kidnepro.com

So I’m sitting at home, minding my own business when I get an e-mail from someone (I can’t say exactly who) that goes on to tell me that there is an auction happening on ebay that has some of my sounds for sale. The e-mail went on to ask me if I knew anything about it.

Great way to mess up your day!

First I would like to publicly thank the person who sent me the e-mail. My best guess is that he’s either a customer of ours or just someone who understands what this kind of stuff does to small businesses like Kid Nepro. Maybe both! Well there certainly is a lot to be said about all that, but first let me continue with my little story.

My anonymous friend was good enough to send me the link to the auction and by putting a few simple facts together, I was easily able to figure out who was doing this. It was actually someone who had purchased our sounds from us, then copied them to USB sticks and auctioning the sticks off on ebay! I could think of a few “choice” words that I could use to describe this type of person, but I’ll leave that up to you to fill in the blanks.

Anyway, I had his phone number so I called him up. I think I was the last person he expected to be one the phone when he answered and I told him who I was, you could tell he was pretty shocked. When I told him I had seen the auction and asked him about it, he blurted out “my cousin put that up there”. Yeah right. Well I knew that was a bunch of crap as soon as it came out of his mouth so I said “I don’t care if it was you or your “cousin”, if you don’t immediately remove it then the next call your going to get is from my lawyers”. After a couple more brief exchanges, I hung up the phone. Not the type of person you want to get into a long conversation with.

About ten minutes later the auction had ended.

OK great. Score one for the good guys. However, this is certainly not the beginning nor the end of the story. Having been selling sounds since the early 80′s this is not the first time this has happened. Every once in awhile I spot one of these thieves and usually with the help of ebay, I’m able to stop it. However, it’s hard to spot every single incident which is why I’m grateful to people like my anonymous friend – which helps me monitor what’s happening on ebay as well as other places where this type of thing goes on. This is why I’ve decided to make a public statement about it and ask for your help.

I figure that “the more eyes the better” so if you happen to see any of this illegal activity happening on ebay or anywhere else please take a minute to send an e-mail about it. And I’m not just talking about Kid Nepro sounds. There are many other small sound companies out there who the same thing is happening to – so if you see anyone else’s sounds being stolen then I urge you to report it to whomever is the rightful owner. In addition, I’ll issue you some free credit on any of the sounds in our catalog. I’ll be happy to give away some free sounds under those circumstances!

Let me just clarify what I mean about people stealing our sounds, so you know what to look out for.

I don’t mind if say, someone is selling a Roland Juno 106 on ebay and they are advertising that the Juno comes with our Juno 106 sound collection. As far as I’m concerned, that’s OK. I’m even OK, if someone has “the original” cassette tape, no longer has the Juno and just wants to resell the tape as “A One Time Auction”. However, if someone is making copies off the original tape, CD, USB stick, ZIP Disk, or whatever format they purchased our sounds in – then reselling the copies, then that’s “NOT OK”. Some situations fall in a grey area between the two so if your not sure just let us know and we will check it out.

As you can imagine, this type of stuff really hurts our bottom line. It’s also very frustrating to spend over two years programming a new set of sounds and then have someone come along, steal them and sell them as their own. I’m sure if you own any type of copyright you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is one of many reasons why there are so few companies doing what we do here at Kid Nepro.

Let me just thank you in advance for your help. Please send any copyright violations to: support (at) kidnepro.com

Copyright 1984-2010 – Kid Nepro Productions – All Rights Reserved. All Kid Nepro software is to be used in music production only. Kid Nepro reserves all other rights not expressly granted to you. Kid Nepro retains full ownership of the sounds and samples contained in our catalogue. Unauthorized copying, duplicating, selling, trading or distribution of this product is expressly forbidden. Downloading our software means you accept these terms.

As many of you know, free mail services like Yahoo, Hotmail and Google G-Mail can sometimes be unreliable when it comes to getting all your mail. I guess that’s to be expected since they are free services. However, as of late Yahoo mail has been getting much worse. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that I felt the need to post something about it on our blog to make our customers aware of the problem.

Over the past few weeks, a large number of customers who have placed an order with us and have used a Yahoo e-mail address have not received our e-mails. Our mail usually tells you the status of your order along with any download info that you would need when placing an e-mail delivery order.

The e-mails have not bounced back, which sometimes happens when the receiving server thinks that the e-mail sent is spam. The mail seems to go through fine, but the customers never receive it. Many of them send us an e-mail to ask what’s happening with their order and when we reply to let them know what’s going on they never receive our reply either.

We are not sure exactly why this is happening, but since it’s only occurs with Yahoo accounts then it would seem that the problem has something to do with the Yahoo mail servers. The problem is definitely not on our end since we have tried sending mail from several different servers and the problem remains. 

At this point we ask that if any of you are interested in any of our sounds and have any questions, or if you place an order with us, please try not to use a Yahoo e-mail address. We understand that sometimes this may be impossible for some people who “only” have a Yahoo address, but in most cases if you have another e-mail address given to you by your ISP then please use that instead. You need not worry that we will give that address to anyone and it will wind up on a spam list. We hate spam as much as you do and never give out your info to anyone.

We usually process orders and answer all e-mail within hours so if you order anything or e-mail us and do not get a response within 24 hours then you can assume that we either did not receive your order or e-mail or we did respond and you did not receive our e-mail. In that case please try another e-mail address to reach us or give us a call. 

Thanks for your understanding and support.