I came across an interesting item on "The Real Blogger Status" today. It's in a post called "Recovering A Deleted Post" - which is itself interesting. But what caught my eye was this:
The choices of recovery / restore may depend upon how the deletion / removal occurred.
(1) Deleted by Blogger - Saved as Draft, because of DMCA violation accusation.
...
Well, that's interesting. It made me wonder: If Blogger were to do this to an old post of yours, delete it and save it as a draft, would they inform you? Or would past posts be silently slipping away into draft status?
I decided to check for myself. I know that I have numerous posts saved as draft. In some cases I started them, lost interest, and set them aside for later. In other cases I had a germ of an idea but didn't get around to doing anything with it. Other times I accidentally created a post from an online article using the blogger toolbar, or simply put something together as a post with no intention of publishing it.
Still, when I opened my list of draft posts, there were a few that looked completed, published even. One dealt with the issue of advertising back in February of 2009. Did Google decide that this crossed the line on its rules for people publishing ads not drawing attention to the ads, and put the blog into a draft status?
There are two others in draft status that dealt with the issue of racism in politics. Unlike the "Advertising" piece, neither of these posts had been assigned labels. And both of these posts seem to lack conclusions. Did I just get tired of writing them and save them for later?
NOTE: In a post published the same day as the "Advertising" post was written, I wrote this:
I have a different post about one-third done, but I'm going to hold off on it. It's nothing time-critical, anyway.
So it looks like I was the one who put that post in draft status.
Still, if you use Blogger, it might be worth your while to review your posts that are currently in Draft, to see if Blogger has been quietly flagging your posts for suspected DMCA violations.
The narcissistic primarily autobiographical blog of the pseudonymous d.b. echo
I have recent, if slightly different experience with this: last spring I moved my blog over to wordpress and transferred all my old posts there as well, then deleted the blogger site after an interval of time.
ReplyDeleteRecently, someone took over the old URL, then used the Web Archive Wayback Machine site to dig out my old posts and put them back up, word for word. I suspect the purpose was to set up some sort of dummy blog with old deleted posts, in order to fill it up with ads.
Anyway, when I saw this happening I wrote to Blogger (and Google) directly, and filled out a DMCA complaint. I suspect this is what they mean by "copyright violation accusations", not that Blogger goes looking for violators itself.