Is There Intelligent Life in Cyberspace? Torrentfreak, Dependent Records, Piracy, and Common Sense

"P2P uploader hoaxes leading BitTorrent blog"
"The Register" (UK) (February 12, 2008).

"A German record label has been forced to deny it wants people to pirate its music after a blogger cooked up a story that it had uploaded its entire repertoire to Pirate Bay."

"Ernesto," founder of Torrentfreak, a BitTorrent fan blog, noticed a note attached to quite a few torrent tracker files. It read:

"Hello, my name is Stefan Herwig. I closed down my record label >>Dependent Records<< for good. But since I want my music to be heard by the people out there, everything I have ever published is now available on >>The Pirate Bay<<.

"This is a LEGAL torrent!

"I am not asking you to give, I want you to take!"

"Ernesto" must have been quite excited. Seeing that the founder of "Dependent Records" was closing his company, and asking people to rip him off, rip off the artists who made the recordings, and break several laws in the process, "Ernesto" whipped out a post announcing the fact.

The message from the founder was a fake, of course.

"The reaction of Torrentfreak.com founder and correspondent 'Ernesto' was to note that since he has a full-time job, 'doing extensive research is not always an option'."

That one blogger left his brain in neutral while posting is nothing new. That "several blogs" picked up the unbelievable tale and ran with it isn't very surprising, either.

What's really impressive about this exercise in credulity is that "tin-pot 'news' organisations" picked up the story and repeated it. Verbatim.

And, that the micro-debacle hasn't made mainstream news.

Torrentfreak was still running the bogus story when "The Register" posted their story.

Here's one of the it's-on-the-Web-it-must-be-true articles: "Record Label, Claiming Losses To P2P, Closes; Uploads Music Library To Pirate Bay" "Mashable Social Networking News" (February 10, 2008).