Absolutely. The unfortunate thing is that even though commercial theft is illegal, brands largely get away with it because they hold far more power. But they clearly know they don’t want others doing to them what they do with impunity to others, legal or not.
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Its no better in the software business. A manager at my former employer, a large engineering firm, insisted to me that you are complying with the GNU public license as long as you don’t change the code. To justify that he pointed to: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
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He might want to run that one by legal. At my workplace, MIT/BSD is ok if you run it by legal, but using GPL code is 100% forbidden.
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Funny, I’ve been going to gigs for going on fifty years, been interested in all sorts of music for most of my sixty-four years, I’ve seen many of the world’s great bands and artists, like Zeppelin, Floyd, the Stones, Metallica, Soundgarden, Thin Lizzy, The Clash, and hundreds more, yet this band is completely unknown to me.
Clearly they’re legends in their own lunchtime.
Yeah that was the way we went, but I had to push the process myself.
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The “I’ve never heard of them” argument. I’d say they are doing just fine without you having heard of them. Of course more popular everywhere outside the US. https://www.musicfestivalwizard.com/festivals/download-japan-2019/
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Oh, the irony…
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Ha ha ha, oh boy. There must be a name for that phenomenon, that somewhat solipsistic tendency to put oneself at the center of things (and anything unfamiliar as obscure and culturally peripheral). It’s so common.
(Though I think I suffer from the inverse - I assume, if I’ve not heard of a band/song/cultural phenomenon that they must be popular and, as usual, I’m just well out of the mainstream, trawling the cultural backwaters. I actually feel weird that I even vaguely know who Taylor Swift and the Kardashians* are.)
*These guys, right?
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Would this work for the White House as well?
I’d love to see the professional press just boycott some things, and cover the effects instead.
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I saw some picture - from some European country, I forget which - where the government started getting testy with the press, and they simply boycotted events, so it was a press conference given to an otherwise empty room. The US press really need to do this. (Especially given the absurdity of the press conferences going on - not just the dishonesty, but things like Sarah Sanders holding one after a three week gap and disappearing off stage after 30 minutes, refusing questions.)
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So you’re saying such a thing does exist? 
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Anything is possible …
I would side with the band and their friend on this one.
The photographer allowed them to share the picture on social media, knowing full well it would be reshared/retweeted/reblogged because that’s how social media works nowadays. Then (presumably when he failed to sell the picture) he started harassing someone who had shared with accusations, legal threats, and demands for payment and was a persistent asshole about it.
He could’ve started out being civil and polite, said something like “You’re welcome to share that from a personal account, but to share from one with a business name requires paying a licensing fee, please move the post to your personal account or you can license it for €X…” But instead he just went full asshole right out of the gate. And persisted. Of course they banned him. Who wants to deal with someone like that?
I know a photographer, I know they have serious problems with this sort of thing. I also know people who have both personal and artist social media accounts and have to watch what they post to which account. It’s an area where lines can be crossed. That can often be resolved amicably if people on both sides are human to each other. But if the initiator acts like they’re trying to make enemies, they’ll easily succeed.
I’d be more in favor of the photographer if it’d been used in an actual advertisement (vs a social media reshare) or if we were talking about some big corporation with a dedicated social media staff and policies. But for just another artist’s social media account, the photographer could’ve worked with her. Instead he chose to attack. The band’s response to that was appropriate.
I will never understand why bands are so self-destructive when it comes to basic PR. This isn’t rocket surgery. Somehow, these hot-headed idiots in the band and management have inexplicably made a little issue into a potentially career-ending nightmare, for no other reason than self-importance and arrogance.
And I swear, if I have to hear one more story about rich people telling artists they should be “happy for the exposure”, I’ll start a portrait series of those arrogant asshats and call it “Dumb Fu*ks To Never Do Business With”.
Steven Robbins had a great podcast on working for “exposure,” to wit:
Execute a contract that
- requires the client pay the artist (in this case, the photographer) their normal fee
- specifies the guaranteed amount (in numbers) of exposure within a specific amount of time
- states the artist will return their fee if the exposure numbers are met
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