Knock, knock. It's Google here.

Yesterday I posted a brief message regarding the release of Bloodbuzz Ohio, a new track from the forthcoming album by The National. The content was as follows......

"Following on from the thrill of seeing Terrible Love on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, now this - available from the band's album specific site. Building up beautifully to the - by now - highly anticipated release of High Violet in May."

And that was it. At the bottom of the message I added a link to the aforementioned track which is available freely for download (for the price of your email address) on the band's site. So, the track is freely open and available, I wasn't offering it for download and you'd be stretching it to suggest that I was infringing any copyright laws. Not so say Google who, now that they're about to cut their losses in China (not that the Chinese will notice), clearly have time on their hands to continue their rather petty witchunt against alleged copyright infringers.

What fucks me off is that someone can make an arbitrary decision to change the status of a blog post to 'Draft' status on foot of supposed (and anonymous) complaint Google received regarding the content. It's unlikely the band's record company made a complaint given the fact that the track is freely available for download and given the fact that, whatever number of people read this blog - Pitchfork this ain't - I was merely advertising the product and pointing them in the direction of the official site.

It all brings me back to a post I made some months back regarding Google's heavy handed approach to bloggers in general with regard to copyrighted material. This is how it is to be it seems. Anyway, should you be interested, here's the text of the aforementioned email.

Oh, and in case you missed it yesterday, you can listen to Bloodbuzz Ohio for free here.

Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to "draft" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again. A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. For more information on our DMCA policy, including how to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/dmca.html. The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org

. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed. If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team