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BPI welcomes judgement in counterfeit vinyl prosecution
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 6 April 2023
UK record industry trade body BPI has welcomed a ruling at Bournemouth Crown Court in which a man was ordered to pay over £373,000 and handed a suspended prison sentence in relation to the sale of bootleg vinyl records.
Richard Hutter pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement after a trading standards team in Dorset discovered he was selling counterfeit records via eBay and a website in the US.
He initially claimed that he had acquired the copyright infringing products at record fairs around Europe and didn’t know they were not official releases. However, when officers checked Hutter’s mobile phone they found conversations where he was trying to arrange for counterfeit vinyl to be made to pair with record sleeves from elsewhere.
In court, Recorder Richard Tutt said Hutter’s crimes were aggravated by him using his son and wife’s bank accounts to take payments from the sale of the vinyl, and therefore involving his family in his copyright infringing enterprise. However, Tutt did also acknowledge that Hutter immediately shut down his operation after being contacted by trading standards.
The court heard that Hutter benefitted to the tune of £1.2 million from his bootleg disc selling venture but that only £373,589 was still available. That sum will now be forfeited under the Proceeds Of Crime Act. Meanwhile, Hutter was handed a four month prison sentence suspended for two years, and must complete 250 hours of unpaid work within twelve months and will be subject to an electronically monitored curfew between 8pm and 7am for three months.
Welcoming this outcome, Paola Monaldi – Head of the BPI’s Content Protection Unit, which assisted on this investigation – yesterday confirmed that, with the vinyl revival, the sale of counterfeit records has become a bigger issue again. “Vinyl has seen an incredible comeback in the past few years, with around 5.5 million LPs purchased in the UK alone in 2022″, he said. “Sadly, this renaissance has been accompanied by a disturbing rise in bootlegging and sales of unauthorised recordings”.
“This is a serious crime that denies artists the rewards for their creativity, exploits fans, and impacts legitimate retail and the record labels that invest in music – but worse, it can feed into other forms of criminality that can impact us all”, he went on. “Over the last three years the BPI has delisted over 100,000 fake items from marketplace platforms and seized over three million counterfeit units across the UK – which underlines the scale of the problem”.
On this week’s ruling in the Bournemouth court, he added: “On behalf of the BPI and its members, I wish to thank Dorset Trading Standards and all the involved authorities for their valued efforts in closing down this criminal operation. We continue to work closely with online platforms and law enforcement agencies to uncover illicit operations and protect the interests of creators, consumers, and music outlets”.
