The Immovable Gatekeepers of Bullshit
Unfortunately, everything has now stopped for legal action, so anything I do in music will literally be therapy to get me through this.
For decades, Discogs.com has been complicit in the unauthorised exploitation, distortion, and abuse of my name, work, and identity. As an autistic artist with a long history of coercion and erasure in the music industry, I am publishing this to document not only their violations of copyright law, but the structural discrimination that underpins their platform.
Discogs bills itself as a user-generated database and marketplace. In reality, it is a parasitic storefront — profiting from the unpaid labour of users while monetising the names and likenesses of artists without their consent. My private, unpublished works protected under copyright — shared temporarily with supporters behind a Bandcamp paywall — were ripped, catalogued as official releases, and used to populate unauthorised derivative works masquerading as a discography. I was neither consulted nor informed. The titles were wrong. The artwork was in progress and is now defunct. The listings included fake “versions” I never published. Some of it was falsely attributed to Greg Hunter, who had no involvement. The entire project was experimental and clearly marked as such. Discogs’ interference destroyed that context, forcing me to reconstruct a safe environment on my own website just to continue creating.
When I objected, they told me I could “join” the site to correct it. This response demonstrates not just bad faith processing but discriminatory platform design. They mock my disability — in direct violation of Article 21 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights — fabricate metadata, attach it to commercial products, and then demand I clean it up for them. I am not a user. I am a target. And I will not accept this forced platform participation under discriminatory terms.
But it gets worse.
Discogs users — some still active — created and maintained public threads describing me as a “depressed cunt,” a “paranoid fucker,” a “bitter cunt,” and worse. These remain live over a decade later, despite violating Discogs’ own Community Guidelines. This is not neutral hosting. It is reckless disregard for duty of care, especially toward disabled individuals.
I am autistic. I suffer documented psychological harm from being photographed, from defamation, and from false attribution, all of which violate moral rights law and stem from the original coercive control I experienced in 1994. Discogs’ actions compound that harm. I’ve spent days writing takedown notices instead of making music.
Discogs claims Safe Harbor under the DMCA. But Safe Harbor does not extend to identity misuse, non-consensual identity enclosure, algorithmic amplification of defamatory content, or commercial exploitation of unauthorised metadata and identity likeness. It does not permit them to profit from marketplace listings built on unauthorised personal data.
Their “artist pages” are not neutral indexes. They are market-facing storefronts advertising their shop. And I want it gone.
If you’re reading this as a fellow artist: this is what they do. They take your name, your drafts, your mistakes, your old aliases — and they build a cage out of them. They profit from that cage. And when you ask for help, they tell you to join the jail crew.
I have now escalated to their hosting provider (Amazon/AWS), the U.S. Department of Justice, and European data regulators. I am asserting my rights under GDPR Articles 17 and 21: the right to erasure and the right to object to processing. This is not a “collaborative encyclopedia”. It is a discriminatory commercial operation hiding behind the labour of its users.
This is an extract from Discogs’ own boilerplate response:
“Discogs is a collaborative encyclopedia of music, keeping a historical record of the credits appearing on every music medium published. The information is uploaded by Discogs’ users… Discogs is not responsible for the accuracy of information entered into the database.”
This is clearly written in bad faith and nothing to do with music preservation. It is algorithmic exploitation. Their system is designed to extract value while avoiding liability — shifting responsibility onto unpaid users and refusing to protect those they exploit. This is structural ableism. This is defamation. This is commercial abuse.
This is Music Industry Parasites: Entry 1.
The others are coming.
