Paul Haig Day
You know, it’s fucking ridiculous, but I am not sure what the overwhelming emotion of this post is for me. It’s either warm appreciation of Paul Haig for his support and attitude towards a good friend of mine, or it’s sheer frustrated annoyance that this kind of thing is necessary in the first place. Sadly, I think it might be the latter.
To explain, a while back my friend JC from the Vinyl Villain posted about Paul Haig, former Josef K frontman, and possibly the coolest individual from the last time Edinburgh had anything like this vibrant a music scene. JC is a big fan, and was absolutely delighted that Paul and his management got in touch to thank him for his post. Then, the next day, he was absolutely gutted to find that his post had been deleted by Google after three Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints had been made against it within about five minutes.
Now, given that the only people with any right to make that complaint had already been in touch with JC to thank him for the post, who the fuck made these infringement complaints? Over-zealous legal interns at some obscure distribution company in the States? Someone with a personal grudge against JC filing nuisance complaints? Of course, this is very reason why the DMCA is such comically bad law. Which corrupt clowns drew it up and then signed it into fucking law I don’t know, but they should really be made to walk the streets of the world in nothing but a fucking frilly tutu for their craven idiocy.
Google, when they receive these complaints are obliged to remove the allegedly infringing material immediately. They are then legally not liable for any damage caused to the victim of the complaint’s business by virtue of a potentially frivolous complaint. Now, Google don’t merely revert the offending post to ‘draft’ mode or something sensible like that, or lock it, or anything, so that the actual merits of the complaint can be ascertained. No, they just delete it forever, and getting a response from a counter-claim is like pulling fucking teeth, despite what their terms and conditions would seem to suggest. They presumably have no desire to actually examine the veracity of these complaints because it could potentially cost them a fucking fortune. As it is, this job has been outsourced to Chilling Effects, which is basically run by a team of volunteers – their backlog may be as bad as a year at the moment.
This is a fucking disgrace, and it is something we should all be very worried about, because it signifies a very powerful and very scary change in how the law works: guilt by accusation. In this situation the actual factual accuracy of the accusation is irrelevant – a blogger’s work can be destroyed simply by someone making an accusation, irrespective of the truth. Remind you of anything? Yes, another fucking diabolical piece of legislation which the big media companies are trying to jam up our arses at the moment: three strikes and you’re out internet disconnections. The European Court has ruled against this nonsense on the basis that the internet is becoming a fundamental utility in the Twenty-First Century, but they didn’t mention the simple fact that accusation does not mean guilt, and that this is supposed to be the very cornerstone of a civillised legal system. And the French government is pressing ahead with their plans to implement it nevertheless.
So what are we left with? Feudalism, basically. Guilty unless you are prepared to take on a massive corporation in the courts of law and risk total ruin and bankruptcy. Justice by might, rather than right. Brilliant. Vic from Muruch is the only person I know of so far who has been brave enough to actually fight any of this, primarily because she knew for absolute certainty that she was in the right, because Muruch is a 100% legal music blog, but for most people they simply submit to the legal hatchet jobs and either soldier on or end up quitting. I can’t stress how brave Vic’s actions were, however. People with houses and families don’t want to be on the receiving end of the music industry’s famously ludicrous damages claims, recently upheld by Barack fucking Obama thank you very much. And once law becomes about accusation rather than guilt the world could become a very scary place indeed. It is already happening in other fields, and we should be very, very worried about this.
So a big thank you to Paul Haig and his management for their support during this bloody nonsense. Please show your appreciation for their efforts in putting out a press release highlighting this silliness, as well as making Reason available for free download as a statement of intent. Feel free to show it by buying something from here, for instance. Once the artists and the fans turn on this fucking rotten law who are we left with who will speak up for it? Ah yes, the grasping whores who made a merry living for years fleecing both of us. Never let anyone tell you that this is about encouraging art or protecting artists. It’s just another major industry trying to throw their weight around as their self-importance and onanistic sense of personal entitlement consistently fail to be matched by reality.
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Paul Haig – Let’s Face the Music and Dance
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You sir, are an absolute star.
Thanks for such a brilliant piece of writing….
The response today has been quite astonishing.
I agree. Powerful writing.
Surely this kind of time/money is fairly inconsequential to a company responsible for ’street map’ and other such nonsense. Laziness is their only excuse.
sorry forgot to quote. that was in reference to-’They presumably have no desire to actually examine the veracity of these complaints because it could potentially cost them a fucking fortune.’
Actually, I am not sure about that. If they set any kind of precendent like that then with all the mp3 blogs, pirate full album blogs, illegal bootlegs on YouTube etc then it could cost them an absolute fortune if they were established as being liable for damages for every infringement.
Bear in mind that entertainment companies are pretty desperate at the moment, and are making some outlandish damages claims. It could be very messy, were this to kick off.
It’s not just sad. That is recent law, it was railroaded through by the media companies, and it’s fucking shit. This is the problem you get when law is entirely written by lobbyists, corrupt politicians and people who can buy access, with no representation for actual human beings. Any lawyer would know that this law is fundamentally flawed, but with money comes ‘Hear No Evil, See No Evil, etc etc..’. It’s both enraging and depressing at the same time.
It’s textbook corruption: people doing things that they absolutely must know are stupid, simply because they are rewarded for being good little doggies. Or simply not even glancing at it long enough to know or care and just passing it into law with a wave of a well-greased palm.
No look what they’ve made me do: three-post fucking mentalism, and it’s not even 10am yet.
wow…deja vu!
There was no point leaving that angry goodness on IM!
Have you used up your typing quota for the day now, Matthew?
I was doing my usual trawl through my favourite blogs. Read this and headed off to Clicky Clicky Music Blog and look what I found:
http://jbreitling.blogspot.com/
Basically, if you’re a blogger, don’t be on Blogger, seems to be a fair lesson to learn from all this nonsense. It’s fucking ludicrous.
Maybe it’s time to start organising some guerilla complaints against big legitimate targets, so that they can understand how fucking stupid their own laws really are.
That would make a statement in itself wouldn’t it?
If all the music blogs just upped and left Blogger?
I know the DMCA ghouls would just set their hounds on whichever hosts everyone migrated to, but the initial action might draw some attention..
So how come such a charming young man, as you are Toad, managed to escape the nasty little people?
Do these myopic little idiots not realise what a good PR job these blogs do, and i mean this across the board, for old, new, undiscovered, never-discovered, upcoming, established music and acts alike.
we’re going to buy the music in the end!!!
breathless and speechless.
What I hear from my label contacts is that the legal departments of the major labels are some of the most conservative, unimaginative and dogmatic people they have ever encountered.
The other difficulty is that a record released here by nice people, can be licensed to a label in the States, who then send it for distribution to not nice people, and getting the various tentacles of that particular octopus to talk to one another is nigh-on impossible.
I have avoided all this hassle by being self-hosted, and not being on Blogger. The benefit of this is that Wordpress is just software for running your site, nothing else, so it you have problems you can host it in bloody Gaza if you want to. Wordpress themselves don’t have anything to do with it, so it is unlikely that there would ever be one single host to which everyone migrated.
Ideal, then.
not ideal at all really……
Fucking silly. And of course, it makes it morally impossible to take the high ground, but try and take it they do, insisting that everyone who opposes them is some sort of thief or criminal. I go from sad to angry to despressed and back again once every couple of days.
Sorry I didn’t get over here until now, but I wanted to chime in and say well done and all, and nicely written and thanks, xoxooxxo!
and yes, oh gawd, I go from sad to angry to depressed to paranoid to furious to hateful to self-hating to … oh you know it all by now…
but I am listening to POBKWT right now, really, really loud in my kitchen over dinner prep and just feeling so much squishy lovey gooey feelings for all of you toadlings that I could burst. And they will never be able to kill the thing that music blogging has given us, regardless of how many threats they throw our way.
So, Matthew add to that list of feelings, solidarity and true affection for the courage of our dear, dear, friends in all of this, the end.
Thanks for the compliments, links, and most of all, helping me escape Blogger!
Had I known that fighting Google all those months (to my own site’s detriment) would do absolutely nothing to alter their censorship practices, I wouldn’t have bothered.
As I’ve said many times before, I do sympathize with the company’s need to protect themselves. But my dispute was with the lack of notice before and after deletion, their failure to verify the claim before censoring my 100% legal posts, and the ridiculously difficult counter claim process. Particularly since they admitted they’d become aware IFPI was filing false, or at least questionable, claims.
All of this, along with Google’s forcing Feedburner users to merge w/ Google accounts and their lack of transparency (not to mention invasion of privacy) in adding tracking cookies to Adsense accounts, makes it hard to defend them any longer.
The problem is obviously much larger than Google and will only be resolved once the major labels (who sadly handle distribution for smaller labels) get their enforcement agencies under control, but Google is not exactly without power themselves. If nothing else, they should come up with a more just system for users who have already filed successful counter claims, and shown themselves to be following copyright laws.