How To Kill MP3 Blogs

"Turns out he got a lapdance to that song. That's hot shit. Hope this gives you a boner, too."

I only visit a handful of mp3 blogs. Not that I'm above becoming a junkie, but because I really enjoy finding out about things all on my own. Also, the number that were created within the last year just makes following them all daily an exhaustive task. But I do want to pick one nit in particular: Scenestars. They've been guilty of this sort of self-important carelessness in the past, but today they're hosting three (!) fucking tracks from the New Order album which isn't even due in stores for two more months. It's bad enough when three separate mp3 blogs will post different tracks from any given record, but to have them all in one place is just a gross mishandling of the responsibilities that come with running such a portal. (So is exploiting the good nature of your readers in an effort to stock up on free iPods and other tech trinkets, but I'll save that gripe for another day.) So, fuck Scenestars and any other mp3 blog that carries on in this manner. It's about giving people a taste of what's coming, not about supplying them with a full quarter of the material from a highly anticipated record.

The comments on both posts are especially hilarious, if only because it's just as illegal to host one track as it is two, or even three.

Journal has been deleted. If you are audiogasms, you have a period of 30 days to decide to undelete your journal.

Wow, you really did kill it.

Probably not so smart.

Ironic bandmembers FTW

Government Names is still at http://governmentnames.blogspot.com/

Gov't Names still here! although DK doesn't really write anymore and I only write about Bmore music there now and kind of deliberately took myself out of the "rap blog" game. Ethan is constantly telling me that G&W is gonna have new shit soon, I hope that's true.

Well, that and to me it seems easier to contact blog-owners direct, rather than figuring out their webhost's contact email address. But like you imply, that tactic is rather less strongarmed and might engender a shrug from sketchier sites.

I do think it's dumb that we might have to consider getting some weird, copyright-blind Scandinavian host, or something -- not because i have any desire to keep something online when an artist objects to it, but just to protect our asses from losing a year's worth of hosting payments because a label goes over our head to the source.

Again and finally, I appreciate that I wouldn't have these headaches if I wasn't doing something illegal!

John - thanks. Abby-poptext got a rather scarier email, really, in terms of its implications for the rest of us... Someone came knocking, insisting that she buy a blanket licence... (I don't want to say more without checking with her!)

It adds a new angle to the mp3-blogger risk, since even if I pay a blanket license per quarter to them for the right to host full-length streams of their artists (who are pretty much every major label-signed act), the legality is still contingent on permission from those who own recordings, ie the labels. So, back at square one.

So, a new challenge. Even if the labels turn a blind eye, these guys aren't.

it does make me wonder if we need to start (siiiigh) talking about some regional mp3blog networks, to share the financial burden of licenses and get a better negotiating position.

unfortunately, as soon as we start talking about money, it means that mp3blogs will start to require revenue. and that means that either subscription fees or advertising. the former isn't very likely and the latter is something i personally dislike very much. and this of course will be a huge obstacle for all the cool little mp3blogs that we all imagine appearing. ("MOOMINRAP: the finnish hip-hop blog")

Jed, I think the point is that ultimately, the ones that are doing the real damage will thrive and prosper. Why doesn't everyone start up an MP3 blog? Work, effort, hosting, writing ability in some cases (hey, never stopped me when I started). Where people hide behind anonymity, there's less risk, less incentive to put passion into the writing and promotion, and therefore less benefit to the artists. (Okay, assuming there IS benefit to the artists. I like to think there is..). Whereas people with a strong brand identity to their writing who put a lot into it... are vulnerable, but also have more potential to do good, and the MP3 blogosphere will lose those guys first.

Oh, I am? Oh, hum.

But hey, feel fre to drop by with a misguided, mean-spirited, self-congratulatory "I told you so" any ol' time, pal! We'll drink peppermint schnapps and wax nostalgiac about other times you annoyed me.

the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
posted by IgnorantSlut at 04:45AM UTC on August 10, 2004

Oh, it was actually one of your other monkey friends who brought that up. My apologies, Forkslovetofu! I fully retract my statement that you come up with half-baked legal theories.

Forkslovetofu, Aug 11, 2004
All you're saying is "They can CRUSH you!" I'm asking, why would they even bother?
posted by forksclovetofu at 12:00AM UTC on August 11, 2004

Anyways, my apologies to the rest of ILM for filling this board up with my flame war like some sort of somewhat-more-sane Marissa Marchant. I'm done now.

As for the rest of your responses, I'm more than happy to let you have the last word.

As for labels and publishers; I certainly understand their point when dealing with almost wholesale-type download communities, but this heavihandedness is best summed up by the caption "The revolution has come, and we're racing to be first against the wall!" or something.

man, I REALLY hope you talk like this in real life. You must get a lot of bloody noses.

I have to disagree that this is a better alternative. If the Justice Department (theoretically) wanted to bust blog A, which practiced this, they would email the author. Then, the author would respond with the song. That is all the evidence needed to prosecute in court. This is how they bust people who sell pirated works online -- they buy a copy first and keep evidence of the transaction. Not only that, but emailing the file legally constitutes "uploading" which makes the sentence harsher. Copyright infringement in which the defendant "uploads" is a more serious crime.

True, but then they only have proof that a copyright digital file was circulated without permission to a single recipient. They can't prove the file was sent to more people, so if they want to prosecute somebody for sending THE OWNERS of the property a copy of their property that's fair enough, but also incredibly silly, and I like to think this sort of incident would highlight the absurdity of the situation all the more.

As for the 'uploading' aspect, e-mailing is no worse than putting it on a webserver (YSI's or your own or anyone's) so it's no more serious.

Has anyone had any problems with more obscure and older material? I've not heard of any. If it's only unreleased material or top-selling current material that's causing legal threats, best to just leave that to the torrentors anyway surely.

Nor am I. I've been in a few interviews where the writer was trying to get me to say that I think it is, and I just don't. Given the laws currently on the books, doing an mp3 blog is illegal. The enforcement of the laws is wildly inconsistent and most people involved will look the other way or simply won't know what's going on, so the odds of getting in trouble are relatively low. Doing an mp3 blog is a calculated risk and unless the laws change, this won't change.

call me old-fashioned.

RE: "I've been right all along" - My suggestion is that when and if the industry decides that it's worth the bad publicity, money and time to take a swipe at a snowballing audioblog community, they'll likely go after a file sharing site. Probably someone who's hosting, say, the complete Rilo Kiley discog. Then they'll call that site an "mp3 blog" in the media and make a stab at painting everybody the same color regardless of intention.

And yeah: out of print, deleted, hard to find is the tact I generally try to take; often I'll move toward things that are in print but more obscure or less likely to catch the average listeners attention or new enough where I hope attendant hype will buoy them up. I'm personally champing at the bit to put together some short pieces on Charlie Patton, Bill Monroe and Madlamini and Her Witchdoctors. Hopefully over the next day or so.

xpost, what Sean said. And I'd rather offer shitty quality sound and let people walk around with it. I don't listen to music in front of my computer as much as I do on the go; better to get something with not so clean of a dub than to be forced to listen onsite.

Future conversation: If we really believe we're being helpful and we want to support artists and labels that are sympathetic to our means of promotion, would it make sense to start excluding tracks by bands that play on labels that have made it clear they disapprove? Sony, for instance? Lord knows, I'd like to put up some Jake Shimabukuro; but as much as Sony has proven user unfriendly, I'm loathe to.

forks - i certainly think it'd be worth having a list of bands who have expressed educated opposition.

As for the 'uploading' aspect, e-mailing is no worse than putting it on a webserver (YSI's or your own or anyone's) so it's no more serious.

You're not really understanding this. First of all, it's irrelevant how many people a copyrighted file is sent to. In the above scenario, that is one single count of criminal copyright infringement. There's nothing in the law stating that it only occurs on some sort of large scale. Also, in the above scenario, the MP3 blog owner wouldn't be sending the material to the copyright holders. It is government officials who run these operations -- the Department of Justice. From what I understand, the DOJ doesn't run a record label.

And the 'uploading' part is right. Running an MP3 blog, it is possible that you may get away with it unproven that you uploaded the files. ie, "Here is a link to a Rilo Kiley song that just so happens to exist on a server somewhere on the internet, and I am directing you to it." Emailing is instant proven uploading with no way out.

In the above scenario it may have been the DOJ but in other scenarios I know of the British Phonographic Industry have contacted the server providers/webhosts and ordered them to contact the blogger rather than go direct. Theoretically it's possible that a BPI rep would attempt to 'entrap' the blogger by requesting copyright material from them so as to prove violation (I probably would if I were them!). 'Government officials' would not enter the picture unless the site was forcibily shut down AND the site's owner prosecuted, afaik.

'Government officials' would not enter the picture unless the site was forcibily shut down AND the site's owner prosecuted, afaik.

This happens all the time. My whole thesis is that eventually this will happen to an MP3 blog.

First of all, it's relevant working on the logical basis that the prosecutors tend to target the sites they believe are most popular (though this may not always be the case), including (in many cases) targetting users of p2p clients who are sharing thousands of files as opposed to hundreds or less

This is true, but targetting is an entirely separate issue from prosecuting. If the DOJ/foreign government/whathaveyou wants to shut down Warez-Mart.com (I just made that up) then they don't need to prove anyhow that they are one of the more popular sites. They just need to prove that one single instance of criminal copyright infringement occurred.

I've been following this discussion with interest, as I got an iMic for Hanukkah and thus now have the ability to digitize some some of my archival vinyl/demo material. I'd feel best about it going the Lacunae route, tracking the artists down and asking permission, but that's arduous enough someone like me (law student/full time job/one daughter/another on the way/barely enough time to sleep) would probably just throw in the towel. My motivation for MP3 blogging would be similar to why I liked DJing so much - the ability to turn people on to things I like - but with the US copyright laws the way they are, there's no way I'm just gonna post something without due diligence.

I'm studying to be a copyright attorney. I promise to help make things better once I graduate. :)

not so!

perhaps the issue with the mogwai thing was that all but one track of the album leaked, and then that track was the one that was blogged, and it was fairly widely linked to (eg here)? just guessing...

i just post things that i think are great; i'm not sure why it's my responsibility to make sure that i'm slower to hear things than the band in question... like i said, though, my wondering is not why a given band (in this case, mogwai) took exception, but rather why their people went about things in the way that they did.

I think the problem with advance leaks is when a band resents the leak. I don't think the problem is that blogs don't check to make sure that the band has heard the song beforehand.

my wondering is not why a given band (in this case, mogwai) took exception, but rather why their people went about things in the way that they did.

i think he would be right to. c'mon, it's perfectly clear why they would go about things this way! a friendly email to you asking you politely to remove not only copyrighted but unreleased material would not really communicate the message they want to, either to you or to other bloggers who might hear about it. really, the more disingenuous the bloggers responses on this thread the more clear it becomes exactly why Rock Action did exactly what did what they did.

It's easy to join the PRS in the UK, and I'd assume that most of the larger independent bands are members in order to take get radio royalties (plays on Peel etc).

I'm a bit obsessive and lame so I keep track of all the online activity relating to a certain band I have an interest in. I know the moment something is leaked on OINK, the random top 10 lists, the number of mp3 blogs and the mp3s they tend to post. It's really easy if you are a label or a band to keep track of these things, it only takes me about 5 min everyday. What you do notice is how many of these blogs are around now, and how huge a task it would be to try to stop it. How you would not really want to have to engage in email conversations/debates with a bunch of site writers if you could just send a notice to their service provider.

I also see a lot of people searching for lyrics online and requesting lyrics by email. OK, so you don't get the lyrics even if you are legally downloading from itunes. I know roughly the amount of sales from these legal downloading sites, and the number of people coming to the website for lyrics is way over this number. My feeling is that if you care enough about a song to want to know the lyrics, you probably should be buying the record to get the lyrics in the liner notes. It's that sort of thing that is pissing me off - more and more poeople seem to think the 'promo' mp3 is just a freebie, rather than something that you should try to purchase if you like the song. That shift in mentality by the frequenters of mp3 blogs is the only thing I don't like about mp3 blogs.

it's not about being chummy with the label - it's the hope that at this point we'd be treated as something other than predators/exploiters/pirates, or whatever. i think any disingenuity that you're seeing is from people (like me, obv) who see mp3blogging-without-permission as not-evil, trying to articulate that to people (like you, i guess) who feel that it is. we're not playing naive - we're just genuinely in disagreement.

There's been several other firms starting up with this purpose, and they are certainly making some money. Now, I don't have any idea if the music industry has started to hire any of these people, but I am positively sure that sooner or later they will. And when these firms are hired, where is the most obvious place they will find leaked material on the internet? You don't have to answer that.

And I don't see the vast majority of MP3 blogs as evil, myself. My whole viewpoint on everything centers around a couple simple facts:
- Life sucks when you're busted for copyright infringement. Real bad.
- Sooner or later it'll happen to MP3 blogs.
- People should know that.
- People should have some minor idea of what the law and the penalties actually are. How many people think that putting up a disclaimer gives them sort of immunity or something? In this thread Forkslovetofu seems to be simultaneously arguing that MP3 blogs, such as yours and his, are obviously illegal -- yet at the same time also perfectly legal because of fair use. Whatever, have fun telling that to a judge some day, folks.

And just to repeat it one more time, I don't mean to be antagonistic in the least. I sincerely hope that none of you have to go through the horrors I have.

i liked these conversations much more when i was living in canada and the law wasn't yet so right-wrong clear as it is here in the uk.

All this bullshit about how the intentions of bloggers are good, and that they generate interest and ultimately boost sales and provide free marketing is irrelevant. If an artist or label wanted you to post these tracks, you'd have explicit permission to do so. If you don't have permission, you're breaking the law. Nobody asked you to market their product for them.

Grow some balls and at least admit that you're breaking the law, and that you don't care about doing so. Try to keep your overdeveloped sense of entitlement in check, and stop making excuses/being disingenuous about what you're really doing when you post other people's music without permission.

That's not to say that MP3 blogging can't be a great, useful thing. The level of dishonesty about the whole enterprise, both from its attackers and its defenders, is terrible.

there is SO much projection going on here. i don't see anyone saying they are "owed" the courtesy, that they are "entitled" to anything. i don't see the "oh my god!" that you're citing, Mickey.

any "surprise" you are seeing is more akin to "huh. i was just fined for jaywalking" (to which the appropriate response is obv "YOU DESERVE IT YOU LAWLESS MOTHERFUCKER, JAYWALKING IS BREAKING THE LAW") than "WTF? jaywalking? how dare the police fine me! i thought they understood that jaywalking was cool, man."

and the utter disingenuousness of it all..

UPDATE: edit: The text and file orginally posted here has been removed from TPP and is no longer shared with a publicly available/viewed website. See the second sentence of UPDATE II and the entirety of UPDATE III. We encourage you to go to the black market or to the private areas of this site or others like it. It's everywhere now. We appreciate all the links and respect we got from the bigger sites (who easily could've never acknowledged or credited us) listed below.

UPDATE II: Big ups and much love/respect to Stereogum, Fluxblog, Tonight Let's Dance and the Boston Phoenix's On The Download. That CnD letter/email/notice should be showing up any second now...

UPDATE III: 8hrs, 30mins. One. Hot. Track.

RIP

Matt, stop stealing my ideaslunch!
-- David R. (popshots75`), Tuesday, 19 October 2004 12:53 (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

Fixed.

Great blog.

lol at Derek Borchadt. In general.

"MOOMINRAP: the finnish hip-hop blog"

why does this not exist

Derek Borchardt, Harry Redknapp's spiritual forebear

Which chairman's wife's face did Arry threaten to piss on? I forget

i want to know what that hot-shit 8:30 track was

retro, you know

"MOOMINRAP: the finnish hip-hop blog"

why does this not exist

-- Tracer Hand, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 7:35 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

it does, but it's called Discobelle (Finnish, Swedish, whatever).

^^^ Racist

so google has started pulling these from blogspot, according to pitchfork. not surprising to me, although it sucks for blogs that just put up one or two songs. I'm not going to bemoan the blogs that offered links to mediafire .rars of entire albums since I'm sure those will just pop up again somewhere else.

so how did they choose which blogs to shut down? is it just an across the board sweep?

That explains why My Jazz World disappeared last night.

so how did they choose which blogs to shut down? is it just an across the board sweep?

I imagine they had some kind of automated thing that scanner their cloud for links to mp3s and archive formats.

They have an automated anti-spam scanner that rakes over their territory, labels blogs spammers and locks out their users for 20 days before deleting them.

I know the latter because they had a false positive mass incident last year and my blog was one of those which was in the sweep. It was corrected fairly rapidly.

However, there's no real appeal process for anything at Google Blogger. Once the hive mind is made up, there's nothing but to lump it.

They recently announced they were terminating their FTP-publishing application to private domains not in their cloud. It's raised a stink but there's no recourse but to either migrate your blog back to Google servers or go elsewhere. Mine was caught up in this and I've already started migrating readers to WordPress.

So if something gets slated for disappearing en masse because of an upper level decision, that's it.

i have one of those blogs on blogger and have long suspected the axe was coming down, so i had it email me an xml backup nightly. which i could just put up somewhere else or host myself if i felt like it.

“The people that create and write and update these sites with fervent passion are your biggest customers! We are the ones that buy the $100 box set of material released 10-years ago. We are the ones that collect the 7”s, attend the music festivals, and buy the t-shirts. We LOVE MUSIC and we LOVE Bands and no matter how you think you’re helping your industry by sending the Web Sheriff or DMCA notices you are most certainly not helping. Thanks to everyone who has supported me, offered a hand, or culled older blogs in the last two days! It’s because of your outpouring of appreciation that I won’t wash my hands of this whole music business, and will continue on reinforced in the thought that I am doing something that people appreciate and that what we as music bloggers do is vital to the continued existence of the music we love.” — Patrick from Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, on Blogger’s shutdown of his blog

Kinda dramarama imo. I mean, I frequent mp3 blogs as much as the next guy, but the righteousness of some of them is weird. You ARE giving away something for free, which can be purchased elsewhere.

tylerw otm, but like My Jazz World only ever put up OOP stuff, so I'm bummed it got shut down.

yeah, totally -- I mean, like I said, I go to these sites too, though i have a weird thing about trying not to illegally download new stuff ... obviously stealing is stealing regardless of the age of the music, but for some reason I feel more OK about downloading an old jazz record as opposed to, i dunno, the new spoon album.

You ARE giving away something for free, which can be purchased elsewhere.

That's the reason they exist -- to provide content where they have none to contribute -- for the sake of an audience. Or if they would choose to do their own content, they'd have to take their chances on the audience being much smaller.

The people that create and write and update these sites with fervent passion are your biggest
customers

This is a bit laughable. Fervent they may really be but it's often in a way in which they're fervently scraping content from others. Which does take some effort and dedication.

*knocks on wood, looks at Dashboard*

so far nothing has changed.

lmao @ first post itt

I hope they shutdown shit like this:

http://vinylkorps.blogspot.com/

shutting down primarily live boot and OOP blogs seems pretty dumb IMO

but seems like about 70 percent of "blogs" aren't really curated anyway, just like filesharing via rapidshare

From Google Blogger's perspective there's no easy way to manage a culling between differences
in what's being pirated, whether it's out of print, live recordings or current. If it's an automated business, which it almost has to be these days, it's entirely dependent on the sensitivity of the programming dictated by a collection of gross measures or rules imposed on page scrapes.

Or maybe they're relying on automation to assemble a list and using eyeballs to make decisions on a top tier of offenders, or some combination of the two.

BUT THEY PROMISED THEY WEREN'T EVIL!!!

i just hope blogs like worldservice (congo music from 50s-70s, almost all out of print) don't get swept up along with all the endless blogs posting leaks of new merge albums.

honestly, i love ian zamboni's blog but he's asking for it, by posting shit like a bunch of love albums that rhino still has in print.

dudes like that SHOULD get shut down imo

the ethics of all this are extremely complex, i think, and usually not handled very well in discussions like this one. is there an article that tackles all this from an ethical--not just a pratical/legal--standpoint.

?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/google-deletes-music-blogs

yeah I'm another not-d/l'ing-if-it's-new-'cause-that's-uncool guy but OOP stuff, I really feel like there's such a compelling case to be made that "sharity" (ugh) bloggers are doing a real service to history. (this despite my weird blanchot schtick about how I think it's kinda awesome when history devours stuff and leaves no traces, etc., about which the less said the better no doubt)

service to history is no small thing imo! like, in metal, during the explosion of new bands in the early eighties, there were TONS of things that got either self-released or came out on little tiny labels and then went through lesser chains of distribution, and probably half the copies got pulped and the rest are God knows where, and it's a valuable service with no downside if that stuff is made freely available. it provides a clearer picture of something. it doesn't take anyone's business away. of course, then somebody does something awesome like the Texas Metal Archives CD and that too goes straight into the "here, take somebody's work for free" bin, so it gets hard to sort out how to deal with things, short of some Official Office Of Blog Allowability which isn't going to happen until I am Tsar.

I feel like a reexamination of public domain w/r/t music is maybe in order but I'm not holding my breath for that

fuck any dude who pirates a dreamboat gorilla album. stealing from angels imo

http://www.blackbeardlives.com/day2/images/films.jpg

"ARR! YE'VE UPLOADED THE WRONG TRACK! OURRRR LEAD SINGLE WAS TRACK #5, Y'SCURRV!"

IMO spreading the word about DBG is doing god's work; Doug Boatgorilla might think differently.

yeah, i mean, for instance, Mutant Sounds is seriously a service to humanity, like an intensely great world of music that is pretty much literally not available anywhere else. In some ways I give blogs that actually feel curated a pass too. Like Locust St., which will share officially available stuff sometimes (though it's old stuff), but puts it in a context that doesn't exist anywhere else ...

We'd like to inform you that we've received another complaint regarding your blog," begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It's a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music-blogs – sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. "Upon review of your account, we've noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger's Terms of Service ... [and] we've been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding."

Here are a couple grafs that show some of the problems and vagaries of the situation. If you do a Blogger-hosted blog you know there's a fink switch for someone to flag you, for any reason, at the top of it.

It's easy to abuse and misuse and I'm sure Blogger gets a steady and large stream of material from it.

If it decides to act on a class of it without exposing each blog to eyeballing, that lessens a huge amount of work.

When I moved my blog to my domain I removed the fink switch because of its potential for misuse. Many people do the same. And there's a way to have it wiped off if you host in the cloud.

Despite the de facto alliance between labels and blogs, not all of the record companies' legal teams have received the message. In a complaint posted to Google Support, Bill Lipold, the owner of I Rock Cleveland, cited four cases in the past year when he had received copyright violation notices for songs he was legally entitled to post. Tracks by Jay Reatard, Nadja, BLK JKS and Spindrift all attracted complaints under the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, even when the respective MP3s were official promo tracks. As a publicist for BLK JKS' label, Secretly Canadian, told Lipold: "Apparently DMCA operate on their own set of odd rules, as they even requested that the BLK JKS' official blog remove the song." It's not clear who "DMCA" is in this case, as the act does not defend itself.

"I assure you that everything I've posted for, let's say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist," Lipold wrote to Google.
The company's first official response came only late yesterday, as #Musicblogocide2k10 sped up Twitter's trending charts. "When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorised manner, we will remove the blog," explained product manager Rick Klau. "[If] this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are 'official' ... it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question."

The only way to get Google Blogger's attention is to post in support. There really is no way to contact them directly and that's purposeful. There's a thing called a 'trouble ticket' which you can lodge but it's buried and it's one of those common e-mail forms that people instinctively know are installed only for cosmetic purpose.

Blogger's way of handling trouble is to ignore it until it reaches a certain level of noise on the support forum. There's obviously no transparency and it has always been this way.

The press, in this case, has forced a response from Rick Klau. It was that way when Blogger's FTP publishing started failing. It was largely ignored by Blogger until it had reached a high level of noise and a couple of stories were written about it.

At that point Klau issued a statement and the service improved, but only for awhile. What really was happening is that Blogger was probably undergoing an internal debate on how to end FTP-publishing once and for all. And that entailed coming up with a method which it could push at users to give them a chance to move back to the cloud and a deadline to do it.

So in the Guardian story, it looks like a pretty standard Blogger procedure. They've pushed a method at users who think they've been wronged and maimed by a process they're putting in place. The Guardian notes that most users don't know how to do this or it's obfuscated by Blogger. This is all true. But that has always been the level of support furnished. It's not a design flaw, it's a feature.

Sometimes Blogger appears to harden or accelerate its plans when the press notices and some row erupts, perhaps to get it behind them faster. They may put up a 'support' blog to deal with the subject but that usually means there will be a product manager hanging around just to further explain why they're doing what they're doing in terms of blogs either being a drain on resources -- in the case of FTP publishing -- or perhaps in this case -- how they came to the decision to clean house on terms of service copyright violators because of legal exposure or a drain on resources caused by people always lodging complaints through the fink switch or other means.

teal dear

am0n otm

Looks like Google's caving:

@masalacism -- Incredible! @Google apologized and put www.masalacism.blogspot.com back on! thanks to @rklau #musicblogocide2k10

Check this post for details (update #2)

http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/02/quick-note-about-music-blog-removals.html

Amazin'! And they were using automation with a bug in it!

http://vimeo.com/9351344

if you have a blog hosted on somebody else's domain i don't see how you should feel entitled to any control over anything, frankly. download wordpress and set up your own site already.