With goal able to shoot department
The music industry’s war against streaming sites continues. And as with any war, there’s also collateral damage. As we now have been saying for a while, this can be a completely unnecessary war to start with. There are many perfectly legal uses of such sites, none of which infringe anyone’s copyright. Therefore, the industry is in search of a tool that might be used for the breach, somewhat than the breach itself.
And if the plan is actually to carpet bomb a distinct segment category of sites on the Internet, that plan will obviously have some flaws. In fact, that is the problem with attempting to broadly remove site types from the list. One example could be the music industry group in Spain Many sites have been faraway from Googlemost of which were indeed stream ripping sites. Most, but not all.
Now MP3.to has done what many sites don’t do in these situations: it has retained its lawyer. This attorney issued a cease-and-desist notice to Promusicae, calling its request false and defamatory. The notice details what MP3.to does and doesn’t do and why the allegations made by the industry group are simply flawed. An identical letter was also sent to Google.
Ultimately, Google reviewed the letter and restored the site to go looking indexing and reinstated the AdSense account. And while Promusicae hasn’t bothered to comment publicly on any of those issues, the general impression is that this was an inadvertent takedown request because the industry group didn’t understand what MP3.to was actually doing.
But is not that exactly the problem? Google’s comments on this matter confer with a desire to balance the protection needs of copyright owners with the must protect non-infringing web sites from such malicious takedowns. But when this type of collateral damage occurs, it’s clear that the balance has been upset. Promusicae won’t suffer any punishment here for its stumbles and clumsiness. But MP3.is definitely yes. So where is the balance?
And where is the balance for other sites which are also non-infringing but have also been removed as a part of the same Promusicae request?
These sites may either not realize they’ve been taken down or don’t have any legal representation to fight back, as MP3.to did. Either way, they continue to be injured, regardless that they should not be. This is because Promusicae doesn’t do its due diligence before sending these malicious takedown notices.
Should we actually just accept this collateral damage because we kowtow to the copyright holders?
Filed Under: copyright, streaming
