NorthGeek

How to get your content removed from torrent: respect

Comedian Louis CK is at the heart of this new take on preventing your content from circulating via torrents.

This stand up comedian logged in to Mininova and nicely asked for some of his content to be removed:

HI. I’m Louis CK. Can you please take this down? This show is a work in progress and was not intended to be passed around the internet. I have absolutely no problem, personally, with file sharing, and if you take everythign I have on the market on DVD, CD, and put it up for free downloading, I don’t care. But this is an artistic and personal request. Please take this torrent down. thanks.

The guy who uploaded the torrent responded:

Sorry Mr. CK, I have taken down the direct downloads and asked Mininova and ViPeers to remove the torrent. I thought you would have preferred the reverse, your live concerts in ****ty audio quality would be ok, especially for what you said about NBC taking down your Late Night appearance, and your high quality DVDs and stuff wouldn’t be ok since you need ***** for that stuff. I sincerely apologize for the torrent and the misunderstanding.

Wow.

What this means: people who use torrents aren’t evil. They do it for convenience, not to steal. Some content is just still best accessed through the world of torrents. If you’re the content owner, and you become confrontational with the torrent users, they will push back. If you become one of them and understand their reasons and motives and converse with them, they will listen.

Louis CK then responded to a thread at Techdirt:

So I ASKED him to take it down. I didn’t demand it. I don’t expect him to sympathize or care how I feel about it being out there. I only hope he does. It turns out he did, which I’m grateful for.

Other people very easily jumped to the conclusion that the torrent guy complied “because he’s not being a jerk.”

Lesson for Metallica?

Remember this guy’s recent tirade on Conan. Hilarious stuff (the good stuff start at 2:18):