5 ms·

Music Labels Ask Blogs to Post Songs then ask Google to Erase Blogs for Posting

47 points by bensummers 17y ago

marilyn 17y ago
Being a music blogger, I feel conflicted about this article. The issue of DMCA take down notices and Google's blind obliging has been a problem for a long time. It has affected many bloggers that do play by the rules. It sucks that Google gets to be the judge and jury in these cases, because really, I doubt anyone at Google cares about who is in the right; they just want to avoid hassles over Copyright. These and all music bloggers know what they are getting into when they set up their blogs. It is no secret that music piracy is a major issue for the RIAA, and posting mp3s publicly definitely puts you at risk. While there are many bloggers that work hard to promote the music they love, and provide links for users to buy the music legitimately, there are many others that just want to attract traffic by giving away free shit. All of the music bloggers are often put in the same pile either way. The music bloggers who were affected by these take downs may be playing the poor me game, but did have the power to prevent what happened by self-hosting their blogs, enabling them to truly own and protect their content. I hope this current round of of publicity encourages more bloggers of all types to take ownership over the content they labour over.
- awa 17y ago
  There's nothing like truly owning your content, the content providers are dependent on Google to index and rank their site, hosting services to keep their site up and domain registrars for domain services. DMCA notices can yank any one of the above services making the content nearly non-reachable.
- hhjj 17y ago
  "It sucks that Google gets to be the judge and jury in these cases..." It isn't since there are DMCA coutnernotices.
  - marilyn 17y ago
    From the article: "the notices that Google relied on to delete the blogs were woefully incomplete. Google should not have acted until it had proper notices from rights holders, including the name of the actual work allegedly infringed. Since many of the notices did not even include this information, there was no way for the bloggers to file a DMCA counternotice"
awa 17y ago
Wow! So Google simply deleted the blogs without any kind of investigation. It seems irockcleveland had had received many such notices in the past wrongly, they should have checked with the blog owner if the current one was of similar nature . Case in point: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=4ba979f2d9e7b6d9&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=4ba...
artagnon 17y ago
What the world really needs is a very smart licensing/ distribution mechanism for digital music.
- pyre 17y ago
  The kind that guarantees that every piece of audio that's ever created has to have licensing information attached to it and some sort of built-in DRM to enforce it? What about formats like flac, ogg, mp3, etc? Do they just become illegal in favor of the 'better' format?
  - artagnon 17y ago
    I certainly don't mean DRM. I'm asking for clarity of license, not some daft enforcement "solution" that prevents users from listening to their own music. And no, I'm not asking for a universal format for all music.
extension 17y ago
apparently, DMCA operate on their own set of odd rules, as they even requested that the BLK JKS official blog remove the song Busted by beurocracy for stealing your own music.. hard to think of anything more revolting to an artist.
- _delirium 17y ago
  It's unfortunately what happens when you sign away the rights to it. Happens to authors, too: you can be taken to court by your publisher if you post a PDF free online after selling the publisher the rights to the book.
  - derefr 17y ago
    What if you post it before? What happens when you Creative-Commons a book, and then try to sell it?
    - iron_ball 17y ago
      http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point Wise publishers just won't pick you up if they can't get exclusive rights.
loso 17y ago
This is not the only time that the music business has played this game, more specifically the RIAA. From 1997-2004 I worked a lot in the world of Hip Hop on a regional scale. I did security for clubs and artist and I was a DJ. Before file sharing exploded, the mixtape was the way that people would get exposed to underground hip hop artist, the most popular being 50 Cent but also many others. So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape. This is coming from both the A&R's that worked directly for the labels and third parties whose whole job was to find popular mixtape DJ's and give them music. They were hired by record companies as well. So anyway, after you released a mixtape, you would give it to a store at a consignment price. In other words, you would give them a box of CD's and they would sell them a set price depending on how popular you were. Then you come back and split the money, of course bigger DJ's would work out a different deal. So everyone in the industry is aware of this fact and they play along with the so called "street" rules. But the RIAA would come down and bust these stores for selling bootlegs. These are items that would be cosigned by record labels with artist even hosting the tapes but they would still bust the shops anyway. Legally, there was no paperwork so in the eyes of the law they were bootlegged and if it was the police that came down hard, I would have less of a problem. But it would be the RIAA, basically the record companies would backdoor the DJ's and the mom and pop stores. This is why I am glad that the music business has taken such a big hit. The people are crooks and as far as I am concerned, they is what they deserve.
- anamax 17y ago
  > So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape. After the first time, why didn't folks wise up and say "not without a contract allowing us to create and sell compilations"? They'd probably ask for royalties and then you'd insist on the standard breakage allowance against said royalties plus the other standard terms that they demand from content producers.
lutorm 17y ago
Regardless of the legitimacy of these claims, it makes me very weary of putting any content on third-party sites at least unless they offer a reliable way to sync it. I don't understand people who put the results of their hard work (blogs, photos, code) on some online service without thinking about backups. (I have my code hosted on Google code, but if I couldn't svnsync the repository to my local machine I don't think I would.)

47 points by bensummers 17y ago

Being a music blogger, I feel conflicted about this article. The issue of DMCA take down notices and Google's blind obliging has been a problem for a long time. It has affected many bloggers that do play by the rules. It sucks that Google gets to be the judge and jury in these cases, because really, I doubt anyone at Google cares about who is in the right; they just want to avoid hassles over Copyright. These and all music bloggers know what they are getting into when they set up their blogs. It is no secret that music piracy is a major issue for the RIAA, and posting mp3s publicly definitely puts you at risk. While there are many bloggers that work hard to promote the music they love, and provide links for users to buy the music legitimately, there are many others that just want to attract traffic by giving away free shit. All of the music bloggers are often put in the same pile either way. The music bloggers who were affected by these take downs may be playing the poor me game, but did have the power to prevent what happened by self-hosting their blogs, enabling them to truly own and protect their content. I hope this current round of of publicity encourages more bloggers of all types to take ownership over the content they labour over.

awa 17y ago
There's nothing like truly owning your content, the content providers are dependent on Google to index and rank their site, hosting services to keep their site up and domain registrars for domain services. DMCA notices can yank any one of the above services making the content nearly non-reachable.
hhjj 17y ago
"It sucks that Google gets to be the judge and jury in these cases..." It isn't since there are DMCA coutnernotices.
- marilyn 17y ago
  From the article: "the notices that Google relied on to delete the blogs were woefully incomplete. Google should not have acted until it had proper notices from rights holders, including the name of the actual work allegedly infringed. Since many of the notices did not even include this information, there was no way for the bloggers to file a DMCA counternotice"

awa 17y ago

Wow! So Google simply deleted the blogs without any kind of investigation. It seems irockcleveland had had received many such notices in the past wrongly, they should have checked with the blog owner if the current one was of similar nature . Case in point: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=4ba979f2d9e7b6d9&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=4ba...

artagnon 17y ago

What the world really needs is a very smart licensing/ distribution mechanism for digital music.

pyre 17y ago
The kind that guarantees that every piece of audio that's ever created has to have licensing information attached to it and some sort of built-in DRM to enforce it? What about formats like flac, ogg, mp3, etc? Do they just become illegal in favor of the 'better' format?
- artagnon 17y ago
  I certainly don't mean DRM. I'm asking for clarity of license, not some daft enforcement "solution" that prevents users from listening to their own music. And no, I'm not asking for a universal format for all music.

extension 17y ago

apparently, DMCA operate on their own set of odd rules, as they even requested that the BLK JKS official blog remove the song Busted by beurocracy for stealing your own music.. hard to think of anything more revolting to an artist.

_delirium 17y ago
It's unfortunately what happens when you sign away the rights to it. Happens to authors, too: you can be taken to court by your publisher if you post a PDF free online after selling the publisher the rights to the book.
- derefr 17y ago
  What if you post it before? What happens when you Creative-Commons a book, and then try to sell it?
  - iron_ball 17y ago
    http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point Wise publishers just won't pick you up if they can't get exclusive rights.

loso 17y ago

This is not the only time that the music business has played this game, more specifically the RIAA. From 1997-2004 I worked a lot in the world of Hip Hop on a regional scale. I did security for clubs and artist and I was a DJ. Before file sharing exploded, the mixtape was the way that people would get exposed to underground hip hop artist, the most popular being 50 Cent but also many others. So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape. This is coming from both the A&R's that worked directly for the labels and third parties whose whole job was to find popular mixtape DJ's and give them music. They were hired by record companies as well. So anyway, after you released a mixtape, you would give it to a store at a consignment price. In other words, you would give them a box of CD's and they would sell them a set price depending on how popular you were. Then you come back and split the money, of course bigger DJ's would work out a different deal. So everyone in the industry is aware of this fact and they play along with the so called "street" rules. But the RIAA would come down and bust these stores for selling bootlegs. These are items that would be cosigned by record labels with artist even hosting the tapes but they would still bust the shops anyway. Legally, there was no paperwork so in the eyes of the law they were bootlegged and if it was the police that came down hard, I would have less of a problem. But it would be the RIAA, basically the record companies would backdoor the DJ's and the mom and pop stores. This is why I am glad that the music business has taken such a big hit. The people are crooks and as far as I am concerned, they is what they deserve.

anamax 17y ago
> So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape. After the first time, why didn't folks wise up and say "not without a contract allowing us to create and sell compilations"? They'd probably ask for royalties and then you'd insist on the standard breakage allowance against said royalties plus the other standard terms that they demand from content producers.

lutorm 17y ago

Regardless of the legitimacy of these claims, it makes me very weary of putting any content on third-party sites at least unless they offer a reliable way to sync it. I don't understand people who put the results of their hard work (blogs, photos, code) on some online service without thinking about backups. (I have my code hosted on Google code, but if I couldn't svnsync the repository to my local machine I don't think I would.)