Sunday, December 27, 2009

No Song Post This Weekend

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:

Michael Arthur said...

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!

Unknown said...

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...