Anonymous Takes Down BMI Website (Broadcast Music Inc.)

[Hissyspit]

Source: The Inquirer

Anonymous visits the BMI website

Hacktivists take down Broadcast Music Incorporated

By David Neal
Thu Mar 10 2011, 19:01

THE BMI, an organisation that collects royalties on behalf of musicians, has had a visit from the hacktivists called Anonymous who seized control of its website.
The BMI website is still down at the time of writing and has apparently been that way since late Wednesday evening. The BMI might have released a statement explaining the outage, but who knows. Repeated attempts to contact the website have revealed nothing but blank page after blank page after blank page.
Anonymous has posted its own message, however, which clearly marks the website as a target.

"Too long have the music and cinema industries, among others, abused copyright for their own gain. Legislation serves to protect artists not the companies managing them and should never attempt to prevent the spread of creativity to the general public," it said in a statement.

"We have seen BMI consistently copyright legislation and consequently have decided to take action against it to show that the people will not stand for its crimes against the public. As of the time of the writing of this letter BMI.com has been taken down by our successful attack. This is a message to you and other corporations like you, we cannot stand this abuse anymore."

The statement goes on to warn that the BMI, like the other organisations already targeted, is firmly on the Anonymous radar and will remain there. "No company can take advantage of our liberties to churn profits and censor information in any form, this is unacceptable and will be dealt with accordingly by US," it added.

Read more: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2033329/anonymous-visits-bmi-website

[provis99]

1. someone needs to make a movie about Anonymous.

[DenverDad]

2. Hey, Anonymous. . .

"cough, cough" Koch Industries, "cough, cough".

[abqmufc]

6. K&R!!!!!!!!!

1) Koch
2) Monsanto
3) Dow
4) ADM

[apnu]

15. They already hit some of Koch's companies to mixed results.

Namely because 1) Koch has the funds to have contingency plans for this sort of thing

and

2) Anonymous didn't generate as much interest, internally, in the OP so the full might of their resources were not brought to bear.

I've read that Anonymous is having problems with so many disparate ops that its diluting their impact in these attacks.

[damntexdem]

3. Oh, I wondered why they would attack a Body Mass Index website.

This is different. ;-)

[musiclawyer]

4. I am BMI affiliated

Not that I sell enough songs to be on their radar, but they have always been professional and responsive. Nowadays even unsigned/indie serious artists need assistance of firms like BMI. I know they are draconian in how they deal with certain vendors, but let's not overreact....... Anonymous needs friends, not more enemies.

[GillesDeleuze]

5. as music lawyer who knows BMI, you must consider them the Righthaven of music? right..

[Wait Wut]

7. Wow.

I guess the kids at Anonymous got tired of paying that 99 cents for their Lady Gaga hits.

[LanternWaste]

11. I suppose they got tired of paying 99 cents

I suppose they got tired of paying 99 cents for each document from Wikileaks too... :eyes:

[Scottybeamer70]

8. and............

they will go after wall street and banks when???

[Wait Wut]

9. As soon as they restock their iPods...

...with free music.

[Exultant Democracy]

10. Banks, Scott Walker, I bet we could make a long list.

[sarcasmo]

12. Wish they would take down Chase and Skank of America.

[bengalherder]

13. Sometime around 2003 or so

I followed some links one of the precursors to anonyous set up to try to inform artists of their rights. It seems that BMI, etc were going to keep all these royalies if the artists named (mostly small time and foreign) didn't contact them in something like 24, 48 hours. This OFFICIAL notice was on a site that was non-publicized, well-hidden and not even named anything pertinent that would have promted someone to go there.

I'm willing to pay artists, and think that there should be some regulation so that they get their checks. I also think there should be more oversight of BMI etc, so that they cannot pocket 'unclaimed' monies through scams and dishonesty.

[Javaman]

14. If Anonymous wanted to go after copy-write whores, then they should attack disney.

granted the music industry has always screwed the musician and they really need to update their profit model, but given the fact that laws have been changed to accommodate disney, I would think they would be their first target.