Guitarist Eric Clapton has successfully sued a woman in Germany who listed a bootleg CD on eBay for roughly $US11 ($15 in Aussie dollars). The woman didn’t even sell the CD, but the listing will set her back at least $US2,000 ($2,781) in court costs for copyright infringement, according to the German news outlet DW.
Clapton, a noted racist and anti-vaxxer, sued the 55-year-old woman from Ratingen, a small German town about an hour north of Cologne, claiming the recording infringed on his copyright. The widow said her late husband purchased the CD at a department store in 1987, but the court didn’t care whether it was legally purchased, nor whether she knew it was a copyright violation to sell the CD.
The woman reportedly tried to sell the CD for just €9.95, or roughly $15, according to DW. She’s now being forced to pay legal fees for both herself and Clapton, which total about €3,400 or $4,867. The woman’s CD was not seized but if she tries to sell the music again she faces up to six months in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
The British-born guitarist is infamous for being a prick, which makes aggressive legal action like this fairly unsurprising. Clapton went on a racist rant on stage in England in 1976 about how he wanted to “Keep Britain white,” among other things.
“Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs,” Clapton said at the concert.
“Wogs” is a British slang term for virtually anyone who isn’t considered white. But that wasn’t all. Clapton promoted Enoch Powell, a far-right politician, who said that immigration caused white people to be “strangers in their own country.”
“Britain is becoming overcrowded, and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking . . . don’t belong here, we don’t want them here,” Clapton continued.
“This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country,” Clapton said.
Clapton eventually apologised for the rant decades later in 2017, but he also spent the past year whining about vaccine mandates and has refused to play concerts unless the unvaccinated are allowed to attend. Clapton, a multi-millionaire, even wrote a song with Van Morrison in late 2020 about how the men were being oppressed because of covid-19 lockdowns.
The song, titled Stand and Deliver, even likens public health measures to slavery with inane lyrics like:
Stand and deliver
You let them put the fear on you
Stand and deliver
But not a word you heard was true
But if there’s nothing you can say
There may be nothing you can do
Do you want to be a free man
Or do you want to be a slave?
The UK reported 87,565 new covid-19 cases on Thursday, the highest increase of the entire pandemic. And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. But at least Clapton has kept some shitty bootleg CD off of eBay. Good work, slow hand. The world is a much better place now and we can all rest easy.