If you stay up on the latest news in the blogging world, you are no doubt aware of the uproar regarding Google’s recent decision to delete a number of popular music blogs that had been hosted on its Blogger service.
Below, I will link out to and excerpt from a few different sources to give you the background on the story. It is, unquestionably, one that any serious blogger needs to be cognizant of and learn from.
Before I do that though, I want to highlight the first thought that popped into my head after I read that these music blogs – many of which had been around for years, with extensive archives – had been deleted completely from the Blogger service:
BACKUP YOUR CONTENT!!!
If there is one vital lesson that every blogger should learn from this story, it is that. Back up your content. Otherwise, you are needlessly starting from scratch.
The One Vital Lesson: Backup Your Blog Consistently
If you read this site regularly, you know that we are adamant proponents of WordPress and use it on all of our blogs. One of the reasons we love WordPress so much is because of plugins like WP-DB-Backup, which make backing up your database an automated cinch.
Because of our WP obsession, I don’t know Blogger, and I do not know how easy or hard it is to maintain consistent backups of your blog’s content (although a quick Google search can fix that). I would certainly hope that there are systems in place to make it as easy to backup as it is with WordPress.
Regardless, there is no excuse for not having a system in place to backup your blog.
None.
Nada.
Zilch, zero, zoo-hooey. (That last word I just made up because it sounded good and I was in a typing rhythm. Just move along.)
If you use WordPress you should be consistently backing up your database and your wp-content folder. That way, if something goes awry or you get spanked with DELETE hammer, you can be back up and running somewhere else without having lost everything, even if you need to remove something to comply with a DMCA takedown notice.
Now for some quick background on the story of Google’s music blog purge, because the details are important, and a couple more important lessons.
Lesson #2: This Could Happen To You Too
Google shuts down music blogs without warning — (Guardian)
In what critics are calling “musicblogocide 2010″, Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.
While Google’s action may not have come completely out of the blue – the music blogs did receive the DMCA takedown notices prior to action being taken - the fact here is that when you host your blog on a site like Blogger, it does have the right to delete your blog if the powers that be determine that you are violating copyright law or their Terms of Service.
Does this make Blogger inherently bad? No. Not particularly.
This could have happened to hosted WordPress blogs or even to a “self-hosted” blog on a MediaTemple server. Whoever controlled the means by which the blog was powered and online would have received the DMCA takedown notice and been liable if a blog it was hosting violated copyright law.
So, despite another of my initial reactions to this story, it is not really a good one for a hosted v self-hosted blog debate. Again, the issue is that these bloggers did not backup their blogs, so they were royally screwed and out of luck when their accounts and files were deleted.
Lesson #3: Take Notices From Your Blog Host Seriously
Dumb Labels, Laws (not Google) to Blame for Music Blogs Deletion — (Wired)
But the biggest problem here is that the laws and organizations affecting music copyright don’t make any sense when applied to music blogs. Labels often give bloggers permission to post a given track, but that doesn’t stop their representatives from issuing takedown notices for those same songs, as Bill Lipold of I Rock Cleveland noted in Google forums on Wednesday and Thursday.
…
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether music blogs are good or bad for the music industry, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forces Google to take these actions — otherwise, it would lose the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” clause and could be found liable for any copyright infringement on its blogging networks.
…
The accused blogger must file a counter-claim or, after an unquantified number of complaints — valid or otherwise — the law forces Google (or any other blogging platform) to terminate the accounts of “repeat offenders,” even if their only mistake was not to file paperwork against the accusations of an anonymous robot — sad and wrong, but mandated by current law.
I realize that’s a meaty excerpt – and I encourage your to read the full story – but I think this is a very important point to make and I wanted to provide enough of an excerpt to make it.
If/when you receive a notice of any kind from whoever is hosting your blog or from someone making a copyright claim, take it seriously. The Wired article mentions that many of the bloggers did not believe they were in the wrong, yet they did not “know how to” file a counter-claim. Fine. I wouldn’t know how to file a counter-claim either.
But guess what? That’s not an excuse. There are two easy solutions to not knowing how to do something:
- Ask someone
- Google it!
In this day and age of information ubiquity, ignorance of anything really cannot be considered a valid excuse anymore.
Still, just because you file a counter claim does not necessarily mean it will be successful. If you are stubborn and refuse to remove the offending content, you still run the risk of being deemed a repeat offender and having your blog host lay the smack down on your and your blog.
Which brings us back to the main point of this post, and the one vital lesson you should take from this unfortunate story of the day the music blogs died:
BACKUP!
BACKUP!
BACKUP!
BACKUP YOUR CONTENT!
I trust that I have made myself clear.
**********
* – Blogger with horns logo credit: CrawDaddy.com
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
ZOO-HOOEY!
Great article. It was informative AND terrifying, which is a really solid combo.
Crying laughing on the ZOO-HOOEY. I might have to go try and create that page in Wikipedia tonight and link it to Jerod’s as the “creator” of the word!
Jerod,
Great summary of the event. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act widely upheld in the courts and is the one element of Internet that has the attention of big players. Even if the blog wasn’t on a hosted platform, an agent could go after the hosting company or even the domain registrar. The key point you make in your post is control.
If these bloggers were on a hosted platform and they thought they had permission to distribute the copyrighted work, they could have contested the take down notice and let the legal process work. Or, they could have gotten their blog into compliance with DMCA and not lost data.
The death of a blog is a sad thing. I concur! BACKUP!
Mr Morris,
Good writing.
Back up of your blog is very important, but also from your local comuter. This is also very important, and this back up should be kept on a (rewritable) cd or dvd to restore the pc if necessary.
comuter = computer