No blog post this weekend. My mother has been in and out of the hospital this weekend. She's better now, but I'm still upset and exhausted. I was going to try to do a short blog, but then I found out I got a DMCA take-down notice for a song I got from frikkin' Minnesota Public Radio. For crying out loud.
It turns out I was wrong about which band I got the take down notice on last time. They don't actually feel the need to inform me of which song is in question, so through process of elimination, I figured out that it's actually a band I thought was pretty cool. The sucky thing is it was a band I really liked, and their labels' tag line says something about real artists doing music their own way. Well, I guess it is their own way, huh?
I took the song down and I wrote a very expressive letter to the band manager and the internet marketing manager about why I thought this was an unfair action on their part. I can understand if I had ripped the song to mp3 myself, but I didn't. I linked to the song from an affiliate of National Public Radio. Have I already said for crying out loud?
2 comments:
A similar thing happened to me with a band that I'm actually friends with. I had linked to another source (who had given me permission), but a year later, the band was signed and someone in some legal office issued an anonymous cease and desist against me. It was very creepy, the sense of helplessness.
I reached out to the band and they apologized and felt really terrible (sincerely), but when a legal department of a bureaucracy gets involved, there's not much you can do . . . except keep on keeping on.
Happy New Year!
Thank you for commenting. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who feels this way. I had this whole diatribe written in my head, but I decided I don't want to be pissed off. There's too much crap out there to be pissed about.
I did e-mail the manager and the American label to let them know that I feel like I play fairly, and I don't appreciate it when I'm not dealt with fairly in return. I got a very petty e-mail back from the manager, which makes me even less likely to promote the band.
I'm not a musician, but I'm a writer, and I think about marketing and copyright control a lot. If I do ever get to a point where I can market my writing, I want control over my material. I don't want some third party arbitrarily deciding who can post what and what can be posted.
All I can do is use what little tiny bit of clout I have as a blogger, and hopefully every other blogger will refuse to be pushed around, too. We don't have much control individually, but when you consider how many of us there are...
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