For context for those who don’t know Slipknot, they’re an extremely famous heavy metal band with an incredible legacy. However, in this post, I’ll be talking about their very early years. In their first album, titled Slipknot, they ran into a very interesting IP dispute. There were two songs on the album, titled “Purity” and “Frail Limb Nursery”, that attracted particular attention because they were removed from every later version of the album. This was because of the “plot” behind the two songs.
The songs were based on the story of Purity Knight, a young woman who was kidnapped and buried alive in the early 2000s. The story was followed by internet users on the website crimescene.com, where updates on the investigation were posted and users were encouraged to follow along. This was a fictional story by the website’s creator and part of an online alternate-reality game. Particularly, Purity was directly about the story of Purity Knight, and Frail Limb Nursery actually used sampled audio uploaded to the website. The tracks were removed because of copyright allegations from crimescene.com, almost certainly because the story of Purity was a literary work they believed they had copyright to. The suit never went to court, so we never found out what actually happened or what was alleged. However, years later, Purity would reappear in a new release of the album. We would never find out why or how the dispute was resolved, but as I did the readings for class last week, I began to wonder if our assigned reading gave the answer for why crimescene.com eventually let Slipknot rerelease Purity but not Frail Limb Nursery.
In Winkler v Hendley, the court found that representing something as a fact, even when that thing is in fact not true, can prevent the author from benefitting from copyright protection. According to the Wikipedia for the Purity song, the crimescene.com website originally included no disclaimer that the stories on the website were fictional (although it now does). I hate to use Wikipedia, but unfortunately the Internet Archive does not have an old enough backup of the site to show the original page without a disclaimer. However, it should also be noted that an article discussing the very first attempt at an online crime investigation by crimescene.com’s creator does mention that it was not noted anywhere that the investigation was fake. There is, however, no way to know for sure whether this persisted through to the Purity case.
The United States, like Canada, has rules stating that facts cannot be copyrighted. In Feist v Rural, it was found that information alone cannot be protected by copyright, and some amount of original creativity is required. Thus if we use a similar argument to what came up in Winkley, we can say it is fairly likely that while crimescene.com probably had copyright over the specific way they wrote the story of Purity Knight, they would be unable to copyright the story itself if it was presented as genuine fact. I think that this is a very compelling argument for how Purity was able to be rereleased, especially when we consider that Frail Limb Nursery was not. The distinction is that Frail Limb Nursery used actual audio samples from crimescene.com, which would likely be copyrighted even though they were supposedly “real”, because there would be copyright to the recording of the audio. For me, this dismisses the idea that Purity was rereleased because crimescene.com decided to play nice and let Slipknot use the song, because, if so, why not let them use Frail Limb Nursery? This tells me that the resolution was most likely based on a legal argument.
I have been unable to find an American case regarding copyright over fictional information passed off as fact. However, I nonetheless believe that the US’s similar rules about copyrighting facts, combined with how it seems that the Purity case was genuinely passed off as a true story originally, lend themselves to a convincing explanation of how Purity was rereleased and Frail Limb Nursery was not.
Sources used:
Copyright & Social Media
Communications Law