Surface Unsigned festival try “legal action” against Created in Birmingham

Created in Birmingham, where you’re most likely to find links to arty stuff rather than a row, posted about the Surface Unsigned ‘festival’ (an interminably drawn-out battle of the bands competition). After originally being fairly positive (and liking a couple of the bands) Danny Smith dug a little deeper and was unsettled by the rules of the competition — specifically that if bands didn’t sell enough tickets then they couldn’t progress to the next round.

Surface seem to have not enjoyed this bit of publicity, as Danny revealed on Friday last that they sent a faux-legal “take down request” to him (Pete Ashton has the text of the email here). Where as they could have cited Britain’s sue-friendly libel laws (they’d have been wrong in my opinion) and made it squeaky-bum time, they decided to talk about copyright (Danny quoted from the horse’s mouth, their rule-book). That’s where they’re quite wrong as far as I can see, as for the purposes of reporting quoting is considered fair-use.

Since they like rules so much, they’d better learn those of blogging and the law hadn’t they? I don’t have any respect for they way they’ve handled it at all.

Tags: copyright, created in birmingham, internet, law, legal, surface unsigned