Reception
Music fans and bloggers often initially respond angrily when first approached by Web Sheriff on its clients' official and unofficial forums. According to the Evening Standard, "Music blogging sites are littered with comments with the Sheriff's contact details at the top, thanking bloggers for obeying the rules." Fans sometimes interpret this as Web Sheriff saying, "I've got my eye on you." The anti-piracy company reports that eventually most of the fans tend to respect the wishes of their favored artists by cooperating. As related by The Guardian, The Prodigy fans on the brainkiller forum engaged with Web Sheriff on a thread that lasted through 18 pages. Some of the fans who had been hostile at the beginning, then asked what they could do to help the band.
Andrew Daniels with Men's Health, in an introduction to an interview with him, referred to John Giacobbi, 'alias, the Web Sheriff' as "the most hated man on the internet" and "the scorn of bloggers, pirates, and regular Joes all over the world".
Gary Fung, the founder of IsoHunt a BitTorrent site, has spoken of Web Sheriff as "the white hat of antipiracy companies" while further noting that "Web Sheriff, in my book, are the good guys. What they do is send takedown notices for copyright owners, which is perfectly legitimate."
Joe Reinartz with Pollstar wrote that "To some, like artists and record labels, John Giacobbi and his Web Sheriff company are godsends. To others, like those who upload new album releases to YouTube, Giacobbi and Web Sheriff are probably not on their Christmas list."
Web Sheriff's method of using a "velvet glove approach" to appeal to fans has been said by Randy Lewis with the Los Angeles Times to have notable successes, including Lady Gaga's Born This Way and Adele's 21. This journalist also notes that despite these examples of success of the "diplomatic strategy", the company's gentle approach still has skeptics, with some critics calling it naive: Brad Buckles, an executive in anti-piracy with RIAA, was quoted as saying: "It's certainly well-intended and may work in some cases. The problem is in many, many cases, you're dealing with people who have no respect whatsoever for the intellectual property of record labels or the artists themselves." A Billboard journalist concludes that to appeal to sites that post links to pirated music and engaging with fans and redirecting them to authorized content by the artist is a "strategy with a future, if implemented properly."
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)