Don't Play Our Record, You Canadian Bastards

I'm almost thinking that this "controversy" is half-drummed up to get attention for a famous musician's side-project... but, Cliff writes in to let us know about a radio station in Victoria, British Columbia (that's Canada for those who failed geography) that was playing a song that had been released in the UK and was available for sale on the internet. They apparently got the song and have been playing it on the radio. Part of the confusion is that it's not at all clear how they got the song. In the submission, Cliff claims the radio station bought the song. In the video on the site, the radio station claims they downloaded it from the band's site -- but as of right now, the band only offers a streaming version, not a download one. Either way, the record label putting out the album has demanded the radio station stop playing the song, and according to the submission, today sued the station -- even though they had decided to stop playing the song (along with other songs by the musician). It would be nice if there were a few more details to back up this story. However, it does highlight another issue that record labels seem to be having trouble understanding: the internet makes your business global pretty quickly. Trying to set up different release schedules for different geographies doesn't work. Plenty of radio stations have been known to play songs released in other countries -- so this could just be a record label overreacting, a quirk of Canadian copyright law... or a weird publicity stunt. Either way, we'd like to see some more info on what's really happening here.