Some are calling it Musicblogocide 2010, according to The Guardian, whose in-depth article on the topic is titled: Google shuts down music blogs without warning.
Nobody likes to hear that music bloggers who tend to write with infectious enthusiasm benefiting both fans and copyright holders lost years of work when they may not so much have broken the law as grazed up against it. It seems especially unfortunate if they enabled an avoidable outcome by ignoring or being ignorant of the stakes of not taking the proper corrective actions when formally warned they were in violation of dreaded (and widely ignored) terms of service. (Deleted blogs include Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, Its a Rap, Ryans Smashing Life, and Living Ears.)
But the biggest problem here is that the laws and organizations affecting music copyright dont make any sense when applied to music blogs. Labels often give bloggers permission to post a given track, but that doesnt stop their representatives from issuing takedown notices for those same songs, as Bill Lipold of I Rock Cleveland noted in Google forums on Wednesday and Thursday.
Lipold told Wired.com that Mute Records gave him permission to post the XX Teens song Darlin on his blog, for instance. Like most music bloggers, he intentionally breaks older links to songs to avoid running up expensive bandwidth bills by deleting MP3s older than two months. That didnt stop the apparently automated enforcement system of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) from alerting Google to this supposed case of copyright infringement.
You're reading this right:
Five years of Lipolds labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasnt even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.
If at any point during the process a human being actually clicked on the link and looked for the infringing content, then they would have realized it wasnt there, said Lipold. Unfortunately, the bot the IFPI uses to flag piracy isnt that smart This bot makes a report for security at the IFPI and they forward the whole list on to Google. Google seems to accept their list as is, no questions asked.
The thing is, Google doesnt have a choice.
This is all that remains of poptartssucktoasted.blogspot.com, which had been posting regularly since 2005.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether music blogs are good or bad for the music industry, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forces Google to take these actions otherwise, it would lose the protection of the DMCAs safe harbor clause and could be found liable for any copyright infringement on its blogging networks.
In a statement issued to Wired.com, Google maintains that it warned the affected music bloggers after each of the complaints that led to deletion (with one exception, as noted on its blog post on the topic Thursday night, in which Google says it restored the unwarned bloggers account). Some music bloggers have claimed that they couldnt file those notices because they didnt know which songs the labels were complaining about, but Google says every notice e-mailed to bloggers included the URLs of the posts in question, and the notices weve seen do include the URLs.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
