Open Letter to Pilgrim Management

There has been a leak, or perhaps more than one person gave out Rammstein properties. I don't know. Obviously this is against your wishes. Communities have found users are getting hold of these properties, and one of the first to combat this and try and quash the spread of your property was Herzeleid.Com. The community team on that site were deleting posts, banning users, and generally combating the spread of the leaked track and images from the day they came to light, and continued to do so as long as I was able to access the site. Right now the site is not what it should be.

Now, I'm not sure if Pilgrim has approached Jeremy, the site owner (I don't know him personally to ask), and I don't know the nature of any contact that might have been made, but I'm seeing rumours all over the show that sites like (and including) Herzeleid have been threatened with legal action or closure over the leaked material. I hope this is not true in the case of Herzeleid, at least. This community is run with the protection of Rammstein's interests at the fore, and this kind of consideration should be taken into account by Pilgrim and Rammstein.

Perhaps, rather than going for fan communities in cases like this, Pilgrim should look to the people they gave the material to in the first place. Perhaps not releasing sensitive material at all ahead of time would be a better way to protect it. Perhaps individually watermarking images given out, so the source of a leak can be readily identified would pay off. Perhaps similarly marking audio files would be sensible. The fan communities are not the source of your leak, Pilgrim, and to alienate them is not sound business practice. You're making fans angry and upsetting what should be a very positive year for you and the band.

All my experience of IP protection is in the games industry, but I am aware that it is possible to individually tag any given file in various ways, so as to be able to identify them later on. Image watermarking can survive any number of methods to foil it and I can imagine that running a tick or tone throughout an audio file would be similarly hard to eradicate if the NDAed individual were aware of it, which they needn't be.

Please look at your own systems and processes before threatening the fan community over the leak of your property, and please pay special consideration to those communities who are doing their best to protect your properties. Using fear, rather than care, is not going to serve your interests nearly so well.

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