Clarity In the War on Blogs? - Blogger Updates DMCA Complaint Policy

Back in February we covered an interesting situation brewing in the world of music blogging.  At the time, many bloggers were experiencing a complete removal of content from their sites due to DMCA copyright policy without any real insight into what infringements they may have committed.  Clearly this raised many eyebrows, but resulted in very little explanation from any official sources.

Six months later Blogger has issued an in-depth statement and associated shift in policy on the situation:

“Starting today, we’ve changed how we handle these situations:

DMCA Complaints are handled via a web form.

Complaints are sent to ChillingEffects.org automatically.

Blogger notifies affected users through their dashboard as well as by e-mail.

Blog posts are reset to draft status and are not deleted.

We realize this birthday present isn’t for everyone—we’d hope most of you never receive a complaint. But music bloggers are a large segment of our users—and we know that for those who’ve received one or more DMCA complaints in the past, this may have been a frustrating experience. Please take care to remove the offending content once notified of the complaint—once you do, you can republish the original post so your audience will continue to have access to the other content contained in the post.”

Follow the link to get the complete explanation and rundown of policy changes.

Overall this is an important step towards legitimizing the sometimes rocky and consistently undefined relationship between music bloggers and the recorded music industry.   The blurry line between promotion and piracy has created too much sparring and only served as a detriment to what both sides hope to achieve - creating awareness for deserving artists.

As most folks close to this know all too well, the majority of music bloggers often get a bad rap for passing along music they’ve been handed directly from label sources.  On the flip side, those that are truly guilty of infringement hide behind the ethical justification that the guidelines are unclear.  Infusing transparency into the situation helps to define those lines a little better, and allow for more accountability on both sides.

A win today for bloggers, Blogger, and just about everyone.