News Source: http://www.laweekly.com
Published: Feb 08, 2009 - 09:38 pm
Story Found By: graywolf 1566 Days ago
Category: SEM
Andrew Pederson, a spokesperson for the Mountain View–based company, explained via e-mail, “When we are notified of content that may violate our terms of service, including clear notices of alleged copyright infringement, we act quickly to review it, and our response may include removing allegedly infringing material. If material is removed, we make a good-faith effort to contact affected bloggers using the e-mail address they set up when they signed up for Blogger.
16 Comments
Comments
Wow...Google sure does think they rule the world, eh? Sadly, we’re all at their mercy...removing something from the SERPs is one thing, removing actual blog entries, that’s something entirely different. Wow...
It’s more an RIAA story than a Google story.Google has been embattled by all the audio/video copyright crap and eventually you just get tired of fighting all the battles and cave.I think the appropriate response for all the music bloggers is to just stop blogging and let the music industry watch their profits sag when nobody is hyping their crap.However, if they had permission to post it via press release like the article claims, the Google could be in deep shit because taking something down improperly via DMCA has a counter-claim you can file, rights violated, lots of money at stake.Class action? :)
"In the past Google would remove results when a DMCA claim was filed, now they are deleting actual posts from Bloggers Accounts" OK, that is incorrect. Nothing new here. Google has owned blogspot.com for years, and they are the publisher of anything on blogspot.com. When plagiarism appears on a blogspot.com blog, the copyright owner can complain to Google. I’ve been doing this for years and have filed DMCAs on hundreds of blogspot blogs. Blogs on other platforms – Google is not liable for those unless they are showing AdSense ads, in which case the owner of the material can complain directly to the AdSense people at Google. There are three sections of Google that accept DMCAs as far as I know, with different fax numbers to send your DMCA letter to: AdSense which will investigate infringement on sites that show Google ads. They contact the site owner for a counter-claim, and the site owner either removes the infringing material or Google cancels their AdSense account.Blogger – for all infringement on blogspot.com sites. Whether Google removes infringing posts without telling the blogger, as this story suggests – I don’t know. All I know is that they send me an email saying the situation is taken care of.Google search index. An unchallenged DMCA can result in the removal of a page from the index. Personally, I rarely file these because plagiarizers are almost always running AdSense, so I use the AdSense channel.
@DMCAFiler google notifications are flaky at best, lots of times gmail flags google emails as spam, so it’s quite possible they send them but they never get delivered. The record companies will often send promotional materials to bloggers to use and due to miscommunication or non communication the RIAA will think them violations and file a DMCA to have the posts removedhttp://techdirt.com/articles/20090206/1237213675.shtmlDeleting someone’s post is an incredibly slippery slope to start down.
@DMCAfiler also big companies often file DMCA takedown notices for things that are extremely trivialhttp://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080720/2033251741.shtmlthe "notice and takedown" arrangement as it stands makes it really easy for posts to be deleted, whether they should have been or not
I’ve read much on this today. Another reason why a person shouldn’t place effort into a blog owned by another. Subdomains of WordPress included!
I just sphunn a blog response by Rick Klau to this article. hmmm...
Google deleting posts from Blogspot, the home of scraper blogs and spam... sounds like good news to me :O
Google Deletes ... Yes Deletes Posts from Bloggers Accounts... That violate their Terms, which you must agree to when signing up.Now, when Sphinn deletes posts on this site for the same reason, it’s not news.When any of the thousands of forum owners delete posts on their site for the same reason, it’s not news.But, when Google, rightfully, delets a post that violates their terms, which you knowingly agree to when signing up, it’s news.Sigh...
Aren’t ISPs required to take things down on notification of a DMCA to qualify for amnesty according the DMCA?? I seem to rememebr going through this a few times when I owned a hosting company.. Take down first, get confirmation of legal use second and restore is appropriate.. Seems like just another example of why free services are not to be used unless you want to follow their rules.. It’s not like buying a domain and hosting costs all that much these days..
The explanation lacks specificity. On the one hand, it’s hard to blame them because you do agree to abide by their policies when you create a blogging account. I don’t see any problems with deleting posts that infringe on copyright laws, but this is the only example that the explanation includes. Before we make a judgment about whether Google is out of line, we need more information.
I keep hearing about how "they" feel that we’re all going to go to the app cloud via Google, MS, etc. I hope not. If someone in the office accidentally flipped the wrong permissions on ( http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/google-docs-des.html ), and DMCA was used or the content didn’t jive with anouther country’s policies where Google operated, would I want to risk the loss of my files, work, etc.?
Google Refutes Accusations http://sphinn.com/story/100423
Rick Klau has debunked this one: http://tins.rklau.com/2009/02/blogger-and-dmca.html The short answer is that nothing in our policy has changed. We alert bloggers when we receive a DMCA complaint, and Blogger posts can be removed from the web if the blogger doesn’t counternotify. It appears that we tried to contact the blogger in question from the LA Weekly article, but sometime the email address that a person used when they signed up for Blogger isn’t actively checked, or that email can be ignored for various reasons. We’ve seen that happen plenty of times when we remove a site for (say) hidden text. We email the site in question, but the site in question doesn’t always see the email.
FFS Google (If I posted nothing but that comment on all posts with ’Google’ in the title, I’d probably be about right.) In other news, teams of Google supported ninjas are stealing candy from organic babies.
Much adieu about nothing. Terms are in place that give Google and millions of other sites the right to do this. This isn’t news. This isn’t even interesting.