Last week, I wrote about copyright and creative commons for bloggers, and I want to revisit that briefly today. Thanks to Steve, I’ve been reading PlagiarismToday.com, who had a post about the problems bloggers are having with Google’s DMCA policy. Essentially, Google isn’t keeping records of DMCA take-down requests and is removing blog posts without notifying the bloggers. When the bloggers request information about the DMCA take-down request, Google can’t (or won’t) provide it. Google also seems to be making it difficult to submit DMCA take-down requests, requiring them to be submitted via snail mail or fax instead of email.
I’m not aware of any copyright problems with my blogs; however, I reviewed the policies of some other blogging platforms (+ Twitter), and they’re all pretty straightforward and specify how to request a DMCA take-down. Here are the links to these sources:
Anyway, I wanted to pass this information along today. It’s a good idea to review the DMCA policies of your blogging platform or web host (mine didn’t have one that I could find), and it’s always a good idea to backup your work on a local machine in case you ever need to provide proof of ownership to a third party. Happy blogging!
