I didn’t anticipate writing a post like this - and wouldn’t have chosen to on New Year’s Day too. But needs must.
A new Community topic was started today. I am not giving details or names as I do not want any individuals to have recriminations or comments made against them. I have exchanged messages with the person who created the topic and believe they acted in good faith and were unaware of the copyright breach involved. The topic has been deleted now.
The topic contained JustinGuitar copyright TABs - a resource that is specific to the Blues Immersion course and which should only be available to people who paid the subscription to enrol on the BLIM course.
Justin makes 90-95% (a guesstimate figure) of his teaching materials freely available to all. He has very few subscription courses and / or pay-for products.
The most recent subscription course is Blues Immersion (BLIM). This is his premium pay-for course. It does cost a lot of money to enrol, but Justin has put hundreds and hundreds of hours into making the course. Plus he has to meet the wages of his team who have worked and continue to work on each and every aspect of the BLIM course - from webpage design to graphic design to accounts to student support and much more.
Justin explicitly and specifically asked that all BLIM students respect his wishes and refrain from sharing materials with anybody else. This is the standard approach and wish for the resources of all his subscription courses equally.
Whoever shared that BLIM content must have paid for the Blues Immersion subscription. Unfortunately they were either unaware of Justin’s request or ignored it.
Those resources cannot now be unshared with the non-BLIM student(s) who has / have received them. But we must ask - we must insist - that no more sharing of copyright material take place.
This request is obviously impossible to monitor or enforce behind the scenes. We rely on and ask for the cooperation and goodwill of all. The most we can do to protect Justin’s rightful copyright is delete anything that is shared in the Community or on any other JustinGuitar related online platform. And we ask that people help us to do so by flagging and reporting any such issues to the team also.
Regards - on behalf of the JustinGuitar team - Richard
