Monitoring and removal at scale
Finding unauthorised copies, uploads and listings across platforms and marketplaces, and clearing them without the process consuming your team.
Music
Piracy and enforcement.
Recordings get used without a licence, leak before release, get pressed as bootlegs, uploaded and streamed by people with no right to do it, and printed on merchandise nobody authorised. Enforcement is available against all of it. What varies is whether the action you take removes the problem or only removes today's copy of it.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The most common form is volume. A recording turns up on channels, on aggregator uploads, on unofficial streams and inside compilations, in numbers no artist or small label can realistically watch. Each instance is trivial and the aggregate is not, and the person dealing with it is usually the manager, at the expense of everything else they were meant to be doing that week.
Pre release leaks are a different problem wearing the same clothes. A record that escapes before its date damages a campaign that cannot be run twice, and the leak nearly always comes from the supply chain around the record rather than from a stranger. Mixes, masters, stems and promotional copies pass through more hands than anyone remembers until they are asked to list them.
Bootlegs and unauthorised physical product sit closer to counterfeiting than to file sharing. Pressed vinyl of unreleased or live material, unofficial releases dressed as official ones, and merchandise carrying the act's name are being sold to the act's own audience, who commonly believe they are buying from the act.
The pattern that exhausts people is the reappearance. A channel comes down and the same material is back the following week under another account. A seller is removed from one marketplace and is trading on two others. Nothing about the first removal was wrong. It addressed the copy rather than the person making the copies.
What actually decides it
Which right you are enforcing. The recording, the underlying musical work and lyrics, the artwork and the act's name are separate rights capable of sitting with separate owners. Performers also have rights in recordings of their performances, separate from the rights of whoever owns the recording. A takedown is only as good as the right behind it, and enforcement stalls most often because the person complaining cannot readily show they hold the right they are complaining about.
What a takedown achieves. It removes a listing, a file or an upload, quickly and without a court, and where harm is genuinely diffuse that is the correct tool. What it does not do is reach the operation behind the upload, recover anything, or prevent the next one. A programme measured by the number of removals will run forever and report success while it does so, because removals are the easiest figure to produce and the one that looks most like activity.
Whether the person behind it can be identified. This is the difference between a recurring cost and a matter capable of ending. An anonymous account, a storefront under a made up name and a seller who appears untraceable are all frequently identifiable, lawfully. Putting a real name and address to one changes every option that follows: a claim that can actually be brought, a settlement that can be enforced, and a person with something to lose. How that is done is confidential and we do not set it out.
Scale, and where the money is. Some infringement takes revenue. Some only takes attention. A leak attacks a release campaign. A bootleg run attacks merchandise income and the act's relationship with its own audience. An unauthorised upload of an old catalogue track may take very little from anyone. Those deserve different responses, and the expensive mistake is treating them alike because they all feel like theft.
What we do
Identifying who is behind it
Putting a real name and address to an anonymous account, uploader or seller, lawfully, so the matter becomes one that can be brought to an end.
Pre release leaks
Containing a leak, establishing where the record escaped from, and dealing with the source rather than with the symptom.
Bootlegs and counterfeit product
Acting against unofficial physical releases and unauthorised merchandise, at the supply end rather than only at the shopfront.
Evidence that survives challenge
Capturing infringement in a form a platform, a regulator or a court will accept, rather than a folder of screenshots.
Choosing the route that ends it
Deciding between removal, correspondence, settlement and proceedings on commercial grounds, with regulated partners where the route requires them.
When to spend nothing
A great deal of unauthorised use is not worth acting on. Uploads that reach almost nobody, in territories you do not sell into, from accounts with no commercial purpose, cost more to remove than they ever took from you. Fan activity in particular is worth reading before it is answered, because the audience that reposts a record is very often the audience that pays for it, and an act that enforces indiscriminately against its own listeners buys a reputational problem that cannot be taken down.
The other case for restraint is timing. Acting on the first thing you find tells whoever is behind it that somebody is watching, and a careful operation is far harder to deal with than a confident one. Where a matter is going to be pursued properly, the quiet early period is worth more than the early removal.
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.