[ale] WAY OT: Nirvana Outcesticide CD's?

[Chris Ricker]

On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Robert L. Harris wrote:

> Yeah, trying to find a contact is nuts there.  They have 30 different
> forms to go through, etc.
> 
> Aparantly she thinks she can just ignore me now, I'm getting messages
> from AOL that she's not accepting email from my account.  Good thing I
> own rdlg.net and know how to set up with all the free providers...
> 
> I've bounced abuse at ebay, abuse at hotmail, etc.  RIAA.org gets an email
> monday.

What exactly is the issue? Outcesticide is a bootleg Nirvana box set. It is
a compilation of unreleased material which was put together by a third party
and for which the band (in this case, the band and the estate) gave no
authorization and receive no royalties. It (at least the copies I've seen)  
is a very nicely done boot though -- great sound, really cool box set
packaging, etc. In that format, it retails for ~$120 or so (or at least
thats what it was back when I used to see it commonly). It's also sold as
individual discs, at usual bootleg prices ($25 - $30 per disc). In either
case, it should purport to be on the Blue Moon Records label....

Is your brother-in-law bummed because his bootleg is an illegal copy of an
illegal copy, when he was just expecting an illegal copy? ;-)
Or did he honestly think it was a legitimate release, and it was presented
to him as such?

If it's the former, I don't think that he has much room to complain to
anybody. If you buy a boot, you take your chances. And, at least before the
wide circulation of boots in mp3 format, you didn't really care how many
generations the copy was, as long as they were all digital. Knowingly buying
illegal material and then complaining that it's not quite the illegal
material you wanted isn't going to get you far.... ;-)

If it's the latter, ebay is supposed to pull bootleg releases / ban sellers
of boots. In practice, they never do anything to power sellers. It's made
further complicated by differences in copyright law around the world, so
that a bootleg might actually be an import from Italy, where it is legal,
and not a bootleg in the strictest sense. ebay does allows imports.

AFAIK, though, the Blue Moon Records which released Outcesticide is a
completely bogus label, and that's not a legal import. To complicate matters
further, there is also a legitimate small record label, Blue Moon Records,
but that's a different one than the one which puts out Outcesticide.

later,
chris
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