Sure, the big labels know exactly what’s going on. Or, more precisely, they don’t all know they are. So that explains why blogger is acting this way. I’m here to do favors for small labels and promote artists who do good live shows. I’m not here to hurt anyone, and I’m not going to fight a takedown notice. It is a labor of love that may be able to generate a couple hundred bucks a year. (such as buying music, sending out prize packages, occasionally attending concerts, etc.) This can hardly be considered a “commercial” venture. And although I recently started accepting advertisements, the revenue is used to offset the costs related to this site Under 17 USC § 107, it is “fair use” to reproduce portions of copyrighted material for “ criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” Fair use considers “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (2) the nature of the copyrighted work (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” I believe that my blog fits all four criteria the only questionable one is the first one. This is why some Obama supporters have begun serving You Tube with DMCA notices about McCain’s fully legal advertisements-You Tube must take down the ad, and by the time McCain’s camp can appeal, the election will be over.Īnd is a little guy like me, who just blogs for the fun of it, going to fight it? Of course not. The host must act immediately, and the person who wrote the post has no right to appeal during the first two weeks. Under this relatively new law, any individual (including your grandma) can send a notice to a host and tell them that a blog post infringes on a copyright. In other words, it was a legal mp3.įirst, let’s look briefly at the DMCA. The post was on a band that was independent when I wrote about them, Wild Sweet Orange, and contained only one mp3, which was hosted by RED, an artist development site that Wild Sweet Orange was using for publicity. It was from the IFPI, the UK equivalent of the RIAA. They also told me who the DMCA notice was from.
They simply marked it “private” and barred me from writing further posts until I addressed the issue. Unlike Blogger, WordPress, to their credit, did not delete my post. Then, an 11-month-old post from my WordPress site got dinged. Ryan’s Smashing Life, and So Much Silence. I am not alone in this-it’s happened to some of the best bloggers out there, like
Blogger, my host, has been utterly silent on the issue. Over the next few weeks, this happened twice more. Nevertheless, the post mysteriously disappeared from my site. But the song that I posted was a live recording, not commercially released. To my knowledge, only one of the artists featured in that post had a connection to the RIAA. Not any more.Ī few weeks ago, I posted a collection of covers of songs from the 1980s. That’s why when companies send me CDs by The Annuals, Matisyahu, or Ryan Adams, I won’t review them unless the company hosts the mp3. I’ve been a non-RIAA music blogger for over a year now. It may be my last post forever, depending on the reaction to this post. It is with a heavy heart that I write this post.