My mind is still blown as to how things have went down over the past couple of months. Talking about this is still really upsetting for me but whether I like it or not I have to break my silence. A band I've worked with since 2012, The Gits and I have had to part ways...and disappointingly not on good terms. After this blog entry I intend to never talk about the Gits again. As many of you might know I've been running the Gits fan site and online store for a long time. It mostly went smoothly apart of some trouble getting merch done (our official merch was screen printed). For example we'd be getting low on some shirt sizes and I'd email Steve to let him know. Since he handled the finances (totally understandable) he had to be the one to make an order. Therefore sometimes we'd have big gaps in between the orders being made and received. Naturally I did a lot of damage control but made my share of errors and learned a ton. In about 2016 the Gits started to fracture....
Out of the blue I got a very formal sounding submission to my contact form from a rep from the Record Industry Association of America . It read as follows... July 24, 2020 Dear Sir or Madam: I am contacting you on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) and its member record companies. The RIAA is a trade association whose member companies create, manufacture and distribute approximately eighty-five (85) percent of all legitimate sound recordings sold in the United States. Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet, and including with respect to the copyrighted works identified below. We have learned that your service is operating and/or hosting the below-referenced infringing web site(s) on its network. These site(s) are offering files containing...