GUYS! GUYS I FINALLY GOT A DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE. I feel like I’m a grownup on the Internet. It only took seven years!

Hello,

We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice
regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific
content in question is as follows:

The party making the complaint (Deborah Sykes, e-mail:
websheriff@websheriff.com), claims under penalty of perjury to be or
represent the copyright owner of this content. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. ยง
512(c), we have removed access to the content in question.

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap5.html#512

If you believe that these works belong to you and that the copyright
ownership claims of this party are false, you may file a DMCA
counter-notification in the form described by the DMCA, asking that the
content in question be reinstated. Unless we receive notice from the
complaining party that a lawsuit has been filed to restrain you from
posting the content, we will reinstate the content in question within
10-14 days after receiving your counter-notification (which will also be
forwarded on to the party making the complaint).

In the meantime, we ask that you do not replace the content in question,
or in any other way distribute it in conjunction with our services.
Please also be advised that copyright violation is strictly against our
Terms and Conditions, and such offenses risk resulting in immediate
disablement of your account should you not cooperate (not to mention the
legal risk to you if they are true).

http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html

We also ask that if you are indeed infringing upon the copyright
associated with these works that you delete them from your account
immediately, and let us know once this has been done. We also ask that
you delete any other infringing works not listed in this take down
notification, if they exist.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Glen,

— DreamHost Abuse/Security Team

Web Sheriff is, Google suggests, a DMCA gun-for-hire firm that Van Morrison has been employing for a couple months to hunt down those damn pirate MP3s on the Internet (along with, quite zealously, people saying mean things about him).

Now, my having posted that song seven years ago was unquestionably infringement, and I’d rather not see my hosting service get terminated, so I won’t be filing counternotice. Of course, the explicit purpose of posting it was to get a noncensored version out on filesharing networks, and I think that work is as done as it’s going to get.

So congratulations, Web Sheriff: you did it! You managed to Google “brown-eyed girl mp3,” send a stern email to the ISPs for all the results, and charge a pathetic, aging musician tens of thousands of dollars. Now no one will ever be able to illegally download his songs again.

I think I’m going to print this thing out and frame it.