Yes, this story is the April fool- Congratulations to those who guessed. Everyone here on the CD Freaks team worked hard to try and create a story that could fool our very technically adept visitors and this was no easy task. There was much discussion and theorizing before the final "news" was posted. Hopefully, what has come to be an annual event was fun for everyone and we did not scare anyone too much. 😉
Most importantly, thanks to each and everyone for their great responses to this story. By reading them, I think we can see the daily visitors are very much in tune with current events and are extremely wary. And this is good, because as every CD Freak knows: "Knowledge is Power". By the way, i n case some of you are wondering, all the other stories posted on April 1st, odd as they were...were true.
Thank you all,
From the CD Freaks team!
During the last few days there have been several news stories relating to the RIAA and other phonographic associations filing complaints against users of file sharing networks. Yesterday, during the late evening, CD Freaks management was visited by the police, together with the states attorney and representatives from the RIAA and IFPI. We were handed a warrant, the crux of which was related to some comments in reactions to news posts and various posts in our public forum.
That's the good news. Unfortunately we were forced to hand out IP addresses and the registration email addresses of 41 CD Freaks members to the authorities. CD Freaks have been informed, that they were not the only site involved. Without being specific as it 'has no bearing on this case" apparently, 104 sites in at least 13 different countries, whose operators have been surprised by the police operation; "Sitestorm".
Unfortunately we did not have any chance to keep our users' information secret. The alternative would have been an immediate collection of 3 CD Freaks servers by the authorities and a coercive detention for our site manager. The thinking was that turning over the servers presented greater risk to our membership and would leave us powerless to communicate. As a temporary measure, to keep our site online, we were also forced to install an administrative access to our servers for the authorities in order to be able to collect more data if '“ 'in their opinion" - further copyright infringement is found there.
The RIAA confronted CD Freaks with several printed news posts of users, who admitted to have illegally copied music files. Fortunately, this investigation only focused on copyright infringement in conjunction with unauthorized audio files. Video files or software were not mentioned in the documents, but it is not impossible that future steps will aim at these types of data.
The currently affected users of this action will be informed via email and a private forum message tomorrow so please have a look at your mailbox and your private messages if you think you might be involved. We are very sad that this could happen as this action was illegal to the Dutch laws, our lawyers were immediately informed and they will investigate the legal aspect of this invasion of privacy.
Of course, we do respect copyright laws, but in our opinion, this action seems heavy-handed and inappropriate, as we from CD Freaks have not been involved in these illegal activities directly. We cannot be responsible for the activities and actions of more than 60,000 members. We were allowed to mention our staff member "Da_Taxman" as one of the victims of this action. Unfortunately, an immediate examination of his hard discs showed a collection of almost 2 GB of illegal music files.
Examples of those file are: This Love, Maroon5; Tipsy, J-Kwon; Toxic, Britney Spears; Hey Ya! (Radio Mix), OutKast; Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Jet and Ruby-Don't Take Your Love to Town, by Kenny Rogers. Some others probably not so well known files such as German language Pop music from "Andrea Berg" and "Mathias Reim" and also Dutch singers "Frans Bauer" and "Rob de Nijs" were found. All of them have filed complaints and want compensation.
Source: CD Freaks
