Fascinating story of the reaction to GNR "Chinese Democracy leak.

cafreema

This is the really, really interesting story of how the RIAA and US Government responded to the leak of 9 Guns & Roses tracks, told by the guy who did it.

Antiquiet

Craig

greg

Quite amazing, thanks Craig

thomnottom

Good read. Most amazing part was that there are people who actually cared about "Chinese Democracy"...

I kid. But seriously, one of the G'N'R fans actually tried to play informant and almost got a member of A Perfect Circle involved in this because he thought it might hurt his favorite band. Are you kidding me?

Germanprof

Thanks, Craig. My mind still boggles at the weird economics of people spending ridiculous amounts of money to try to get compensation for something that already makes large amounts of money from someone who does not have large amounts of money.

greg

This is just another amazing story involving the FBI - how they spent years investigating the Kingmen's Louie Louie in the 1960s for being obscene.

ScissorMan

That was a totally different situation, nor would I call it "amazing." This was back in 1964, and a lot of parents were terrified of "longhairs" and the Beatles and dark-skinned ethnic minorities, not to mention communists. Apparently a college student, probably in Florida, thought it would be funny to make up obscene lyrics to "Louie Louie" and try to sell them as a form of pornography. (I guess you could actually do things like that back then, as they didn't have streaming internet video ike we have today.) Some people saw these phony lyrics and, since they couldn't decipher the actual lyrics, they freaked out - some of them going to far as to write letters to the FBI demanding that they arrest the record label's owners under the ITOM laws that were in place at the time (ITOM stands for "Interstate Transport of Obscene Materials").

So this wasn't really a matter of nutcase prudes in the FBI with weird ideas about a pop song, it was actually an extremely effective, though probably inadvertent, hoax that ended up costing American taxpayers a great deal of money.

The original case files are available on the FBI's website. For the obscene phony lyrics, go to page 14. These recent stories about this case are written so as to have you believe that some FBI agents sat down and wrote a 109-page report analyzing the lyrics to "Louie Louie," when in fact the documents almost entirely consist of angry letters from "concerned citizens," and their (mostly failed) attempts at producing good-faith replies to them. The most remarkable thing about them is actually the fact that the FBI's records managers were good enough at their jobs to collect all of them in one folder.