''The Internet Ghostbuste​rs!''

''THE INTERNET GHOSTBUSTERS!''

I think it means Email. Or SMS, Or tweet. Or.....!!


But wait a minute, ''Who are we gonna call?''  'Web Sheriff!'


The Internet is rife with criminals, counterfeiters, and thieves. And despite all its brushes with creativity, the Internet, -in all its form, still awaits for some abstraction morphing into a Web Sheriff to bring these rogue elements to Justice.

But that's a situation that has sprouted self-styled superhero John Giacobbi, a music business lawyer.He is now an Online crusader with evangelical zeal for protecting the rights of artists. John is determined to turn round the perception of the Internet as a place where consumer gorges freely at the expense of the creator!


It's a notion that is fast gaining traction  -In the last few years Rupert Murdoch has declared the days of gratis content over, and Giacobbi thinks that in years to come we'll look at the ''free'' bit of our Internet history as an aberration. Surprisingly, where Lawyers are involved it is not about the money.Web Sheriff has been instrumental in closing terrorist websites, was directly responsible for the removal of Ken Bigley execution videos and then worked on Magnolia Pictures, distributor of Oscar winner Peter & The Wolf, as well as policing city trading sites such as ragingbull.com, where rogue posters can ruin a company's reputation in minutes.


The fast growing TV piracy is next on the to-do-list just above ''sorting out the biggest book publisher'' in the world. With just a few clicks he can demonstrate how just about every novel you'd want to read is free Online if you know where to look. For now though, Giacobbi's bread and butter is new-release protection. He counts Prince   -only some years ago he removed some 3000 videos of his O2 shows from the web- Prodigy, Franz Ferdinand, Thom Yorke, White Stripes, and Moby, among his more high-profile successes.
''New Albums can leak anything from two weeks to two months ahead of schedule,'' he states.''If you do nothing about it, by the time its released you have lost 50 per cent of your sales. Less than 5 percent of albums get to their release date without leaking.''


''Ebay is the main source. The recent Prodigy album -Invaders Must Die- turned up on there. We contacted the guy offering it, he'd had got it from a shop in Brighton who had bought it from a journalist on one of the nationals. We got involved two months upfront, doing leak-profiling so we got a good idea where it is likely to leak and when. Usually, we'll contact the band's forum and ask them not to put it up when it pops''


Some years ago we had two big album leaks on Christmas day and we were up till 4:30am. There are 20 of us in the core team. We use web crawling programmes, but we human audit because it's important to differentiate between a band's biggest blog and.and a Russian Pirate site. Mostly these people are fans.The idea is how to fashion illegal content into something that works for both artist and the fan. And this never an easy undertaking by any means.


With many thanks to !WOW! stay tuned to the next post as I take you to more knowledge and legal issues.

Good Night & God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless