Or quote him, or quote the Saker, or link to any other writer on the Unz Review. I received this notice from Blogger yesterday:
We have received a DMCA complaint for your blog, Vox Popoli. An e-mail with the details of the complaint was sent to you on Sep 30, 2016, and we reset the post status to “Draft”; you can edit it here. You may republish the post with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.
The complaint was related to a post entitled Cold War II, in which I extensively quoted The Saker and provided a link to The Saker’s article on the Unz Review from which I quoted. There are three problems here.
- It is obnoxious to file a DMCA complaint instead of directly contacting the writer with a request to take down or modify his post. My words get quoted, repeated, copied, and even plagiarized every day, and I have never filed a DMCA complaint about anyone. This is only the second DMCA complaint I have received; the first was from SFWA when they wanted to hide their embarrassing report about me from the public.
- I have an email from the Saker giving me permission to utilize all of his work; we’re even planning to release a collection of his excellent work on the Russian invasion of Syria in an ebook one day.
- The Saker told me that the rights to his work have been released to the public under one form of GPL or another; I’ll have to look it up to determine precisely which license it is.
So, until I a) hear from someone at the Unz Review, b) the DMCA complaint is either withdrawn at their own request or Blogger is informed that it is illegitimate and was filed by someone without the rights to do so, and c) I am assured that no DMCA complaints will be made against VP or AG in the future by anyone in their organization, I will neither cite nor link to anything on the Unz Review.
Caveat: if I go to the trouble of successfully counter-claiming and proving that I have the rights to quote the Saker as I see fit, I will continue to read and quote and link to him.
Lest anyone doubt that I am serious about this, I should mention that there was a strategy-related service that used to send me emails, unrequested, every day. One day, after I posted a quote from one of their emails and linked to their site as I had previously done from time to time, they sent me an email demanding that I stop posting quotes from their emails. So, I promptly unsubscribed, and after a few months went by and they realized they had lost an amount of regular traffic, they asked me to resubscribe and start linking to their posts again. I declined to do so, having found superior alternatives in the meantime, and spamfiled them. That was years ago. I haven’t visited their site or read a single email from them since. I don’t even know if they’re still around.
If any site doesn’t want a writer with monthly traffic of ~3 million pageviews providing them with links and traffic, that’s fine. I am too busy to waste time working with fools, the obnoxious, or the obtuse, and I have a surfeit of prospective sources from which to draw. I already feel that I don’t read half the material or address one-quarter the subjects I should. Regardless, as you can see, I have removed Steve Sailer from the list of Day Trips on the sidebar so as not to risk any future violations.
And just to be clear, I’m not blaming Ron Unz, Steve Sailer, or The Saker for this. I tend to doubt any of them even knew about it.
UPDATE: This appears to be an SJW attack on the Unz Review. He said the following in the comments:
Someone mentioned this situation to me. As might be guessed, this was the first I’d heard of it, and I assume it’s some sort of hoax intended as petty harassment by some random activist on the Internet. Anyway, I’m not too familiar with either these DMCA complaints or how Blogger works, but if you’ll drop me a note explaining whom I should email to explain that it’s fraudulent, I’ll be glad to do so.
Regards,
Ron Unz, Publisher
I have, of course, restored the link to Steve Sailer at the Unz Review and I will be contacting Blogger accordingly.
UPDATE: I have filed a counter-complaint with Blogger, citing Mr. Unz’s statement as proof that the complainant did not have the right to the content. That should suffice to resolve the issue.