Bootleg music man is spared jail term

A Hamilton man caught with bootleg Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Beatles recordings worth around £30,000 was last week ordered to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work.

The discs had been seized by CID officers at Fraser Campbell’s Dickson Street address on April 16, 2014, while they were investigating the possession of indecent images of children.

Fifty-two-year-old Campbell was last month convicted on charges under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Trade Marks Act 1994 following a five-day jury trial.

He had illegally traded in music without sufficient consent of the performers or copyright owners and infringed the copyright of numerous artists including Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

Detective sergeant Suzanne Cairns had told the court that a search of the Dickson Street address was carried out by officers under warrant on April 16, 2014.

Ms Cairns said she saw“numerous amounts” of what appeared to be music CDS in bookcases during the search.

There were multiple CDS which had the appearance of being identical according to the inlays of the CD cases. She was therefore concerned that they may have been illegally copied material. A printer and boxes of empty CD cases were also seized. Officers sought advice from British Phonographic Industry officer and former Strathclyde Police chief inspector Patrick Ferguson.

Mr Ferguson (67) told the court he had been contacted by detective constable Danny Pulfrey following a search of a house in Hamilton in which“a really large quantity”of CDS had been found. The officer took some CDS to Mr Ferguson for him to assess if they had been illegally produced.

Looking through them he could see they were bootlegs. The discs had cover artwork, contained the name of the artist, the location of the concert and its date, along with a track listing on an A4 word document.

The following day Mr Ferguson and colleague Michael Sharpe took possession of all the disks, the printer and photographic paper and took them to BPI offices. Mr Ferguson said there was so much material they needed to put down the back seats of a car and place the material there and within the vehicle’s boot over two car journeys.

Mr Ferguson said it was a“fair sized seizure” adding that it was“not the smallest, but not the biggest either”.

He estimated that“well over 3000 to 4000 CDS were involved.”the value of all the discs, he estimated, were in the region of £30,000.

Most of the items were bootlegs. Mr Bashir asked the witness about the relevance of blank CDS and jewel cases.

These, he said, were required to copy music. In this instance 450 blank CDS was“an excessive” amount. The only reason someone would have that amount was if they were making up discs and putting them into cases, Mr Ferguson added. Campbell had been convicted on the indecent images offence in June 2014 and was later jailed.

At Hamilton Sheriff Court last Friday Campbell, who represented himself, told Sheriff Marie Smart“the vast majority of shows”he had were from bands who“actively encouraged” recording, although The Beatles and Pink Floyd, he said, were“not considered tape-friendly acts”.

A social work report prepared for the court, he said, was“favourable.”he also pointed out following a difficult job search he was“trying to get back with his partner Lorraine to rebuild things”.

Campbell, now of East Kilbride, asked Sheriff Smart to consider a non-custodial sentence. She told him that the matters before the court were illegal, which he accepted. She sentenced him to a community payback order – with the condition he carry out 300 hours’unpaid work. Sheriff Smart pointed out that she was giving him 12 months to complete the work instead of six due to his work patterns.