Brandon, MS P0wned by WBC, still think they won

According to blackfive.net's take on a quote from a Mississippi message board Brandon, Mississippi "defeated" the WBC. The problem with their rather naive take on the matter is that they played right into the hands of the WBC cult, giving them exactly what they want. Clearly some government affiliated idiots in Brandon thought spewing hate is the goal of the WBC. It's not. The WBC's goal is to sue, sue, sue. The police in Brandon Mississippi just made the WBC's job very, very easy.

The Phelps clan was running their usual act. Find the funeral of a dead soldier and do their best to piss off as many people as possible. It's claimed that most of the WBC income is the result of first amendment and civil rights lawsuits filed against the people, particularly the local governments, that try to silence them. Apparently knowing NOTHING about the WBC other than their tendency to protest the funerals of soldiers resulted in this response:

The Oxford Square

They did show up, a few showed up a couple of days early.

A couple of days before, one of them ran his mouth at a Brandon gas station and got his ass waxed. Police were called and the beaten man could not give much of a description of who beat him. When they canvassed the station and spoke to the large crowd that had gathered around, no one seemed to remember anything about what had happened.

Rankin County handled this thing perfectly. There were many things that were put into place that most will never know about and at great expense to the county. Most of the morons never made it out of their hotel parking lot. It seems that certain Rankin county pickup trucks were parked directly behind any car that had Kansas plates in the hotel parking lot and the drivers mysteriously disappeared until after the funeral was over.

Police were called but their wrecker service was running behind and it was going to be a few hours before they could tow the trucks so the Kansas plated cars could get out. A few made it to the funeral but were ushered away to be questioned about a crime they might have possibly been involved in. Turns out, after a few hours of questioning, that they were not involved and they were allowed to go on about their business.

Ranking deserves a hand in how they handled this situation.

Brandon, Mississippi can probably expect a number of lawsuits to be filed by the WBC family, most of whom are lawyers. The article linked by the OP might end up part of the filing as proof of a conspiracy to suppress the first amendment rights of the Phelps cult.

Using government resources to violate the rights of jackasses is a piss-poor way to honor a soldier who died ostensibly defending those rights. It's a shame Rankin County didn't dedicate more resources to civics classes. After the WBC clan is done with them they probably won't be able to afford to keep the schools open.

How did the poster on blackfive.net describe the events that placed an entire town at the mercy of Fred Phelps?

Sometimes, when all else has fails, you need the good old boys to get things done. Hats off to the patriots of Rankin, Mississippi!

I HATE it when the WBC wins. I HATE it when those WBC jackasses get exactly what they want handed to them on a silver platter. The town's only hope now is for the tale to either be a complete fabrication or for the WBC to decide there isn't enough money in the county to justify a lawsuit.

NZ to Throw People into an Internet Memoy Hole

New Zealand has passed a law that purports to allow copyright holders to more easily cut off the Internet connection of Intellectual Property pirates.

There's a dark side to the law however, aside from the fact that technical issues make the New Zealand law useless or at the very least guarantees a lot of innocent bystanders will be caught in the digital crossfire. The law effectively allows anyone with the time and money to file a few dodgy complaints to cut off the Internet connection for a household or business.

If the entirety of the law goes into effect due process is pretty much eliminated and anyone can be kicked off the Internet based upon a few complaints. One guy who knows how to use a proxy server could file a few complaints and get an entire household's Internet connection cut. Is there a NZ blogger who ticked you off? File some dubious file sharing complaints and you can get him and his entire family cut off in one fell swoop. Is a competitor cutting into your profits? File some complaints and they'll lose their Internet connection. Don't like the review someone wrote of your business? Cut off their Internet connection.

Once cut off, getting back on can be a dicey proposition. Employers wouldn't be happy with their Internet connection being jeopardized by a blogger employee, so continuing whatever political or business blogging that got your home connection severed during your lunch break may just get you fired. If you work from home your business and personal connection is dead. All it takes to cut off a family or business in New Zealand will be one person willing to lie about Internet Piracy. Folks like that aren't exactly difficult to find.

Cameron Tilbury and Salem Jones The Bareback Gift Giver

Whoa Nellie! What have we here:

Cameron Tilbury and Salem Jones The Bareback Gift Giver

THAT'S a weird title. According to LimeTorrent it's just as popular as One Soul Thrust's debut album. Can anyone translate that movie title for me?

Cameron Tilbury only needed a month to destroy One Soul Thrust

It turns out One Soul Thrust, the band that has been humiliated online by the incompetence and dishonesty of Cameron Tilbury only signed with him in February of 2011.

20 February 2011
One Soul Thrust Unveils New Management

Rock band One Soul Thrust has just signed a management deal with Cameron Tilbury Publicity in the United Kingdom.

...

"We were introduced to Cameron through Nashville vocal coach Judy Rodman," says One Soul Thrust's lead singer/songwriter Salem Jones. "He started getting our music out to international radio and doing our publicity. but he was also talking to booking agents, promoters and other people. We soon realized that he was doing a lot of what we wanted in a manager. Since our focus is international and our producer is based in Europe, we wanted an international manager. It just seemed like a good fit. We simply love C."

One Soul Thrust is fronted by lead vocalist/songwriter Salem Jones. Add drummer Todd Pretty, guitarist Jag Mollerup, bassist Trent Morley, and you have the core members of what one US journalist called "one of Canada's best-kept secrets."

...

Cameron Tilbury is a native of Ancaster, Ontario, Canada and a former Canadian radio announcer/writer (820 CHAM, KX96, Q107, CHFI). He has worked at advertising agencies in Nottingham, Peterborough, Maidstone and London in the UK. Cameron Tilbury Publicity was founded in 2010 in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire--about 85 miles north of London--and is currently handling international radio promo and publicity for some of North America's best up-and-coming talent.

For information: info@onesoulthrust.com, cameron@camerontilburypublicity.com

By the first week of April, 2011, you couldn't look up information on the band without getting results about One Soul Thrust's manager feeding them bad information. In a little over a month, he turned them into an Internet joke.

Around April 3 and 4, the band and the manager posted some statements in their defense, but by April 8, the relevant posts on Tilbury's site were gone. Apparently he thought better of continuing to claim 100,000 pirate downloads when there were really none. Instead of admitting his mistake, he's decided to delete his comments and hope everyone just forgets he screwed up and was an ass about it. Given the short attention span of the Internet that strategy might actually work. Unless of course people keep linking to articles about this incident using his name and the band's name. Unless he admits his mistake and eats some humble pie, the odds are good his incompetence will continue to be one of the top things people learn about when they look him up online.

George Takei auditions for the role of Spiderman

There's the old D&D joke that Sean Connery reached "Epic" level in the 1990's and "stopped leveling." This is usually supported by photos showing how little he has aged in the last few decades.

Clearly, George Takei got the "Epic Level" rule book so he could keep leveling, even after achieving Epic Status.

In programming terms:
GeorgeTakei = Epic +1;

Every few months:
GeorgeTakei ++;




All joking aside, letting him retool the show into a comedic vehicle could work nicely. It might even, dare I say, save a failing production!

Salem Jones probably flunked all his math classes

It takes a special kind of stupid to not be able to tell the difference between 0 and 100,000.

'While I question the exact precision of these numbers--pirates are dishonest by nature--it appears they reflect a strong enough version of reality to bring a serious issue to light.' - One Soul Thrust's lead vocalist Salem Jones, on the fact that his band is claiming their album has been pirated 1000,00 times when it's not even available on any piracy sites.

Switched.com has the best headline for this fiasco: Obscure Canadian Band Mistakes Spam for 100K Illegal Downloads

Imageshack has an example of the spam that fooled Salem Jones.

Cameron Tilbury, a lying SOB?

Until a few weeks ago, Cameron Tilbury'S main claim to fame was being a lackluster music manager and a somewhat psychotic looking Gordon Ramsay look-a-like. Now he's becoming known as a "special needs" individual who can't tell an advertisement from actual search results.

In my recent post Cameron Tilbury vs One Soul Thrust, I outlined how Cameron Tilbury used advertisements that auto-populated with your search results to claim that the debut album of the band One Soul Thrust had been downloaded about 100,000 times. If you actually try to download any of those files you learn something interesting. They don't exist. There are no copies of One Soul Thrust's album available on any illicit file sharing sites.

Cameron Tilbury's piracy claims are not true.

I wondered if he was deliberately lying or just an incompetent moron, incapable of telling the difference between and advertisement and actual search results. Was he also desperately trying to collect on his million pound Yahoo Lottery prize while feverishly corresponding with Nigerian prices desperate to get their money out of the country, giving him an eight figure cut in the process?

Tilbury's recent response to this mess has convinced me he is deliberately lying. I won't do the scumbag Cameron Tilbury the service of linking to his site. Instead I'll link to The Mad Hatter's response to Cameron Tilbury's dishonesty. I highly recommend reading it. The Mad Hatter's article, like my earlier one, uses absurd search criteria to demonstrate the idiocy and nonsensical nature of Cameron Tilbury's claims.

This is Cameron's money quote:

Sure enough, it would appear that not only are the downloads on pirate sites illegal, but their numbers are pretty shady too.

At no point does he admit that his piracy claims are fraudulent. He just weasels out and says the numbers my be off a bit. His excuse isn't completely off base. There's a substantial difference between ZERO downloads, which is what One Soul Thrust has experienced and the 1000,000 downloads Cameron Tilbury claims. That would fall under the criteria of "their numbers are pretty shady too." By refusing to admit that there are no actual incidents of One Soul Thrust being pirated he is engaging in what can be termed "deception by omission." Specifically he's leaving out the critical point that his claims are complete balderdash.

I would advise anyone thinking of doing business with Cameron Tilbury to seriously reconsider associating with him. If his handling of this debacle is any indication, then stretching the truth or even flat out lying are part of his business toolkit. It may seem like a good thing to have a dishonest bastard on your side, but lying bastards have a tendency to turn on you. Do you REALLY want to be in a contract dispute with someone as apparently dishonest as Cameron Tilbury?

If you have an existing relationship with Cameron Tilbury, get out as fast as you can, unless you like knowing that you can never trust a word that comes out of his mouth.

Where will Tilbury go from here? I suspect he'll try to cast this debate as a general piracy issue, distancing himself from his debunked claims. Instead of addressing the falsified nature of his 100,000 downloads number, he'll steer the conversation away from his specific incompetence and dishonesty towards a general attack on piracy. Anyone who calls him out on continuing to lie about the One Soul Touch piracy numbers will be lumped in with anyone who advocates piracy.

Cameron Tilbury vs One Soul Thrust

Cameron Tilbury is the manager for a band named "One Soul Thrust", and I feel sorry for the band.

In April of 2011, Tilbury broke the news that One Soul Thrust's debut album had been downloaded illegally over 100,000 times. A small band was being decimated by piracy. They'd gone Pirate-Platinum despite being an obscure band whose one youtube video had less than 80 views. I have videos of my toddler online that have more views than that.

The claim that a band with no real Internet presence could have racked up 100,000 illegal downloads was a red flag to a number of people. After some due diligence it turned out that the claims of One Soul Thrust having 100,000 illegal downloads were complete and bull. Cameron Tilbury, the man claiming there have been 100,000 illegal downloads has released his "evidence", which consists of a screen shot of an advertisement. TorrentFreak details the story in their article CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band. Specifically, the ad is for LimeTorrents, a site that uses your search terms to make up fictional torrents with massive download rates in order to get you to click on the link.

The article One Soul Thrust – Who Is Lying To Them reveals that the album isn't even on Gnutella.

Tilbury however hasn't admitted his mistake,. Far from it. He's defending his position on the Balanced Copyright For Canada Facebook wall.

He's even being a jackass about it. For example, Trent Morley pointed out that Tilbury was responding to requests for supporting evidence with name calling Tilbury wrote:

Cameron Tilbury: So are you Trent. I've substantiated our claims to real journalists, not silly little bloggers who hide behind cute names. Nice loyalty on your part, I have to say. Class.

All anyone has had to do is contact me directly. The only ones who ha...ve done that are legit journalists and CRIS. I will not condutct this the way you kids want to play. Grow up."

If that's the case then it should be fairly simple for Tilbury to provide the same evidence to bloggers. Based on the Google results for the band's name bloggers are the primary people writing about this anyway. Deliberately excluding the people who are providing the most information on the issue only guarantees their version will dominate the conversation.

The fact-checking articles I've linked above make it pretty clear that no such torrent actually exists. The question becomes not one of if the piracy is occurring, it's not, but one of motive. Is Cameron Tilbury malevolent and trying to use this to get press attention or is he merely incompetent? He's clearly failed the band in his efforts to promote them. Is this an attempt to excuse his failure to get the band more paying gigs? Is he actually foolish enough to think no one would research his claims? Is he deliberately trying to make a fool of himself online to promote the band?

Tilbury's response on his web site is vacuous to say the least. He never admits that the download figures were based on bad information. He seems downright offended that anyone is even asking him for evidence. In the end his post devolves into an anti-piracy rant, never mentioning the white elephant in the room: The Piracy he's claiming happened to One Soul Thrust did not happen.

It's pretty clear One Soul Thrust needs a new manager. He's technologically incompetent and his management of this debacle is proving a complete inability to understand the relevance of the Internet in marketing the band. There are a lot of graceful ways he could have handled this and benefited his client but they all entail admitting he was wrong. A bigger man could do that. Cameron Tilbury however, does not appear to be a big enough man to admit a mistake.

Now, just for fun, here are some other torrent search results that claim far more downloads than are feasible. Keep in mind, none of these files actually exist, but the images below constitute the same level of evidence that Tilbury provided to TorrentFreak to support his claims of piracy. His screen shots showed download counts similar to the ones in the screen shots below. He appears to have gotten his 100,000 number by totaling the results. This means if the information Cameron Tilbury has released about One Soul Thrust is proof of massive piracy, then Cameron Tilbury is a piracy-platinum blue movie star.

Cameron Tilbury Dealing with constipation audio book

Cameron Tilbury Gay Sex Tape

Cameron Tilbury on the Nixon Tapes

Cameron Tilbury Murder Conviction read in court

To the best of my knowledge, Cameron Tilbury has never starred in a gay sex movie, written a book about constipation or been convicted of murder, but his own standard of evidence, screen shots from dodgy torrent search sites, would suggest otherwise.

I doubt he ever shagged Chris Crocker either: Cameron Tilbury caught in bed with Chris Crocker