METALLICA Copyright Lawsuit A Hoax

August 17, 2007

The Pulse of Radio (formerly Launch Radio Networks) reports: A copyright infringement lawsuit allegedly filed by METALLICA against two video game companies has turned out to be a hoax. The uproar over the fake legal action began when DailyGaming.com posted an item claiming that the band was suing Harmonix and Activision for including its song "One" in both the upcoming Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band. Although the item has since been categorized as a satire, it quickly spread across the Web and was picked up as an authentic news story. A spokesperson for the band, however, denied the entire story, telling RollingStone.com that the song had been licensed to both games and the band was looking forward to its inclusion.

One attentive reading of the story is all it takes to see that it's a spoof. One passage says, "METALLICA is fearful that album sales could decline if their fans were able to simply walk into any Gamestop or Best Buy and purchase an $80 video game that contained one of their songs," also suggesting that the group had subpoenaed the game manufacturers for lists of consumers who had pre-ordered both titles.

The item later stated, "Analysts in both the music and video game industry believe this may be one last pathetic grab for attention from a band that has lost all cultural significance outside of reruns of 'I Love the 90s' on VH1."

METALLICA did sue the original Napster for copyright infringement several years ago due to the illegal trading of the band's songs over the company's file-sharing network. The action earned the group a tremendous amount of scorn among music fans, but METALLICA has changed its position since then, making all its music available on iTunes in late 2005.

Drummer Lars Ulrich told The Pulse of Radio that the band was never as leery of downloading music as it was made out to be. "You know, some of us would like to think that we were a little more digitally interested than given credit for, but that's okay," he said. "It sort of got, like, annoying every time you went on iTunes (laughs) that you couldn't find your own stuff there, so it was like, 'Okay, fine.'"

METALLICA is currently in the studio with producer Rick Rubin working on its ninth album, due out in early 2008.

Watch a clip of METALLICA discussing their stance on illegal downloading and Napster at a 2004 press conference at the Sundance Film Festival:

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