[Infowarrior] - Google supporting RIAA censorship?

[Richard Forno]

Google's New Killer App? Why Are Music Bloggers' Posts Disappearing,  
and Who Is Deleting Them?
By Jeff Weiss
Published on February 04, 2009 at 7:37pm

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-02-05/music/google-39-s-new-killer-app-why-are-music-bloggers-39-posts-disappearing-and-who-is-deleting-them/all

Ryan Spaulding, the proprietor of Boston-based music blog Ryan’s  
Smashing Life, noticed something odd happening to his archived posts a  
few months ago. His blog, founded in 2006, has expanded to include  
four contributors and now rakes in about 25,000 hits a month. Chump  
change compared to megablogs like Nah Right or Stereogum, which  
average at least twice that daily, but enough to attract a modicum of  
ads and a devoted community of readers.

But in November, some of Spaulding’s posts, both recent and older,  
long-forgotten ones, started disappearing from his site. There didn’t  
seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. One moment they were there, the  
next they were gone. Confused, he started comparing notes with other  
music bloggers, and they noticed a trend. A lot of posts across the  
Web, on everything from Abba to Zappa, had vanished.

That, of course, sparked countless e-mail-conspiracy theories. Blogger  
chat rooms buzzed with speculation about the mysterious force behind  
the surge in disappeared posts. Open e-mails to the Recording Industry  
Association of America [RIAA] began popping up at such a rapid rate  
that you’d think they contained new Justice mp3s.

Eventually, though, a consensus emerged: Each post takedown occurred  
on a blog hosted by the Google-owned Blogger platform, the publishing  
system used by the majority of mp3 sites, particularly those founded  
prior to 2007, when the open-source WordPress software became the  
vogue. Google, the bloggers believe, has quietly changed the methods  
by which it enforces its user agreement. Whereas in the past, a blog  
owner would receive a warning before a post’s removal, Google is now  
simply hitting the delete button. In Spaulding’s case, this means that  
posts written over the past year or more on Wilco, the Annuals, the  
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Matisyahu and Earth, Wind & Fire are gone.

“I’d received the label’s press releases and followed their  
directions, spending my time and energy to promote their albums,”  
explains a frustrated Spaulding. “By pulling down my post, they  
destroyed my intellectual creativity, the very same thing they’re  
erroneously accusing me of doing. Say someone had linked to that post,  
or [blog aggregator] Hype Machine — it’s gone completely. If I go into  
my Blogger table of contents, it’s gone. Not de-published — gone.”

Spaulding says he plays by the understood rules, and is doing the same  
thing that thousands of other music bloggers are doing. “I’m not  
leaking albums, not putting up three mp3s. Just the one they wanted.  
And they start erasing everything, with the threat of a lawsuit.  
People are afraid.”

And perhaps they should be. U.K.-based Web-scouring copyright  
detective Web Sheriff will soon open its first U.S. office, no doubt  
spurred by its success in policing the Web for unauthorized mp3 leaks.  
Music bloggers are bracing themselves for a new round of scrutiny, and  
are taking measures to prevent the RIAA from working its way into  
their music blogs.

After seeing his old posts on Elliott Smith and Tim Hardin disappear  
without warning, local writer and L.A. Weekly contributor David  
Greenwald decided to switch his The Rawking Refuses to Stop! blog from  
the Blogger to the WordPress platform, which is what a lot of old- 
school Blogger devotees are doing. In Greenwald’s case, he’d received  
an e-mail from Blogger informing him that the expurgated posts  
violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA], passed by  
Congress in 1998 to regulate the then fledgling problem of Internet  
copyright infringement. Despite multiple e-mail retorts to Blogger,  
Greenwald has yet to hear back — a common experience among bloggers  
whose work has been deleted.

“The first was a collection of Elliott Smith live covers, which  
actually exists in several other posts on the site, which were  
untouched,” recalls Greenwald about his own blog. “You’d think it  
wouldn’t have any legal problems, given that Smith’s stuff’s on  
Archive.org and freely traded. In the case of the Hardin post, the mp3  
links had been dead for over a year.” Greenwald adds that he’d gladly  
comply with a takedown notice if given a warning, which is  
historically how such matters have been handled. In fact, he’s done so  
in the past.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a blogger lacking a few war stories  
regarding the RIAA or its European arm, the International Federation  
of the Phonographic Industry. But actual lawsuits have been rare —  
other than the infamous 2006 Ryan Adams case, in which two bloggers  
were sued by Universal Music for leaking part of Adams’ Jacksonville  
City Nights. More recently, Culver City Guns N’ Roses fan Kevin Cogill  
was arrested for uploading unreleased tracks from Chinese Democracy.  
In the former case, the pair were sentenced to two months’ house  
arrest and two years’ probation; the latter case is pending.

But lately it’s hard to ignore a certain nervousness permeating the  
blogosphere, with many sure that the ever-erratic RIAA is continuing  
its haphazard approach to enforcement. Even the biggest music blogs,  
such as Nah Right, which rakes in nearly 2,000,000 views each month,  
are worried. More influential in the hip-hop world than any old media  
outlet, Nah Right, owned by a writer named Eskay, has become a virtual  
Canal Street for rap fans, offering everything from news aggregation  
and leaked singles to Web videos. A post on Nah Right, which operates  
as a de facto portal for smaller blogs, tacitly implies that the  
material is cleared for circulation in the piranha pool.

In three-plus years of blogging, Eskay has received his fair share of  
cease-and-desist letters (mostly, he says, from draconian Atlantic  
Records). But he maintains that anything posted on Nah Right has been  
expressly approved by either label or artist. When asked, he says,  
he’s deleted all potentially offending material and is allowed to  
continue operating with relative impunity. Nonetheless, he worries  
that the capricious and ever-desperate RIAA might soon crack down  
further.

“It’s definitely something I think about often,” says Eskay. “I don’t  
want to wind up the DJ Drama of the blog world [referring to the  
Atlanta mixtape kingpin arrested in a January 2007 sting operation for  
allegedly bootlegging mixtapes]. I try to respect the artists and the  
labels.”

And, really, only the most Luddite of labels would have a problem with  
Nah Right and its brethren. The dynamics of promotion have changed  
dramatically, with early online buzz now creating an incubator for  
later commercial success (see Gnarls Barkley, Arcade Fire and Lily  
Allen). Even Web Sheriff believes that it’s in the best interests of  
the labels to dole out at least one or two promotional mp3s prior to  
an album’s release.

John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff’s managing director, says that his company  
recommends to its clients (XL Recordings, the Domino label and George  
Michael among them) that they give fans two tracks prior to release.  
“At the end of the day, all most blogs are guilty of is  
overexuberance,” Giacobbi says by phone from the company’s London  
headquarters. “Our strategy is to try to engage blogs and fans and  
articulate the certain ground rules for any prerelease. What they can  
get for free and what they can’t. For the most part, they’re willing  
to play by the fair rules of the game.”

In late November, Web Sheriff made headlines when it sent a menacing  
letter to popular Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear, which posted an illegal  
leak of Animal Collective’s “Brother Sport” on its band site. Grizzly  
Bear was forced to publish an apology to Animal Collective, and keep  
it posted for at least seven days. (There was no mention of whether  
Grizzly Bear was allowed to watch television during the interval.)

Giacobbi says he hasn’t heard of a shift in RIAA blog policy, but  
admits that such a change wouldn’t surprise him. Nor would it shock  
Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and  
Society and one of the founders of Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, an  
organization designed to help Internet users understand their rights  
in the face of C&D threats.

“It sounds like some arm of the recording industry is getting more  
aggressive about enforcing copyright, and is pressing Blogger to  
respond more rapidly,” speculates Seltzer. “I’m not sure what’s  
motivating it. Many labels think blogs are good publicity, so I can  
easily believe that one hand sends out the mp3s and the other bears a  
C&D letter.”

Seltzer noted the Sisyphean nature of stymying offending posts,  
likening it to a game of Whac-a-Mole, with two or three new sites  
popping up for each one shut down. One source at the RIAA who declined  
to speak on the record seems fatalistically resigned to the necessary  
evils of blog promotion, insisting that there’s been no change in  
policy: The RIAA continues to send its master list of offending URLs  
to Google/Blogger, which then deals with the problem. According to the  
same source, the RIAA’s chief focus has become leak control.

But none of this explains why Blogger is deleting year-old Elliott  
Smith songs that can be legally accessed elsewhere. All arrows,  
however, point to an unacknowledged switch in Google’s corporate  
policy. Though its corporate brass declined an interview with L.A.  
Weekly, 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.  
This is in compliance with the DMCA, which requires that users receive  
notification after material has been removed.”

Indeed, nowhere in the fine print of the DMCA does it state that any  
agency is required to notify bloggers prior to the deletion of their  
posts. Meaning that in the five years since purchasing Blogger’s  
parent company, Pyra Labs, Google has been extending warnings as a  
common courtesy. Now, it just sends an obituary notice. Which raises  
the question: Did Google finally get fed up dealing with unruly  
bloggers? Was there some sort of back-office conversation with the  
RIAA? Does it just really hate MGMT?

Whatever the answer, a lot of bloggers are jumping platforms. “I’m  
switching to WordPress immediately. The RIAA, or Google, obviously  
doesn’t seem to know what the labels are doing,” says Heather Browne,  
the writer of the popular I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, which was  
recently named one of the U.S.’s five best music blogs in a Stereogum  
poll. “Most of the tracks posted are provided to bloggers, and nearly  
all are willing to take a track down if contacted. Sometimes, people  
just make a mistake. Cracking down on a couple blogs will never stem  
the problem of illegal downloading. This is how things have worked  
since blogs started five years ago. The labels just need to embrace it  
at some point.”

Few industry outlooks come more panoptic than that of Ashley Jex, who  
writes the Rock Insider blog, plays bass in the Monolators and  
formerly handled new media for Capitol Records and Suretone Records.  
Jex foresees a future in which the labels attempt to further assert  
control over their catalogs, inking deals — similar to current pacts  
with sites like YouTube, Imeem and MySpace — that guarantee them a  
share of online revenue in exchange for streaming content.

“Blogs will never die, but the golden age of the guerrilla blogger  
posting whatever they want is coming to an end,” says Jex. “There will  
be arrangements for ad-sponsored content that you can put on your  
blog, in the vein of sites like Hulu. Eventually, there will be  
software in place within all the major blog platforms — Movable Type,  
WordPress and Blogger — where if you’re trying to post an infringing  
content, you won’t be able to publish. At least, that’s the direction  
it seems to be heading.”

Perhaps most ominous for music bloggers are the reported conversations  
between the RIAA and Internet service providers. ISPs already possess  
the ability to monitor traffic flow based on Web addresses; on the  
copyright-enforcement horizon is a new tool called “deep packet  
inspection.” A technology with the potential to give copyright holders  
the upper hand in scouring the Web for infringers, deep packet  
inspection is currently employed primarily in law enforcement. If used  
for policing copyright infringement, however, it would allow ISPs and  
the RIAA to decrypt and track files sent across the Internet.  
Suddenly, a bunch of telecommunications and music companies would be  
given the ability to monitor files; in essence, to filter the  
Internet, a frightening proposition that would make a few thousand  
deleted blog posts look quaint.