world – Web Sheriff. They are also in a big time need of some media attention, so I guessed they teamed up for that reason.”

Bloggers are also getting familiar with the Sheriff’s informal style of takedown request, which have no basis in law whatsoever. Some bloggers even feel like ‘they have arrived‘ when the Sheriff first comes-a-calling.

With his fans around the world, John Giacobbi isn’t short on publicity. His photos are all over the web but my favorite is this one of him relaxing on the hood of a classic car, not on a horse as everyone expected.

There again, maybe he’s not a real sheriff….

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