Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Google has shut down a number of popular MP3 blogs on its Blogger service for copyright infringement. More shutdowns are promised.
Over the course of the past day, the Google-owned blogging service Blogger has shut down a number of popular mp3 blogs, including Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, I Rock Cleveland, LivingEars, and It’s a Rap. If you follow the links to any of those blogs, you’ll see that they’ve been wholesale deleted. All you’ll find is the Blogger message, “The blog you were looking for was not found.” The apparent reason? The music posted on the blogs allegedly violates Blogger’s terms of services.
From Google’s official blog:
Earlier today, word spread about some popular music blogs that were recently removed from Blogger. While we make it a policy to not publicly discuss individual users or their accounts, we wanted to clarify a few things about how and when Blogger enforces its Terms of Service as they relate to our DMCA policy. Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we: 1) Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard. 2) Reset the offending post to ‘draft’ status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content. 3) 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.
The blogs being shut down often offer free downloads authorized by labels in order to promote releases. They also post a disclaimer that unauthorized downloads will be removed upon request. Obviously, those disclaimer notices do not protect MP3 bloggers from charges of copyright infringement.