In 2021, W. Joseph Johnson self-released the album 3 on Bandcamp as Heavy Comforter, on the tiny Bloomington label Let's Pretend Records. In August 2023, someone took those recordings, slowed each one down by its own ratio, renamed every song, and put them out under a made-up name: Zebulon Sheridan. The album was called White. It carried a fabricated composer credit, Laura Bennett. It went out through Repost Network, SoundCloud's $30-a-year distribution arm, with nothing but a checkbox swearing ownership. A second fake identity, Darnell Barrie, did the same.

The person who broke it open was a fan. A playlist shuffled up "At Night" by Zebulon Sheridan and it stopped him cold. He built an imaginary man out of a low voice and lyrics he could not crack, spent a week decoding it with his family, and recorded his own cover of "At Night" as a tribute and a trap. The trap worked. When he re-uploaded the song, YouTube flagged it. The claim did not name Zebulon Sheridan. It named Heavy Comforter, for a song called "Can't Go Home At Night." He followed it to the real thing.

Hear the fan's cover: Can't Go Home At Night, the cover. Then the original, by Heavy Comforter, on heavycomforter.bandcamp.com.

This is the episode where the story turns. Billy has signed a 512(h) subpoena, prepared by Zebulon, to compel SoundCloud to name the person behind the fraud. SoundCloud has confirmed the account is already terminated and the recordings are scrubbed from every platform they reached. The name behind it is the last door, and this subpoena is the key.

A note on what you are hearing. SoundCloud's Vice President of Communications, Sade Ayodele, did not sit for an interview. An actor reads a dramatization of the substance of her written replies to Beaumont and Sheridan. The fan and the fraudster are likewise dramatized from the written record. No voice you hear in this episode is a verbatim quote. The emails those dramatizations were built from are reproduced in full at the bottom of these notes.

Resources and the full documentary record are at beaumontandsheridan.com.

The written record: SoundCloud's replies

These are the emails the dramatized passages are drawn from, reproduced verbatim.

June 26, 2026

Hi John,

Thanks for reaching out and for sharing your questions.

SoundCloud takes copyright infringement, fraud, and abuse of our platform seriously. Users who distribute content through SoundCloud for Artists are required to represent that they have the necessary rights to the content they upload. We investigate valid reports of infringement and take appropriate action when violations of our Terms of Service are identified, which may include removing content, disabling accounts, or other enforcement measures.

We continue to strengthen our trust and safety capabilities and work with industry partners to improve rights management and reduce abuse across the digital music ecosystem. As with any large user-generated platform, our approach continues to adapt alongside increasingly sophisticated forms of fraud.

We can't comment on specific user accounts, releases, or matters that may be subject to legal review, nor can we disclose details of our fraud detection methods, enforcement practices, or internal investigations. Because many of your questions relate to confidential processes, account information, or potential legal matters, we're not able to provide additional comment beyond the above.

Thanks,
Sade

August 11, 2026

Hi John,

Thank you for reaching out. We reviewed this matter with the relevant teams.

Our records confirm that the account was terminated over two years ago. The referenced recordings were removed from SoundCloud and removal notices were sent to platforms to which we delivered them.

Regarding your request for the former account holder's registered email address, name, payment information and IP addresses, SoundCloud cannot voluntarily disclose another user's private account information. Any request for such records must be made through an appropriate legal process (such as the section 512(h) subpoena identified in your email), and any such process will be reviewed in accordance with applicable law, our privacy obligations and SoundCloud's Terms of Use.

We also cannot transfer a terminated user account or its associated assets to a third party. However, if Mr. Johnson would like SoundCloud to evaluate his ownership claim, please have him (or his authorised legal representative) send the relevant track list, ISRCs, original release information and supporting rights documentation, and we will direct those materials to the appropriate team for review. Information about SoundCloud's dispute and appeals process is also available here help.soundcloud.com/hc/en-us/sections/115001112928-Disputes-Appeals.

SoundCloud takes artist rights, copyright enforcement and platform integrity seriously. We appreciate you bringing the matter to our attention and hope this information provides helpful clarity.

Best,
Sade

Featuring Heavy Comforter music throughout. HeavyComforter.com, the real thing.

John Shiloh Beaumont II introduces Jack Calder and Diane Collins — hypothetical, composite characters built from real cases, real patent filings, real DMCA records, and the lived experience of practicing attorneys. Their names are borrowed, with no apologies to the cougar. Their problems are not fictional.

Jack's copyright problem. A friend sends him "Have I been trained?" — and he wakes up to 47 of his songs sitting in LAION-5B, a dataset of 5.85 billion image-text pairs that also links to millions of audio tracks. LAION didn't license anything. They scraped the open web. The DMCA removes the data from the public dataset, but it cannot untrain the model — the meal has already been eaten, the pattern is already in the bones, and the bones belong to a corporation.

Jack's patent problem. His fourth-generation guitar pickup is rejected for prior art — filed eight months earlier by Aurelia, an AI shell company that pre-invents 5,000+ applications a year, locks up future ideas, and demands tolls. A challenge costs $400,000 minimum. Examiners average less than 20 hours per application. And AI-made discoveries are automatically in the public domain — so the more we lean on the machine, the less there is left for anyone to own. "IP has cancer. The diagnosis is terminal."

Diane's war. A solo practitioner of 18 years, she subscribed to an AI document review service that flagged a two-year non-compete as boilerplate. "94% accurate" means six mistakes per hundred contracts — six expensive, career-ending mistakes. The big firms grab the headlines. The real damage lands on the solo practitioners who can't negotiate with the AI vendors.

The fix is not in the courtroom. It's in legislation — which means you need to talk to your legislator. The machine has no judge. But you do.

The legislator contact tool is live at beaumontandsheridan.com/act — enter your zip code, get your senator and representative and pre-written letters about AI regulation, training data, transparency, opt-out rights, content labeling, and data center accountability. One click opens your email client pre-filled. This is not a petition — it goes direct to their inbox. And inbox math is real: fifty emails and their legislative director notices. Five hundred and they schedule a meeting. Five thousand and they change the vote.

Learn more:

• Resource Library — guides on AI training data, having your work in a dataset, DMCA takedowns, and documenting infringement
• Is Your Work in a Dataset? — how to check whether your creative work was fed into the machines
• Contact Your Legislators — the live tool from this episode

Featuring Heavy Comforter music throughout. HeavyComforter.com — the real thing.

John Shiloh Beaumont II is joined by technology consultant Allison Andrews — returning from Episode 2 — to walk through the reality behind the industry's favorite euphemism. Four massive music datasets. Twelve million tracks. A million-million copies made in GPU memory. And the asymmetry at the heart of it: Zebulon Sheridan's stolen songs were scrubbed from every platform, but AI models trained on copyrighted music are still live, still generating, still profitable.

References from this episode:

• Is Your Work in a Training Dataset? — Search tools for images, books, music, and web content
• Documenting Copyright Infringement — Evidence preservation checklist
• Have I Been Trained — Search LAION-5B for your images
• The Atlantic AI Watchdog — Search music datasets by artist name
• Glaze & Nightshade — Data poisoning tools from UChicago

Next episode: The Law — DMCA takedowns, class actions, and what the platforms actually have to do.

Featuring Heavy Comforter music throughout. HeavyComforter.com — the real thing.

With JS going full Paul Harvey on the 4,854-word Finnegans Wake recitation — what the echo remembered, what it forgot, and why the forgetting might be the point. One question that won't resolve: is an echo art?

Featuring Heavy Comforter music throughout. HeavyComforter.com — the real thing.

For the full resource — data center map, community opposition tracker, references — visit beaumontandsheridan.com/resources/data-centers-the-internets-body. Featuring Heavy Comforter music throughout. HeavyComforter.com — the real thing.

John Shiloh lays out the Zebulon origin story: a fraudulent imposter singing Heavy Comforter songs at slowed-down speed, uploaded to every major streaming service by an unknown content farmer. The record did well. Real money was made. No legal action was taken — a weird little case nobody's heard of, but John Shiloh's law office is on it.

Zebulon punctuates with a lyrical meltdown — \"I am here by the grace of nothing / I'm depressed, but I guess that's something\" — before John Shiloh restores order. The legal disclaimer: you can't take legal advice from a podcast, no matter how good the lawyer sounds. Talk to a real one.

Featuring Heavy Comforter music throughout. HeavyComforter.com — the real thing. Next episode: data centers — the internet's body. Resource page at beaumontandsheridan.com.

Ad: Good Eats Cafe, East 23rd Street, Chattanooga TN. 24 hours. Meat and three. Red chairs. Bob Seger on the jukebox. No record in any training corpus — lost to time.