Last night I received my first Takedown Notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from CBS Interactive, who own TechRepublic.com, asking me to take down a post on my Windows 7 News site that included content from a Tech Republic blog on Windows 7 Launch Party Games because ‘CBSi’s copyrighted content is reproduced without permission’:
Now I will hold my hand up straight away and say that we didn’t ask for permission to use the content from the TechRepublic blog and I immediately took down the offending content (which only generated around 1k page views). But, the TechRepublic site is a blog and like other blogs encourages readers to share its content:
So, did I really do something that warranted a Takedown Notice? I believe that it is common practice for blogs to link to each other and to promote each other’s posts and the ‘share’ feature on the original source even encouraging readers to do so. If I had used the share feature and posted the content on digg or facebook or any other social networking site, would CBS’ lawyers have come after me in a similar fashion?
What really upset me about the Takedown Notice is that we didn’t in any way try to pass off the content as our own and very clearly in not one, but TWO places made it very clear where the content come from:
Fact, blogs link to each other. If the TechRepublic blog isn’t a true blog then they really need to stop masquerading as one and trying to cash in on the buzz around ‘blogs’.
What do you think? Do you think TechRepublic and CBS were too heavy handed?
