Can you steal what's already stolen?

Do you want to know what I was doing last weeks instead of posting tons of albums? I crossed the border to the Wild East, my quest being to find the answer to one serious question on my mind: Can you steal what's already stolen?

Understand, I'm far from idealising what I'm doing here but at least I try to post original material that isn't widely available around the net. I try my best to keep this place cozy and warm with a personal touch. I won't fool you, blogging like this isn't so hard. It only takes me to read through piles of requests and comments, go to the attic, dig in the box, wash my dusty hands, rip and tag, find the covers somewhere, write some short text and post it. In return I get another pile of mail, with smilies and warm thankyous this time.

Then one day my posts started to leak. Some of the records I post here are so rare or outstanding it's easy to track them with the Gugol search engine so I could see them popping up on various forums, download sites and "blogs", mostly of israeli, russian, ukrainian and (it only gets better) belarussian provenience. Since the early days of music sharing blogs I felt proud to be quoted by "older" bloggers, and when I linked their posts, I always did it with taste and respect. Needless to say that these rascals just repack and uploaded my files on filesharing servers with tons of pop-ups and a good cash-for-downloads rewards.

Actually first time around it made me feel sort of proud because the first to go were my own Electronic Colorations compilations (btw still the most dowloaded posts on this blog ;-). Clearly those guys from the wild east mistaken them for real industry releases, with the faux covers and all that jazz. Then the plot thickened and my posts were stolen on daily basis. I tried to fight back.. only to find myself knee-deep in pointless conversations: "How do you knowing this albums is your blog?" "Read the bloody ID3 tag, punk!" Holy mackerel, I even had to threaten certain russian "blogger" with Gugol complaint to stop him from reposting my stuff without any connection to my blog. Seriously how can you communicate with someone who wrote: Will not I understand what is wrong with that? I got in your bloge, and that I pleased me - added to the blog. Humiliating, to say the least.

So instead of posting like crazy I was searching through the forums and sites I could find, downloading my own stuff from exotic servers, tagging the rascal posts as STOLEN in big red lettering and having mindless chats with I.R.Baboons with cultural deficits. Did it help any? Well not that someone would say sorry or remove the links but the theft ratio dropped rapidly - which I'm afraid is mainly a result of the lack of activity on Future Vintage.

There's a brighter side to this - in the past weeks I had enough time to make up my mind what the next discography blog will be. Ladies and gents, meet the new member of my family of blogs - Rising High Records. First I had in mind Talkin' Loud as there's constant demand for older releases of this acid jazz giant, then I realised that I have almost complete collection of Rising High albums (some of the stuff already appeared here with great success). Almost, of course, so expect a want list to appear soon with appeal to help me with the completion. It worked well with The CTI never sleeps, then with A Private Collection, let's see if we can make it again.

Also I started compiling two new volumes of Electronic Colorations, The Vocal Edition and The Ambient Edition should be ready sooner than much later ;-)

Stay tuned!