Longtime readers of The Lost Turntable may know that for the longest time this site was on Blogspot, the free web-publishing platform that is owned by Google. I started this blog on Blogspot back in 2006, but I cut the cord and went solo in 2010, when my blog got three DMCA notices over the course of the year. You can read all about here. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
You back? Good. For those of you who decided not to revisit history, I’ll sum up. Starting in 2009, the IFPA (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) decided that certain posts on my blog violated their copyright (and they were probably right) so they sent out a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to Google, requesting that the offending posts be removed. This is in their right. I have no problem with that.
The problem was that Google did that without question, accepting it without ever contacting me. Furthermore, during the process I was never given an opportunity to defend myself, nor was I allowed to look at the DMCA that was levied against me. The IFPA had all the power. I had none.
The fact that I was called out for copyright infringement was fine, I get that. But the fact that I was never once given a chance to look at the claims against me was total bullshit. That was the reason why I decided to migrate my site to my own servers and my own domain in 2010. Since then, I haven’t gotten a single DMCA notice, this is because organizations like the IFPA are as lazy as they are greedy, and only search easily indexed sites like Blogspot and WordPress.
For two years I kept the old blog up, with little more than a “yo, update your bookmarks” post left behind. But I was sick of getting emails about it from idiots who couldn’t find this site, so I finally decided to deactivate and delete the blog earlier this year. Apparently it wasn’t gone for long though, because if you go there now, you’ll see that someone else snatched up the name and is now using my old site address as a spam bot. I found this out only because a few of my readers who never removed the old Blogspot RSS feeds from their aggregators were suddenly getting flooded with spam from this site.
This is relatively harmless, of course. But I don’t like my brand name being tarnished and associated with shit like this. I own the name Lost Turntable. It may not be a registered trademark, but since I used it, it’s mine. It would be like starting a new magazine with the name Newsweek. You can’t do that. And you shouldn’t be able to take an established blog and create your own spam blog using its name.
So, being a fan of irony, I decided to file my own DMCA against Blogspot, claiming that this spam blog was infringing on my trademark. I figured the case was pretty cut and dry, and besides, it’s a worthless spam blog, it should be taken down regardless.
Well, a lot of stuff should happen, here’s the response I got from Google in regards to my claim:
Thanks for reaching out to us.
Thank you for writing in regarding
http://lostturntable.blogspot.com/2012/08/business-management-effective-strategic.html.
We would like to confirm that we have received and reviewed your inquiry
dated 8/13/2012.
Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that
content. We allow our users to create blogs, but we don’t make any claims
about the URLs or content of these pages. In cases involving trademark, if
a contact email address is listed on the blog, we recommend you working
directly with the author to have the information in question removed or
changed.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
There’s a key line there I want to focus on.
“Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that content. We don’t make any claims about the URLs or content of these pages.”
That is a bold faced, dirty filthy stinking rotten lie.
Let us go back to the DMCA notice I was served with back in 2009.
“We are in the process of removing from our servers the links that allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits.”
That is a blatant example of them mediating content and making a claim to the what the content is. They are literally working as a mediator there, removing content that allegedly infringes on the IPFA. So they lied to me, pure and simple.
It would appear that if you’re a massive corporation with millions of dollars behind you, Google will do whatever you want at the drop of a hat and remove any blog that is allegedly infringing on your copyright/trademark. They’ll do so without allowing the owner of the blog to challenge it, and they’ll make it nearly impossible for them to find out what exactly they’re being charged with.
However, if you’re a single individual who doesn’t have an army of lawyers, then you can just fuck right off as far as Google is concerned.
So if you are the owner of any kind of content at all, any brand name, any publication, any YouTube video series, anything like that, and you give a shit about how your content is represented on the Internet, then I would strongly recommend you set up a Blogspot account and create a blog there using that name. You don’t have to update it, just make sure you’ve claimed it. Because if someone else does Google won’t do a damn thing to stop it.
(And by the way, if you could all go to Google’s support and report that site as spam, I would greatly appreciate it. Hopefully if enough people complain it can get removed for good.)
