Among the informed class of music lovers (of which I obviously include readers of TMT), the caricature of the Big Four record labels, and of the popular music industry in general, is not unlike a suit-wearing version of Star Wars’ Empire leadership. They presumably collude in the dark recesses of their offices. They operate on a presumably amoral basis. And perhaps most importantly, they’re uniformly (if not always blatantly) focused on crushing any and all opposition. Were you aware that their opposition now extends to negative reviews of albums posted on the internet? Well, at least some people think that’s the case.
A bit of background: about a week ago, Henry “Rizoh” Adaso, the founder of the hip-hop website The Rap Up, wrote about the mysterious disappearance of an album review from Google’s search results. The review was a brief, but decidedly not-positive take on rapper Drake’s album Take Care, which was conclusively referred to by Adaso as a “safe-alternative to sleeping pills.”
After investigating, Adaso found that the review was removed on the basis of a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint, initially thought to have been made by Universal Music Group and which included numerous other URLs containing supposedly infringing material. Adaso maintains that the page with his review was entirely innocent, writing “The only UMG property on that page is the artwork, and IT IS fully credited. So what’s the issue here?”
The issue, apparently, is the power given to entertainment companies by the DMCA. As Billboard first reported, it was BPI, the UK’s equivalent of the RIAA, and not UMG, that requested the removal of Adaso’s review. They claim it was a mistake and an “isolated” incident. Their entire statement reads as follows:
BPI uses the DMCA process to request the removal of millions of links in search results to infringing sound recordings every year. We have no intention of ever trying to remove links to reviews or writing about music. In this case, we regret that an isolated error occurred with the effect that we mistakenly asked for a few links to reviews to be removed. Immediately on learning of the mistake, we asked Google to reinstate the links concerned and are undertaking a review of our processes to ensure this does not happen again. We apologise to all concerned for our mistake.
I don’t know. Part of me wants to give BPI the benefit of the doubt. The other part imagines them pointing the Death Star at Alderaan and deceitfully announcing, “You may fire when ready.”
• BPI: http://www.bpi.co.uk
• The Rap Up: http://therapup.net
