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Twitter Forces Tweet Takedown of Leaked 'The National' Album

by Amar Toor on April 27, 2010 at 10:10 AM

Jean Pierre Chigne, who runs his own music blog, recently published a post about 'High Violet,' the new album from The National that leaked last week. At the end of the post, he included a link to the album's Amazon pre-order page, as well as a link to MediaFire, where the song 'Afraid of Everyone' was available for download. After Chigne posted an update to his Twitter page with a link to his blog, he received a message from the site, informing him that the tweet was removed because of a DMCA complaint that someone filed with Twitter.

Strangely enough, the blog post with the leaked track is still online, while the tweet linking to the post has been taken down. Moreover, the song to which the post linked has been available for download on Pitchfork since April 13th -- which is why Chigne figured it was fair game to link to MediaFire. In response, Twitter issued the following statement to Mashable: "In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim."

As ArsTechnica points out, the MP3 in question wasn't even hosted on Chigne's blog, and the tweet itself was only linking to the blog without any copyright infringing material in the text. It seems pretty pointless, then, for the plaintiff to target the more superficial tweet, instead of going straight to MediaFire, or Box.net, where the download is actually hosted. The way we see it, Twitter is like the epidermis of the Internet anatomy. If some sort of irregular skin irritation arises, a good doctor would use the symptom as a clue to help figure out what underlying issue might be at work. A bad doctor, on the other hand, would just treat the symptom and send you home -- which is exactly what happened to Chigne. If anything, copyright holders should be embracing Twitter as an easy means to sniff out the original sources of leaked or infringed material. Attempting to muzzle it, however, only makes their jobs more difficult, and ultimately, achieves nothing. [From: Mashable and ArsTechnica]

Tags: copyrightinfringement, DMCA, download, mp3, music, musicblogs, RecordLabel, socialnetworking, TheNational, top, twitter

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