Being a music blogger, I feel conflicted about this article. The issue of DMCA take down notices and Google's blind obliging has been a problem for a long time. It has affected many bloggers that do play by the rules. It sucks that Google gets to be the judge and jury in these cases, because really, I doubt anyone at Google cares about who is in the right; they just want to avoid hassles over Copyright.

These and all music bloggers know what they are getting into when they set up their blogs. It is no secret that music piracy is a major issue for the RIAA, and posting mp3s publicly definitely puts you at risk. While there are many bloggers that work hard to promote the music they love, and provide links for users to buy the music legitimately, there are many others that just want to attract traffic by giving away free shit. All of the music bloggers are often put in the same pile either way.

The music bloggers who were affected by these take downs may be playing the poor me game, but did have the power to prevent what happened by self-hosting their blogs, enabling them to truly own and protect their content. I hope this current round of of publicity encourages more bloggers of all types to take ownership over the content they labour over.