Google’s service Blogger is a great way to host your own blog for free. Many music fiends used Blogger to talk about music and share it with the world. Today Google has taken down a ton of music blogs hosted with Blogger. Google says they were forced by the DMCA Act. Many people have taken their opinion to Twitter with the hastag #musicblogocide2010.
Google took down all of these blogs down with out any notice. Also, they deleted all of the archives of these blogs. The blog I Rock Clevland was one of the blogs shut down. Two years of blogging, now gone. I Rock Clevland claims all of the MP3s uploaded were legal.
Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:
- Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
- Reset the offending post to ‘draft’ status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
- Send a copy of the complaint to ChillingEffects.org.
When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.
Your Thoughts?
I personally think what Google did is required, but they did it totally wrong. Google should have emailed the blog’s owner, sending them a backup of all their posts. I don’t think anyone would of been angry then, because all of their content is in their own hands. What do you think, did Google take the right approach?