A Troll is Bringing Down Artist Tracks on SoundCloud

A troll has managed to exploit SoundCloud’s copyright infringement policy. A few artists and producers had to suffer the consequences when their tracks were taken down from SoundCloud.

In an attempt to get back for an unknown offense, Dr. Egg (the hacker), filed copyright violation claims against several SoundCloud artists. He managed to do so by sending emails through seemingly ‘genuine’ email addresses posing as two verified users. The accounts that were used were of Moonboy (moonboycreator@outlook.com) and Too Vain (toovain@outlook.com). Dr. Egg managed to make the emails look very believable by falsifying their signatures. After these claims were filed, Jamie Madsen, who goes by the name of Moonboy, quickly realised what was happening and tweeted the following statement:

IMPORTANT Please retweet: Copyright claims are being filed under my name.  Literally every producer is getting their songs taken down and the guy is trying to put the blame on me.  Wanna say I have nothing to do with this.  Me and my team are doing our best to sort this out ASAP.”

Affected artists included Ubur, Xaebor, Svdden Death, Wooli, and Mastadon, among countless others. Upon enquiring about why their tracks were taken down, the confused artists received the following email from SoundCloud:  

Hello there, Thanks for getting in touch, I’d be happy to get you some further information here.  We received the copyright infringement report from Jamie Madsen.  You would need to get in touch with them directly to resolve the situation.  Their email address is moonboycreator@outlook.com. In their report, they stated: “Using the moonboy vocal copyright to franchinco inc.”Thanks for understanding that we have to act and take down tracks that are reported to us for copyright infringement in order to remain in compliance with copyright law.  If you are able to settle this situation amicably amongst yourselves or in a court of law, we would be happy to review the situation again and reinstate the track if everything checks out.”

After a day of controversies and backlash from the affected artists, SoundCloud reinstated all the tracks and released the following statement:

Our takedown notification process is designed to respect copyright, and it is our policy to review all infringement claims per the guidelines outlined in our Help Center.  Upon review, we have determined these copyright claims are not valid, and are happy to report we’ve reinstated all affected content.”