14 DAY TRIAL // With millions of blogs under its supervision, verifying that everything that gets posted on Blogger, complies with policies or with the law can be a daunting task. Add to this the whole copyright, fair use, DMCA debacle and you've got a situation that inevitably leads to problems. After several music blogs were taken down by Blogger, things got so bad that the blog hosting service had to respond and clarify some of the misunderstandings.
"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," Blogger's Rick Klau wrote.
The whole thing started after at least six music blogs were deleted for repeated copyright infringement violations. Nothing wrong with that, after all the law is the law and Blogger has the right to say what goes and what doesn't. The problem is, many of those blogs actually operated legitimately and all the mp3's posted came directly from labels or artists.
As is usually the case, overzealous lawyers sent DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown notices to Blogger without checking to see if the songs were licensed or not. Blogger was caught in the middle and after repeated complaints, it took down the blogs. It's not the first time this happened and Blogger updated its DMCA policy last summer precisely for these types of situations.
Under the new policies, posts for which Blogger receives notices don't get deleted right away, but rather set to 'draft' mode which only makes them unavailable. The blogger then had a chance to file a DMCA counter-claim if the content in question was indeed legitimate. However, as this last situation shows, most bloggers have no idea what that is and how to issue one. Here are Google's own instructions on how to file a counter-claim . You can't really blame Blogger on this, it is under a lot of pressure to ensure no copyrighted material is illegally shared on the blogs it hosts, Google has enough lawsuits as it is. And you can't really blame the bloggers who, knowing they were covered didn't think that this kind of problems might arise. The problem is with the current copyright laws, in the US and elsewhere, under which people are presumed guilty until proven innocent.