To the Department of Justice, et al:

During the past few days you have shut down three prominent hip-hop sites: OnSmash.com, DaJaz1.com and RapGodfathers.com. I expect that by the time this letter is finished there will be more domains seized. Why are you shutting down our hip-hop sites? As a principle to an internationally distributed record label, I’m curious as to why we have been stripped of the power to enforce our own copyrights.

The users that frequent these sites are vital to the existence of hip-hop music. The communities that are formed within these sites listen to the music we distribute, leave feedback and debate with one another about the quality of our products. These sites effectively serve as the customer service department to the record industry. If I put out a bad record, I want to know how to improve the sound. If the reception is overwhelmingly positive, then I’m encouraged to put more money behind the record to increase its exposure.

With your efforts to curb piracy, you are costing us money by tampering with the ecosystem in which we aggregate our content to the masses. These sites do not operate under the radar. We are all aware of their existence and the placement of content on these sites is an integral part of our marketing campaigns. By cutting off our online communities you are not by any means heightening our expectations for sales. If we thought these sites were detrimental to our financial well being, we would have filed complaints against them a long time ago.

After reviewing the list of sites your organizations recently targeted, I noticed that these hip-hop sites were grouped in with sites that were selling counterfeit goods. I fail to see the correlation between a knock-off pair of Timberland boots and a sound recording that has been created and financed by an artist or label. A common phrase I hear in the music business is “Piracy equals theft.” Sure it does. But first you must truly define piracy. When the creators and owners of original content are encouraging these sites to post their media, who is guilty of piracy?

These moves are especially detrimental to independent musicians. With these actions you are cutting off the avenues to success for thousands of musicians in order for you to satisfy the wishes of four companies (Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner). The fact that these four companies have this much power over a government agency is the root of the problem in the first place. They limit competition by monopolizing radio airwaves and are now trying to do the same thing with the Internet. These hip-hop sites level the playing field for independent artists by giving them a high-traffic platform to gain exposure for their work.

Needless to say these four companies have tried to do this before and it didn’t work. To paraphrase a scene from the movie, The Social Network, the record labels may have succeeded in shutting down Napster, but after the smoke cleared nobody was itching to invest in a Tower Records franchise. The Napster shut down did not curtail file-sharing. It just made users scatter to other locations in order to discover and share new music. We will see the same effect if this current trend continues and this will be incredibly detrimental to the promotional efforts of artists in the hip-hop community.

Your recent actions do more harm than good. I am asking that you take a moment to listen to those of us who actually earn a living by working in the hip-hop industry before taking further drastic measures. As I wrote in an article nearly two years ago (see The Hip-Hop Stimulus Plan Part II), I believe the people operating these hip-hop sites are an invaluable resource to our industry and we should be paying them for their work rather than tyrannizing them.

We are in the process of rebuilding a struggling industry and the unwanted intrusion of the Justice Department into our online channels will only make our industry suffer longer. For the music industry to rebound we must embrace technology and learn how to remain profitable as innovation continues. Government intrusion creates a divide between providers of content and those who operate the sites distributing it, and it breeds distrust between the labels and site owners. This government action will inadvertently increase piracy as record labels become the enemy to site owners. The Department of Justice has crossed the line with this attack on the hip-hop community and this is unacceptable. It is not the job of a government agency to enforce copyrights owned by private entities and these actions interfere with the operation of our businesses. Do not strip us of our rights by bullying people that are vital to our prosperity. We are capable of handling copyright infringement claims through the proper legal channels and will certainly do so when we deem it necessary.

Sincerely,

Stu Pflaum
Element 9 Muzik LLC