Music Labels Ask Blogs to Post Songs to Promote Artists, Ask Google to Erase Blogs for Posting Songs

[Commentary] Today's news that Google shut down music blogs that were accused of copyright infringement is rightfully getting plenty of coverage. Mostly, it is being held up as another in a long line of examples of problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice-and-takedown system. The notices that Google relied on to delete the blogs were woefully incomplete. Google should not have acted until it had proper notices from rights holders, including the name of the actual work allegedly infringed. Since many of the notices did not even include this information, there was no way for the bloggers to file a DMCA counternotice. It is important that this story is being used to point out problems with the DMCA, and with Google's policies for dealing with DMCA complaints. What it equally important, if less commented on, is what it can tell us about copyright filtering.