Just like the Wild Wild West the internet needs a good sheriff to enforce the law.
In the world of the web, there is only ONE http://www.websheriff.com/ aka John Giacobbi!
Web Sheriff, founded 11 years ago in the pioneering days of the internet, by veteran intellectual property
lawyer, John Giacobbi has emerged as a leading advocate of the soft sell representing artists including
Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Dylan, Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Lady Gaga, Adele and many more.
Web Sheriff is the premier digital rights management and brand protection service for the music industry,
helping artists and labels across the globe. Web Sheriff stops online album leaks using a ‘gentle’ approach
that ‘engages’ fans to help prevent distribution of copyrighted material. Giacobbi’s preferred strategy is to
persuade rather than prosecute, to educate rather than incarcerate.
He strives to avoid cease-and-desist
orders, fines and criminal prosecutions and seeks to differentiate between professional music thieves and
those he regards as hyper-enthusiastic fans.
"The only thing most fans are guilty of is over-exuberance," Giacobbi said in a recent interview. "When
you've got some artist they love and have been waiting for a new album for two years, you've got to treat
them with respect rather than hit them with the big stick -- it's a better way of doing it. Generally speaking
it's impossible to put the genie 100% back into the bottle, but you can contain it to a significant degree."
The notable successes for the velvet glove approach include Lady Gaga’s "Born This Way," which crashed
through the million-sales barrier in its first week, Adele's "21," the No. 1 record in the country for nine weeks and Taylor Swift's "Speak Now," a mega-seller last fall.
While music has been the company’s bedrock, Web Sheriff has made increasing inroads into a variety of
markets: film and television, book and newspaper publishing, sports, on-line libel protection and stock
market share price protection, are all areas to have benefitted from Web Sheriff’s unique approach to online
rights management. The range of its applications is such that the company has also been
commissioned by news media in libel protection and to close-down sites that even the police can’t shut,
such as extreme-violence porn sites and terrorist related web-sites.
