Owing to people constantly pirating his painstaking and excellent restorations, Glen Richards of the Hot Dance & Vintage Jazz Pages is calling it a day. I can hardly blame him:
Hello, everyone!
I know it's been a very long time since I've written (and updated the site!); life has a way of asserting itself when we least desire it. I've been struggling the problem of finding my recordings all over the internet (and commercial projects), all used without permission or even acknowledgment of their origin. When I started this site (back in 1997!) I knew this would be a problem, but I had hoped I would be able to ignore it. I can no longer do it; providing new content is never easy, and to have it used against my wishes simply makes doing this no longer fun.
I will no longer be posting any new content to the website. I have many recordings prepared and have purchased and scanned numerous photos and magazines that I will not release because of the work of a number of unscrupulous and unprincipled people. I made the mistake recently of looking through YouTube.com and various BitTorrent files and was amazed at how much of my stuff is used without any attribution. I had a fellow write to me the other day, accusing *me* of stealing stuff from YouTube and passing it off as my own! The arrogance and outright stupidity of so many people simply overwhelms me.
So, yes, I'm taking my bat and ball and going home. And yes, I *do* angrily blame thieves like "grimriper@yahoo.com" and others for taking my files, removing the copyright notices (and resampling the files, poorly) and them posting them to bitTorrent, archive.org and the like. It is you, and people like you, that have made this once enjoyable hobby an exercise in extreme frustration. "F*ck the RIAA" you put in many of the files you stole from me, but you haven't hurt them at all - you've made certain I'll not make new content available ever again. I hope it was worth it! The website will continue to be open but I will be removing all files and closing the Downloads and Replays pages. I'm sorry this has to affect the majority of folks who have followed my usage guidelines and asked for permission to use the files (*always* freely given, by the way), but I don't enjoy this "hobby" anymore.
Glen
Thanks for all the great music, Glen--your efforts are deeply appreciated. And they'll be missed.
2 comments:
I always looked forward to his new postings because you never knew what was in store. But unfortunately, piracy/sharing/copying is the nature of the beast now and the genie can't ever be put back in the bottle. Glenn's restorations were nice and took some work, but if you're going to offer something for free on the internet you have to know that sooner or later someone is not going to follow your wishes. That anyone bothered to re-rip and remove tags is beyond me, it must be the sign of a guilty conscience.
I haven't quite reached the level of disgust that caused Glen to stop posting his efforts--though I think the last straw for him was being accused of stealing his own stuff from YouTube!
I know that putting up my shows is a tacit invitation for such shenanigans, but it's still important for me to get this material out there and distributed as widely as possible. I also stay off YouTube, which helps me sleep better at night.
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