Overzealous Enforcement Means Even Legit Music Blogs Deleted 240
AnotherUsername writes "Recently, many [Google-hosted] music blogs were deleted for hosting mp3s of songs by various artists. The problem? The music blogs in question had been given permission to host the songs, and often, the older links to mp3s were often broken intentionally by the bloggers in order to save bandwidth. From the article: 'You're reading this right: Five years of Lipold's labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn't even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.'"
Not really a surprise (Score:1, Interesting)
The business model of the record labels is borken. They don't want to change and are swinging violently. Everyone must suffer. I know I recently got a new version of OpenOffice.org off of a p2p site, and I got a warning from my ISP that downloading (anything) off the internet is illegal. They didn't want to hear about the GNU GPL. I responded and they threatened to cut me off and were considering forwarding logs to their lawyer. Nice. Legal content isn't allowed either. I'm disgusted.
Re:New tagline/category needed (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're going to host a blog for five years, why not upgrade to hosting it yourself? Even technically challenged simpletons can install wordpress on most large webhosts these days (mine was installed with the single press of a fat, green "install wordpress now" button). Surely you can handle that if you're capable of getting permission to host, and then upload and link to the MP3. Blog hosting through a 3rd party once you're old enough to afford it, particularly if you've been writing in it for years (with no backup??? wtf?) is just asking for trouble.
Achilles Heel. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This will keep happening... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Class Action Defamation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also no lawyer, but maybe tortious interference with a contract. Thing is, it gets to court, the judge sees the IFPI as Authority and the defendants as a bunch of music-stealing whiners, throws out the complaints, and charges the defendants with the IFPIs legal fees. At least, that's what happened when people objected to DirecTV suing people who had bought certain legal pieces of hardware which could be used for decoding DirecTV among other purposes.
One hand not knowing what the other is doing. (Score:4, Interesting)
If music labels can get infinity billion dollars for copyright violation then surely the blogger should get similar compensation for having his website destroyed by careless lawyers. Everything is about having the right checks and balances and right now things are biased towards the companies. I definitely think it would be within reason for a blogger to expect a few hundred thousand lawyer or responsible party for having his site (and possibly only means of income) wiped out in an instant due to incompetence.
Or if they insist on property (Score:1, Interesting)
Or if they insist on property, why not property taxes like real property (RP) has? Why not abandonment laws and squatters rights like you have with RP? How about death duties and sales taxes and upkeep and zoning taxes (for commercial property: without which you don't get a police force patrolling the town centre where your shop is while you're in the suburbs where your home is)?
Why not?
If it's like your home, then why not get taxed like it (remembering that you can't undertake commercial work in your home if it's zoned residential only and you make more than so much a year).
Send a DMCA counterclaim (Score:3, Interesting)
Google doesn't delete stuff as a result of a DMCA notice. They block access to it. Send a DMCA counterclaim, and Google will put your blog back up in a week or less.
Re:This is exactly the spirit of the law (Score:4, Interesting)
It's completely ass backwards and results in a total thwarting of creativity.
I compiled some research recently to assess creative work ethic amongst musical artists from the 60s to the present. It had nothing to do with copyright originally, but the data can easily be arranged to show some interesting things about what effect increasing copyright lengths may or may not have on creativity.
Using album lengths of studio albums for these artists I came up with a figure I called CPY, which just stands for content per year, which is measured in minutes. For this post, I took my data and divided the artists between 2 groups: Pre 1978 & Post 1978. Jan 1, 1978 is when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect BTW.
The Pre 1978 group had an average CPY of 42.55 minutes
The Post 1978 group had an average CPY of 30.6 minutes
This is about a 28.1% reduction in creative output after the copyright act took effect. Now, correlation does not imply causation, so it can't necessarily be said that this dramatic drop was caused by the copyright act. However, it can certainly be said that the copyright act definitely is NOT causing an increase in creative output. There is no evidence of such in the data whatsoever. In fact, creative output has held close to the margin of error from the 80s onward in my data.
Non US based hosting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anonymous Robot? (Score:4, Interesting)
No. The only thing you are required to attest to under the penalty of perjury in a DMCA notice is that you own or represent the owner of the copyright of the work you are claiming was infringed. All the rest can be lies (including the part where you say it's true to the best of your knowledge). If you own just one copyright, you can, without committing perjury, send a DMCA notice to anyone's ISP demanding they take something down as an infringement of your copyright. Even if you know damn well it's false.
Re:New tagline/category needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly thats not true either. I've had an entire account suspended and all my data deleted because there was a file on the server named mission_impossible.txt
It was a document containing plans for summer trip to alaska...
Re:This is exactly the spirit of the law (Score:3, Interesting)
No, this is a way of saying the IFPI controls music distribution, and not the artists or recording labels that own the music. The rights holders aren't involved or consulted.
There is no legit enforcement... (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to see reverse RIAA on this (Score:2, Interesting)
Have an artist file suit against whoever filed the DCMA paperwork.
The artist should be entitled to the "lost sales" of the artists work on the same level of damages the RIAA claim.
Re:This will keep happening... (Score:1, Interesting)
Having processed hundreds of DMCA complaints for an online service provider, I'd estimate that 5% or less of those copyright complaints would actually hold up in court. I have yet, however, to hear of a single person who has filed a blatantly invalid notice of copyright infringement being brought to court over it, despite having to swear under penalty of perjury that their complaint is valid. There's absolutely no expectation for companies to ever be brought to court over sending invalid copyright infringement notices. There's also 1% or less rate of people filing counter-notifications despite being informed of their right to do so :-/
Re:This will keep happening... (Score:3, Interesting)
and the air of someone who might actually pay for the reasonably difficult to perform professional services you receive
Which is all well and good if you have the money or influence to get a good lawyer on your case for you.
I've heard reading comprehension helps. Just sayin'.
Re:Anonymous Robot? (Score:1, Interesting)
Another fun but unexpected detail of the DMCA, it states that if a take down address is clearly posted, all take down requests MUST be sent to that address to be considered legal documents.
The ISP I used to run had an image at the bottom of the main website, simply saying "DMCA Take down requests must be sent to dmca@..."
This address forwarded directly to our legal department. Our staff at the ISP never even saw them, or for that matter hardly ever heard about them (Only when our legal firm contacted us to instruct us to do something)
For all the complaints sent to our staff or support email, those are not legal take down notices, so we just deleted them.
We were even involved in a lawsuit where Sony attempted to sue us for infringement, after giving up our safe harbor provisions by not responding to their take down.
Our lawyer told the judge he never received any such take down request, and of course Sony couldn't prove they sent a proper take down request, as all the had proof of was emailing it to our support@ email.
The judge threw the entire case out, making Sony start over.