Copyright Trolls Don’t Need To Tell The Band When Suing Its Fans

Unless your band’s name ends with “etallica”, suing your fans for copyright infringement is very bad for publicity (and even if it does, that’s still a dick move Lars). So, imagine All Shalt Perish’s surprise when they learnt that a Panamanian copyright troll, which no one remembers hiring, recently filed suit against 80 of their fans.

Last Friday, Panama-based copyright litigation firm World Digital Rights, filed papers in a Florida court subpoenaing the vitals on 80 unnamed defendants for allegedly pirating ASP’s album “This is Where it Ends”. Problem is, neither ASP nor its label, Nuclear Blast, has any clue as who the hell World Digital Rights is. Both band and label have denounced WDR’s actions as unauthorised.

“The band wasn’t consulted whatsoever and none of us have ever heard of this company,” Ryan Downey, the band’s manager, told TorrentFreak. “I spoke to the US label manager and German label president who both are as confused as we are. We are digging deeper and looking into the legality of it all. We are thinking it’s perhaps a sublicensor or some digital aggregator or something?!”

In its defence, WDR claims that the label signed an “exclusive licence” to the album on March 12 of this year, which grants the right to sue. Whatever the reason, both All Shalt Perish and Nuclear Blast need to get this figured out post haste before WDR tries to actually collect on the $US150,000/person they’re asking for. [Torrent Freak via BoingBoing]