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Blogger Fixes Its DMCA Takedown Process
from the good-job dept
You may recall earlier this year that Google was accused of invisibly deleting entire blog posts on Blogger when the RIAA would send takedown notices alleging that the blog posts contained unauthorized music. This was troubling for a few different reasons. First, on the RIAA side, there seems to be something of a double standard here, as many of the record labels purposely send MP3s to music bloggers to help promote their music... but then they decide to take some down? But the bigger issue was the way that Google was handling the whole issue. Bloggers were upset that entire blog posts just seemed to disappear entirely without any notice at all. Google claimed that it was alerting the bloggers, but it didn't seem to be doing a very good job of it, and making entire posts completely disappear based on the sayso of the record labels seemed to be a bit extreme. So it's good to see that Blogger has entirely revamped its takedown process for Blogger posts that get takedown notices.
First, for those issuing the takedown, they've switched from a manual (send a fax or letter) process to an electronic one -- which has the side benefit that Google can now get those takedown notices to ChillingEffects.org much faster. Google always passes along takedowns to ChillingEffects, but when the notices were faxed or typed it took a while before ChillingEffects could get them up, meaning that if content was taken down, there was often no way for the blogger in question to understand what happened (Google says it always emails the bloggers, but not everyone's email address is up-to-date).
On top of that, Google not only will notify people via email, but will put a notification in the Blogger admin dashboard, so the next time the blogger logs in they'll see it. Finally, and most importantly, to handle the "takedown," rather than totally deleting the posts as before, the posts are switched to draft mode, which allows the blogger to see the post and change it (if necessary). This seems like a much better policy than what Blogger/Google was doing before.
The one that that still seems to be missing (at least in this description) is the counternotice process. The process described in the announcement says that bloggers can adjust their post... but what if they don't believe it's actually infringing (fair use, authorized copy, different content, etc.)? It would be nice if Google also offered an easy counternotice procedure from directly within the Blogger admin as well -- so that a Blogger who has been falsely accused of a copyright violation can quickly counternotice and get the content back up.
