Google found itself at the centre of a lot of criticism when it shut down seven popular music blogs without warning last week. The blogs in question Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, I Rock Cleveland, Masala, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap, Ryan’s Smashing Life, and Living Ears had in some cases, up to five years of music writing dumped from Google’s Blogger servers without notification for alleged US copyright infringement.

Maddeningly, many of the offending MP3s in question on these blogs were actually approved by bands and record labels. Miscommunication between some tiers in the music industry led to legal reps for these labels issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to Google despite the fact that marketing and PR wings of the same company had sent the bloggers the tracks in the first place. In one bizarre case, a DMCA notice requested that the band BLK JKS remove their own song from their official site.

To complicate things further, the correspondence the bloggers received from Google didn’t specify what songs were the cause of the infringement making it very difficult, as suggested by Google to file a counter-claim. If you don’t know what you did wrong exactly, how can you correct it? (more…)

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