Imagine this: your blog posts mysteriously disappear. You didn't delete them, and your ISP or blog host didn't tell you they deleted them. Who could be the culprit?
Google, perhaps. The giant corporation that dominates all aspects of our lives, from email to chat to location, may also be sneaking into blogspot and deleting music-related posts.
It happened to local blog Ryan's Smashing Life, and it could happen to you. Though Ryan tried to follow label reps' wishes, only sharing songs they provided, plenty of his archived posts still got deleted without warning. The same thing happened to other bloggers, many of whom are switching from Google's Blogger over to WordPress or other blogging platforms as a result.
So Is the RIAA (or Google) right to go after people posting music online?
As LA Weekly notes, "the dynamics of promotion have changed dramatically" online, and blogs are actually useful tools for creating buzz about an album or band. As long as only one or two tracks get out, it'll almost certainly help sales more than hurt them. Plus, publicists are often the ones sending out tracks to bloggers, anyway: "I can easily believe that one hand sends out the mp3s and the other bears a C&D letter," said Wendy Seltzer of Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which tracks cease and desist notices.
Ashley Jex of Rock Insider envisions a future where blog publishing platforms can identify copyrighted content and prevent bloggers from publishing it. This would be preferable to deleting content after the fact, but raises questions of how works will be copyrighted, and how "copyrighted" works can be shared if the creators so desire. There are a lot of kinks to work out—but deleting original content (which a blog post is, even if it contains links to copyrighted material) is not the right action to take.
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