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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

http://jbreitling.blogspot.com/