Coach wrote:Iholdthepain wrote:so just curious... what makes this and the 1995 tour movie taboo?
Back in the day, some of the band's lawyers I believe reached out to this board asking us not to share unreleased, unfinished projects. Probably because there were perhaps plans to release the '95 movie as an official release, its copyright protected, etc.
The long story:
Back in 2002, before DVD burners and YouTube, people started sharing video bootlegs on VCD's. Easier than VHS, with none of the generational degradation, and it meant that everybody could get them. Most of it was facilitated by a fan site called TVM: The Video Mission. All B&Ps and trades. No one was selling anything. Band seemed okay with it - it totally undercut the video bootleg sellers. (The band didn't want people videoing their shows - and asked fans not to - but generally didn't care about the recordings that got out there.)
Then somebody in PJ's circle gave TVM a copy of the Birdman sessions, with a note that it was okay to share them. So they did.
Ed went ape-shit. Unknown to anybody, he considered those recordings to be private. So he rousted PJ's lawyers into C&D'ing TVM out of existence. After that, video boots were verboten across the board. (Tim Bierman is an asshole, but he was never a bigger asshole than he was at that time.)
What made it so rough was that they didn't just ask TVM to take them down. It felt like retribution. It upset a lot of folks.
For the next few years, PJ seriously gave a shit about unreleased stuff like they never had before. (The 1995 movie leaked in mid-2003, and it was basically just back-channel B&Ped for a long time.) Eventually, YouTube (and probably time) made it not worth enforcing.
