The Web Sheriff logo, which reads 'Protecting Your Rights on the Internet' |
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| Industry | Intellectual property rights |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2000 |
| Founder(s) | John Giacobbi |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Area served | International |
| Key people | John Giacobbi |
| Services | Copyright enforcement, digital rights management, website building, hosting and management, video editing |
| Owner(s) | Web Sheriff Corporation |
| Employees | 20 |
| Website | websheriff.com |
Web Sheriff is an anti-piracy company based in the United Kingdom that provides intellectual property, copyright and privacy rights protection services for a range of clients that include record labels, musical artists, film studios, news media organizations, and celebrities. The company monitors various websites that host links to unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and film. Web Sheriff has been in operation since 2000, with two offices in the UK.
The company was founded by attorney John Giacobbi, who acts as its managing director. While Web Sheriff will send an immediate "take-down" notice to BitTorrent and other file sharing sites or threaten lawsuits on behalf of its clients, the company reports that over half of its activities involve sending an initial polite request to blogs and fansites for copyrighted music to be removed, engaging with fans and offering free official promotional tracks and clips from the artist as replacement for the leaked material.[1][2] According to the Los Angeles Times, Web Sheriff is a "leading advocate of the soft sell" in the anti-piracy industry.[3]
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Web Sheriff performs online rights management services including copyright infringement, libel, identity theft, privacy issues of social media, protection from cyber-bullying and recovery of fraudulently registered domain names.[4][5][6][7][8] The company provides design and website and YouTube build including maintenance services as well as online security for the live broadcasts of concerts.[9][10] It provides video editing services and manufactures watermarked CDs and DVDs and provides individually watermarked digital streams of audio and video for journalists.[9][5]
The most predominate work it performs is copyright protection services for record labels, music artists and film companies when releasing new material.[7] Major corporate record labels, independent record labels and American film production companies use the company's services.[16] It monitors blogs, BitTorrent trackers, file-sharing sites, YouTube, eBay, film-sharing sites and websites that host links to unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and film.[17][18]
Web Sheriff uses proprietary software and web-crawler programmers to search the Internet, using human auditing to determine the type of site that is posting its clients' copyrighted material. The company gives the importance of this determination as, by example, "to differentiate between a band's biggest fan's blog and a Russian pirate site."[7][19] It relies heavily on phone calls and relationship building instead of only on technology.[17] When locating the links, it does not illegally interfere or add bogus files but targets the persons running the sites.[20] When it detects pirated content on BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites, the offending party is given an initial warning before further action is taken.[7][21] Web Sheriff has noted that some Torrent sites and file sharing sites such as Mediafire and Rapidshare provide access and allow them to remove infringing content.[22][23]
When approaching fans on blogs, a polite request is made for the copyrighted material to be removed, while providing the fans with free official tracks and clips from the artist and record label. The company's methods make use of each fan encounter to "turn a negative into a positive by using viral marketing and actively engaging with and including fans and bloggers in their marketing and promotion."[15][21][24][25][26] According to the company, it then tries to build a relationship with the fans and promote the artist further by sharing links to their Facebook, YouTube, Myspace page and to the artist's official website.[1]
Web Sheriff is said to also function as a "fan outreach organization"[5] through its unique, "gentle, gradual approach".[3] Web Sheriff states their intent is to engage with the protected artist's fans where they congregate most and redirect them to artist approved material with the hope that they will leave the leaked content alone.[1]
Web Sheriff was founded in 2000 by attorney John Giacobbi, who acts as company spokesman and managing director.[5] Prior to forming Web Sheriff, Giacobbi had been an independent consultant to record labels and artists including Village People. Giacobbi told an interviewer that the formation of the company evolved from his desire to help Village People retain their rights on the internet, as copyright infringements and the selling of bootleg CDs by "fake bands, fake sites or fake names" had become a major problem for the band at that time.[5]
The company first came to note when it was hired by Prince in 2007 to "disappear entirely from the internet."[4] The star's spokesman related that "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."[27] In September 2007, Web Sheriff announced it would launch lawsuits against YouTube, eBay and The Pirate Bay on behalf of Prince if they refused compliance.[1][27][28][29] Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, dismissed the threats, stating that American law was not applicable in Sweden.[30] YouTube complied by removing over 2,000 videos from their site and eBay removed more than 300 auctions.[31][32][33]
Chicane hired Web Sheriff in 2007 to prevent leaks from his album Somersault. Chicane's 2003 album, Easy to Assemble was so widely pirated by a Russian counterfeiter alone, selling thousands of copies with a sleeve from a previous album with the title digitally removed, that it was never officially released.[18][34]
In 2007, when Bloc Party's album A Weekend in the City leaked three months previous to release, their record label, V2 Records hired Web Sheriff to stop the leakage as the album was intended to make the band popular on an international basis.[14][35] Web Sheriff at first appealed to fan sites to not post links to the album out of respect for the band. When this approach did not work, widespread uploaders were tracked down and sent letters that referred to possible prosecution. Said to face a possible one million illegal MP3 files downloaded, according to V2, the leakage was reduced to an insignificant amount.[14]
In 2008, Van Morrison hired the company to help remove copyrighted material from fan sites.[36] The two most popular sites closed down soon after they were notified. The videos on YouTube were also removed.[4] Bryan Adams hired the company to remove bootleg video clips from YouTube and replace them with official videos on his own channel. [10]
When "Brother Sport", the first song from Animal Collective's album Merriweather Post Pavilion leaked in November 2008, Web Sheriff posted to Grizzly Bear's blog that they were the "global-leak-source of the track" and asked for an apology to be posted on the blog for a week to Domino Records, Animal Collective and Web Sheriff.[9][13] Grizzly Bear band member Ed Droste complied and apologized stating "The Web Sheriff is just doing his job, and we're all aware of the damage internet file sharing is doing to album sales."[24] The album leaked a month early and while Web Sheriff said it was "virtually impossible to completely put an album back in the box after a leak", the company was able to remove 90% or 10,000 of the links.[4]
Bob Dylan used the company's services pro bono to protect his charity Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart. Web Sheriff also removed unauthorized videos YouTube, replacing them with official ones on Dylan's channel.[5]
When Lady Gaga's Born This Way leaked a week before it's 2011 release, Web Sheriff offered fans approved material return for not posting the pirated copies. [22] Randy Lewis with The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The notable successes for the velvet glove approach include "Born This Way", which crashed through the million-sales barrier in its first week, Adele's "21", the No. 1 record in the country for nine weeks..."[3] Despite these claims of success, Web Sheriff's gentle approach still has skeptics, with critics calling the approach naive.[3][2]
After locating ISP where Ken Bigley execution videos were hosted, Web Sheriff requested the ISP take down the video. In response to the ISP free speach claims, Web Sheriff suggested that the White House might be notified, whereupon the videos were taken down.[37] It has also closed down terrorist related sites and monitored trading sites, [7] as well as the billing pages of a necrophilia website related to the murder of Jane Longhurst.[38][39]
Music fans and bloggers often initially respond angrily when first requested by Web Sheriff to take down MP3 tracks or to not post them on the music-related site. Web Sheriff's usual approach is an appeal to the fans to respect the wishes of the band with offers of links to approved tracks and samples for the new album. Fans sometimes interpret this as Web Sheriff saying, "I've got my eye on you."[24] The company spokesman says that eventually most of the fans tend to respect the wishes of their favored artists by cooperating.[17] As related by The Guardian, The Prodigy fans on the brainkiller forum engaged with Web Sheriff on a thread that lasted through 18 pages. Some of the fans who had been hostile at the beginning, then asked what they could do to help the band.[21][40]
Andrew Daniels with Men's Health, in an introduction to an interview with him, referred to John Giacobbi, 'alias, the Web Sheriff' as "the most hated man on the internet" and "the scorn of bloggers, pirates, and regular Joes all over the world".[2] IsoHunt's founder Gary Fung has spoken of Web Sheriff as "the white hat of antipiracy companies" while further noting that "Web Sheriff, in my book, are the good guys. What they do is send takedown notices for copyright owners, which is perfectly legitimate."[17]