The fight between music bloggers and record labels reached its most visible point when a guy who uploaded a leaked copy of the latest Guns N' Roses album to his site got arrested by the FBI. But many music bloggers are now fighting a much more invisible menace, with posts they've written suddenly disappearing from their sites (via Tyler Hellard) hosted on Google's Blogger platform. An RIAA source says that the group sends Google a list of URLs it doesn't like, and Google "then deals with the problem." Google says that it notifies bloggers after their posts have been taken down, in accordance with the DMCA. But it should hardly be surprising that many of those affected say they've gotten no such notice, nor that the offending material was either legally posted and/or supplied by the labels themselves. So two possibilities emerge: the RIAA is filing false DMCA takedowns, and/or its legal right hand doesn't know what the labels' promotional left hands are doing. The upshot of this is that lots of music bloggers say the threat of landing in legal trouble -- particularly for posting music supplied to them by labels and artists -- is having a chilling effect on them, and could eventually stop them from blogging, shutting down a valuable promotional tool for the labels. That sort of shooting itself in the foot, though, seems to be the record industry's specialty.
From 'Techdirt'
From 'Techdirt'
No comments:
Post a Comment