Full story of "Clancy" getting leaked and my part in it

"Clancy" by twenty one pilots has been leaked online. The reason is that after the band postponed the release date of the album, many record stores still sold CDs as originally scheduled, and many people even posted screenshots of the album being shipped a week in advance.

Among them, @jumpsuitlive posted on Twitter at noon of Thursday, May 16th (EST time, the same below), saying that he had received the CD. (According to subsequent info, he should have bought it at Walmart.)

By 7 am on the 17th, a Discord server called "TOP LEAK" released a low-definition version of each song in "Clancy", which was a phone recording of the album playing on a speaker.

The low-resolution version of the audio was then uploaded to Dropbox and was removed a few hours later.

The person who got the record seems to be called a-jam-jarr, and many people want to teach her how to rip tracks and upload high-definition copies of the CD. But she said she didn't have a computer and couldn't rip the CD.

The server appears to be purged after a few hours.

At 1 p.m. on the 17th, @jumpsuitlive, mentioned above, ripped the CD track and uploaded the FLAC lossless audio and the album's lyrics book photos to the website clancyinbio.com made by @loisbearer. The audio source was initially uploaded to the Mega.nz service, andthe link was removed a few hours later.

The website uses the cartoon image of Lois Griffin from the cartoon "Family Guy", which is very funny...

According to the information I found, this website is actually made using the free hosting service of GitHub Pages. The only thing that they paid should be the domain name.

Before the link to the Mega.nz network disk expired, loisbearer also uploaded a copy to Google Drive. But a few hours later, the links were dead. Eventually, they changed the link to a page on the justanothermusic.site website, which requires registration to see the content.

As of now (11am on Saturday), clancyinbio.com is still online. I don’t know if GitHub received the DMCA notice but didn’t handle it, or if Warner Music’s legal representatives couldn’t figure out who to contact.

According to jumpsuitlive, this website seems to have 2.9 million visits (?) I'm not sure if this is true...

The following is gossip from myself.

Yesterday, I uploaded the leaked FLAC audio file compressed zip file to my personal WordPress blog [the domain name is status.dun4real.org], and then shared it on Twitter. Because I did not use a 3rd party file hosting service, but placed it directly on my own server, I think this will make it more difficult for them to take it down.

Because I had received a deletion email from Rock Sound before, I was basically certain that I would receive an email from the legal department after spreading the audio files. I received an email at 5 p.m. on Friday from GrayZone, Inc., a company that specializes in music copyright issues. They were entrusted by Warner Music Group and asked me to immediately delete the Copyrighted Content about Twenty One Pilots "Clancy" from the website. (In order to avoid my site being taken down by the server provider, I subsequently deleted the link)

The email also ends with contact information for the person handling the matter.

What’s really funny is that they didn’t find the right recipient. My website is hosted on DigitalOcean, but maybe because they saw a Substack link in the web page and so they sent the email to Substack at the same time. (my site isn't even hosted on Substack.) If they send it to DigitalOcean, I don’t know if the website will be taken down (the biggest concern is this), or if they will just send me a warning.

By 5 am today, I received an email from Twitter informing me that a post involving infringing content from Twenty One Pilots Clancy had been deleted. At the same time, a DMCA takedown notice from the UK IFPI was forwarded, which required Twitter to delete or disable all links mentioned.

At the same time, my account was temporarily blocked and was not unlocked until I agreed to the warning message.

The email mentioned a total of four Twitter post links, two of which were from loisbearer and two from my account.

The contact information of the sender is also given at the end.

Overall my impression is that the legal representatives that handle infringement removals are either very slow to respond to such content, or they don't even find the right service provider.

The Leak page I published has been visited a total of 1500 times, which has probably the highest I've ever seen.

Overall, whether it is downloading leaks or sharing leaks, I feel thrilled, very excited. Maybe this is the feeling of doing bad things, or the thrill of rebellion. What's more, good guy's response is so slow.

11 am / May 18, 2024