Confused Musician Threatens Google, Blog Because Her Works Are Found Elsewhere On The Internet

Too Much Free Time

from the there-are-ignorant-people-on-all-sides-of-this-debate dept

If you look hard enough, on any side of a big debate, you can find people who are really ignorant, but not afraid to speak their minds. And, yes, this certainly includes those who are concerned about what has become of copyright law. You may recall that writer Mark Helprin wrote an entire book based on taking a few dumb comments from Techdirt out of context, and pretending that they were representative of the views of those who think copyright law has some serious problems. So, you have to be careful not to take a few ignorant comments and extrapolate further viewpoints on a particular subject. Still, sometimes, you come across an example of someone who is so willfully ignorant that it’s difficult to know how to respond.

Take, for example, the ordeal that the site Torrentfreak recently went through, with famed 60s session musician Carol Kaye, who apparently doesn’t quite understand how BitTorrent (or, potentially, the internet) works. Somehow, she got it into her head that Torrentfreak — which is just a blog that writes about this stuff — was distributing her works in an unauthorized manner. Of course, as a blog site that doesn’t distribute any files, nothing could be further from the truth — and the Torrentfreak folks tried to politely explain this to Ms. Kaye. They even went so far as to offer to contact the admins of certain torrent tracker sites about removing links to the files she was concerned about.

Rather than admit her mistake (and maybe even thank them for their help) she sent a series of increasingly angry emails, such as the following:

You’re a liar, a pirate, and a thief and a no-body — you’re coming down buddy, don’t give me that run-around BS! Whoever you are, you’re THIEF AND A DELIBERATE PIRATE!

So much for helping. She also had her friends start emailing the TorrentFreak folks with similarly misguided emails. I’m reminded of a rather angry Hollywood lawyer who has blogged repeatedly bizarre (and totally false) claims about me — saying that I (seriously) command an army of hackers who will vehemently attack any musician or songwriter who dares to disagree with me. Perhaps some readers here get a bit aggressive in responding to questionable statements made by musicians/songwriters, but you can always find some people who go too far — on either side, as the experience of TorrentFreak demonstrates.

In the case of Carol Kaye, however, it looks like this isn’t the only time she’s been confused about how the internet works. Some folks note that on her own website is a statement suggesting that she thinks Google is responsible for unauthorized access to her content, and she’s expecting the FTC to fix that:

Please do not download any of my books/CDs from Google. I filed FTC Complaint #25172648 against Google for those illegal downloads, don’t be a pirate!

It might help if Ms. Kaye spoke to someone who could explain to her that Google is not the liable party here — and the FTC isn’t going to suddenly make Google liable just because Ms. Kaye is confused about how the internet works. But, then again, she might just accuse anyone who tries to help her of being a “thief.” Clearly, Ms. Kaye is angry about some of her content being available in an unauthorized manner online, and seems uninterested in actually understanding how the content got there or what she can legitimately do in response. It’s really too bad.

Filed Under: accusations, carol kaye, copyright, file sharing