2019.10.19 - Torrent Freak - Guns N’ Roses Fans ‘Fear’ That the Band is Setting a Piracy Trap (& related articles)

Guns N’ Roses Fans ‘Fear’ That the Band is Setting a Piracy Trap

By Ernesto Van der Sar

This week Guns N' Roses asked its fans to share bootleg footage of the band's "Not in This Lifetime..." tour, with a chance to have it featured in the official video. While that may seem like a great idea, some dedicated fans suggest that it's an (inadvertent) trap, as many people have received strikes and bans in recent months after sharing Guns N' Roses footage.

Over the past three decades, Guns N’ Roses has been one of the best-known bands in the world.

When it started in the mid-eighties most music was still sold on cassettes, while the World Wide Web has yet to be invented.

Today the web is the major driver of revenue when it comes to recorded music. However, it also poses quite a few challenges, especially when it comes to copyright.

Guns N’ Roses’ entourage appears to be particularly concerned with these rights, up to a point where it has started to annoy fans. Over the past several months, many people have had their bootleg concert recordings removed from YouTube, Instagram and elsewhere.

“My YouTube account I’ve had for 15 years was terminated on Thursday of last week.  Roughly 20 GNR videos I’ve filmed from 2011-2016 were flagged and removed,” one fan wrote a few weeks ago.

These copyright takedowns don’t just affect full-length recordings. Smaller clips were apparently removed as well. Interestingly, even Meegan Hodges, the girlfriend of guitarist Slash, had some of her clips removed.

“I’m just putting this up to see if my video is taken down. Noticed that some are just gone. Hello Instagram I took this video. #iamwiththeband no seriously what’s up?” she wrote a few days ago.

The band is of course completely within its right to remove unauthorized recordings. Even from Slash’s girlfriend, if she didn’t obtain explicit permission. That said, going after short clips can do more harm than good as it usually only upsets and annoys the fanbase.

In response to the removals, a subgroup of fans appears to have revolted. Some continued to publish concert footage on alternative outlets, such as Pornhub, for example.

While there will always be workarounds, the whole episode clearly signaled that fans shouldn’t post any Guns N’ Roses footage online. Those who do, risk strikes and bans from YouTube, Instagram, or even Twitter.

Just when this idea started to sink in, Guns N’ Roses posted a rather surprising request this week, as highlighted by Guns N’ Roses Central. On Twitter, the band asked fans to share concert footage, which may then be included in the official tour video.

“Tag us in your videos from this tour to be part of the #NotInThisLifetime 2019 final tour video,” the band tweeted.



https://twitter.com/gunsnroses/status/1184521433483010050

Needless to say, this request came as a surprise to many fans. First, they were actively hunted down for sharing concert video, and now the band wants them to share footage online?

As a result, fans were quite reserved with their responses. Some indeed posted short clips but many others suggested that this could be some kind of trap. At the very least, it’s not a well thought out plan.

“Yes, this will make it easier for you to demand that your fans remove their videos of you from the internet. Is your assistant getting tired of searching for copyright violations?” Claire replied.

“Is this ‘let s see how stupid our fans are’ contest? We re not making music we’re deleting our fans accounts, we’re @gunsnroses,” Jaro notes.

“So you can block them?? Sort yourselves out and do something for the fans for once,” Jan adds.

While the takedown requests are not being issued by the band directly, it’s clear that some fans are not happy with the request. While it’s most likely not an intentional trap, it could be an inadvertent one when followers get flagged by automated bots or overactive takedown outfits.

Considering the takedown outrage among many dedicated fans over the past few months, this week’s request to share footage certainly wasn’t well thought out.

https://torrentfreak.com/guns-n-roses-fans-fear-that-the-band-is-setting-a-piracy-trap-191019/

Meegan's post on Instagram on October 7, 2019:



https://www.instagram.com/p/B3VCTeZlvf0

On October 25, 2019, Beta commented on an Instagram post by Margott, a fan who has attended many GN'R shows:









margott1h
So both of my videos of "Dead Horse" (the one on fb and the other one on IG) got reported overnight. And by how it was only minutes apart, you can see it was done by an individual on PURPOSE. See screenshots.
Also, the video I posted on Facebook when the power went down in Tijuana and @gunsnroses WAS NOT EVEN PLAYING, but you can hear the fans in Tijuana singing a capella sporadically to KNOCKING ON HEAVEN'S DOORS was also reported a couple of nights ago. Again, this was done on purpose by a certain individual (or couple of individuals - you all know who). The band wasn't even playing.
That video was a nice way to show how supportive the fans are, but these individuals (so-called "fans") felt the need to report it anyways.
@betalebeis @flebeis @meeganhodges @thefrankferrer @slash @officialduffmckagan @deljamesgang

betalebeis
Listen, the certain individual you have mentioned has nothing to do with anything and, a lot of the illegal videos and songs posted, will continue to be taken down. Stop spreading lies or accusing people. Whatever videos taken down that you are crying about it has nothing to do with whomever you are attacking, so relax.

patrick_gnfr (translated from Portuguese)
@betalebeis this is ridiculous! They are amazing videos, good for the band and they are taken out of silly, what she does, Tako, and many others do are giving 10 out of 10 in the videos posted on Instagram of the band itself. It might even be band rights but it's silly to remove these videos.

betalebeis (translated from Portuguese)
@patrick_c.t.p.d honestly we're not taking anything down. Margot loves to make a mess. I'm fed up with her. I honestly don't know who's pulling videos from shows. It's always a promotion. You're right.

margott1h
@betalebeis I apologize if there was a misunderstanding, but I never said the band was at fault for the takedowns. It's just some fans doing them and that's what my post was about.

betalebeis
@margott1h there is no fan taking it down. I don’t know who is taking it down. No one knows. Write to Instagram and ask. Make your complaint directly to them. You have an issue with someone and keep making accusations that are not real. That is all I am saying.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4DE-QTh9-z/

The Music Network, Oct. 28, 2019:

*
Are Guns N’ Roses setting copyright traps for their fans?

By Nathan Jolly

When it comes to nerding out over live bootleg recordings, Guns N’ Roses fans rival those of The Grateful Dead. Live videos taken in Dublin in 2012 are dissected and discussed at length on fan forums, and slight arrangement changes on 33-year old songs are celebrated or bemoaned.

The obsessive nature of the band’s fans makes sense. It is statistically impossible for any band who sold thirty million copies of their debut album not to have more than a handful of crazies. Guns N’ Roses epitomised the type of hard-living, slithering-around-Sunset Strip lifestyle that rock and roll feeds off. They wrote both breakneck sonic assaults and nine-minute piano ballads about seasonal weather. They are fronted by a red-haired maniac and have a guitarist named Slash who wears a top hat.

Like many great Hollywood stories, they rose too quickly and imploded a few years later, falling to earth in the mid-90s – around the same time the bassist’s pancreas exploded. Axl Rose limped on for decades with a carousel of hired guns, spending 15 years and 14 million dollars making a long-promised masterpiece named Chinese Democracy that still seemed undercooked by the time he presented it.

Their catalogue is frustratingly uneven: a peerless debut album, a bloated 150-minute double, a ‘fake’ live EP coupled with four acoustic tracks; a covers album, then 2008’s Chinese Democracy: the ultimate anti-climax.

So there are a few gaps to fill. That’s where the forums come into play.

After years of estrangement, the classic-era lineup of Guns N’ Roses has been on a worldwide tour since April 2016, mounting the type of late-stage career renaissance even the most hopeful forum fans couldn’t have dreamed possible. By the time the tour wraps this Saturday, November 2 in Las Vegas, the band will have played 175 shows and grossed over half a billion dollars. I don’t think it’s an accident the tour is ending in Vegas, either.

Not surprisingly, there are hundreds of fan videos uploaded of each show. Every moment of the past three-and-a-half-year tour has been documented, uploaded, and debated. The forums have gone mental. Just this week, the band played ‘Dead Horse’, an Illusion deep cut, for the first time in 26 years, and the fan reaction was so intense that Rolling Stone picked up the story.

Last week, with the tour winding to a close, whoever runs the Guns N’ Roses social media pages (Duff?) asked fans to “tag us in your videos from this tour to be part of the #NotInThisLifetime 2019 final tour video.”

The official Guns N’ Roses social media game is generally pretty good. It is almost certainly manned by a few employees with other jobs, who brainstorm ‘fun’ ways to use the platform and end up with animated Halloween videos of laughing skeletons, clumsy AR experiences, and self-awarded certificates for reaching self-appointed streaming milestones. There is a lot of effort put in the wrong places.

Asking fans to share their shaky iPhone footage seemed like a benign enough request. If you can be bothered, sure, share away. But this tweet has spawned an amazing conspiracy within the Guns N’ Roses’ forums.

It’s all a trap, you see, and the hashtag is a way for the band to issue takedown notices to their fans, who shot the videos. It’s all part of a continued bid to cleanse the internet of all unauthorised Guns N Roses footage.

In recent months, a number of the heavy Guns N’ Roses bootleggers have been hit with legal notices, or simply had their channels removed.

One bootlegger had an account that had been active for 15 years terminated, after 20 Guns N’ Roses videos filmed between 2011 and 2016 were removed. “To say I’m upset is an understatement,” the user bemoaned in the forums. “I took filming seriously,” they explain, “but was not in this for the views or publicity.”

Even Meegan Hodges, who is Slash’s girlfriend, had a video removed.

She posted a video of Slash with his foot on the foldback, playing the dramatic final section from ‘November Rain’ – ‘cos if Slash is your boyfriend, that’s the moment you film and put on Instagram. Unfortunately, this loving humblebrag was a breach of copyright law and was removed. She reposted it on October 8, with an incensed caption and the #iamwiththeband hashtag, and it to date, it has remained online.

Technically though, being #withtheband doesn’t allow Hodges to post such a video. Slash himself wouldn’t be able to post this video. But once she declared who she was, the video remained, suggesting that this wasn’t necessarily an automated takedown. Someone is ordering the hits.

It is fairly easy to have something removed from the internet due to copyright. The process is largely a result of a man named John Giacobbi, a tenacious music attorney who calls himself the Web Sheriff.

In 2007, Prince contacted Giacobbi and asked to help him “disappear entirely from the internet”, an enigmatic enough request even for a man who once had an unpronounceable name.

Giacobbi threatened YouTube, eBay, Pirate Bay, and numerous smaller sites with takedown notices. Tens of thousands of videos and MP3s were removed. Websites selling bootleg merch were closed down. Even lyrics sites, concert photos, and album covers were wiped from online existence.

And for a number of years, it actually became impossible to find any of Prince’s music or videos on the internet, unless the Purple One himself uploaded it.

As musical identification software has become more intelligent, guns like Giacobbi have been largely replaced by automated systems which flag copyright issues without troubling the holder. Computers dealing in the backrooms.

But occasionally, a targeted sweep by a human is undertaken, and YouTube channels that have been quietly hosting concert bootlegs for over a decade will suddenly be taken down.

This is what seems to be happening in the Guns N’ Roses universe. But it’s unlikely that the request for live footage is little more than a misguided social media campaign that happened to clash badly with a sweep of routine takedown notices.

But that’s no fun. I prefer the conspiracy. I like to think of Axl Rose sitting at an old MacBook in a robe, fuming at shoddy iTunes footage of ‘Welcome To The Jungle’, and slowly concocting the perfect digital trap.

https://themusicnetwork.com/guns-n-roses-copyright-traps/