Last weekend, I posted about the UK record industry lobby's strategy of legally threatening executives of the UK Pirate Party over the party's Pirate Bay proxy. Now, Adam Liversage, BPI Director of Communications, wants you to know that his employers had no choice but to threaten the personal finances of Pirate Party officers:
The facts are that despite our efforts over a number of weeks to resolve the matter amicably, Pirate Party UK continued to make clear that they had no intention of removing the proxy to The Pirate Party.
The Pirate Party claims the opposite. I've never known the Pirate Party to knowingly utter a falsehood. I've never known the record industry to knowingly utter a truth, so you make up your own mind.
Our solicitors then wrote to PPUK's National Executive seeking legal undertakings that they would remove the proxy. 'Pirate Party UK' as an entity cannot give undertakings – it has no form of legal personality and it isn't incorporated – so the proper legal course is to write to the members of PPUK's National Executive personally.
The subsequent allegation made by Loz Kaye that BPI has threatened him or other party officers with "bankruptcy" is completely untrue. We have not "individually sued the party's executives" as you assert – we have asked for undertakings to remove the proxy. At no time have we threatened "bankruptcy", so your subsequent narrative about "corporate bullying" and "terrorising people who organise against them" is, in our view, difficult to justify.
So, they're not threatening bankruptcy, they're just talking personal legal action against individuals under statutes that they wrote, bought, and paid for, where the fines involved are designed to bankrupt the losers. But they're not threatening bankruptcy, oh no.
Finally, Mr Liversage, whose employers are funded by companies that stole $45 million in royalties from musicians using a Canadian legal shell-game, routinely fiddle their accounting to their artists, and who ran off-the-books "third-shift" pressings of CDs that could be sold without ever paying royalties to artists until the Sarbanes-Oxley act made their execs personally criminally liable for the practice, wants you to know that:
There is nothing principled in Pirate Party UK helping The Pirate Bay defraud people who earn their living in the creative industries. They have a right to be paid for their work like anyone else.
