I received a notice from Blogger support saying that they had received our DMCA takedown notice (here, edited):

We have received your DMCA take-down notice on EDITED OUT URL dated 03/13/10 and have reviewed the allegedly infringing content in question. In accordance with our policies, we have taken the content offline and notified the blogger of the complaint. Should the content reappear at this post with the infringing content included, please let us know and we will take further action.

Now a few things trouble me.

• The first is that this was received on 03/19/10, a full six days after the DMCA notice was sent to Blogger. My understanding of the DMCA is that they need to respond expeditiously to complaints, yet this complaint took a full six days to respond to. I have no doubt of the guilt – it was a work I created myself.
• The second is that the blog is simply a zombie blog used as backup for links already on other sites. This is an extremely common practice. A pirate will post the same set of links to several associated sites, then link those sites all together to build up page rank value. It is clear if you look a this blog that it is filled with links to other unauthorized materials – I guess the folks at Blogger Support just ignore anything other than complaints.
• The third is the lack of admission that they are acknowledging confirmation of the legitimacy of the complaint to a DMCA takedown notice but just following their own policies. Now every site should have its own internal policies for dealing with DMCA notices, but that really isn’t relevant to their relationship with me and my content.
• The fourth is that the pirate blogger has now been notified that he’s been caught in this instance; fair warning so he can know he needs to replicate links elsewhere.

I am going to document my dialog with Blogger. In reply to the message above on 03/19/10,  I have asked the following in reply:

Thank you. Im sorry but, can you tell me when you took the page offline? Im noting that the request took place on 03/13/10 and I was notified on 03/19/10. This doesn’t seem expeditious.

So should I expect a response? I would certainly hope they would, though there is no requirement for them to tell me this information, nor does there seem to be any requirement for them to disclose the identity of the pirate (who is clever enough to use Domains By Proxy to hide his identity with the URL associated with the Blogger account). They have no motivation to help. After all, free, pirated content brings eyes to this Blogger powered site, and its only a financial loss to my company.

Some of these are extremely geeky and you may not recognize them, or inversely they may seem like the best products – only done wrong by Apple.

OpenDoc. Apple had this fantastic feature called Publish and Subscribe that, for its time, was a step beyond templating and was a powerful linking and embedding solution that promised much. Mac developers were at first ecstatic at its power, but dismayed at how hard it was to program for – I know one company that never did recover after investing in this technology and then Apple pulling the rug out from under it.

HyperCard. Are you kidding? HyperCard was fantastic! It was the tool that turned a generation of Mac users into scripters and developers.  It was even available on the Apple II GS for a while. Third parties have done HyperCard better, especially Runtime Revolution. I don’t diss HyperCard, I diss Steve Jobs for terminating it, even as HyperCard 3.0 was being shown around – and not even selling it off or open sourcing it.

Apple USB Mouse. It seems all the sites out there that already did their dissing agree that the hocky puck was not meant to be held in ones hand. What they also failed to mention was that Apple was so insecure about this that they repeatedly warned customers that it might not work with any other Mac.

Keyboardless iPhone.  I want what I had years ago when I carried a Palm V to trade shows and managed to do all my note taking, calendaring and email with two small devices – the Palm V (with very, very slim modem) and the expandable, foldable keyboard.  At least two companies have come out and discussed making one. I have met many people who want one. Could it be that Apple is worried an external keyboard will cut into its Mac lap top sales?

Mac OS X 10.0. Steve Jobs himself said it would take three or so iterations to get this one right – and he was right. Mac OS X 10.x should have been a free public beta until Mac OS X 10.3. That Mac OS X 10.0 also shipped with woefully underpowered hardware to run it was the other half of the problem. Third party developers struggled with every minor and .1 release as Apple changed APIs to get it right; worse that the third party developers would get blamed for trusting the APIs to work.

What about….

Yeah, there are others that are troubling – too expensive, poorly implemented…or both. Maybe I’ll do a follow up on those, especially underpowered pieces of crap like the Mac II vi and vx. Those products though don’t have an undercurrent of betraying the customer or developer.

The legislature failed to create a tax the beer; I don’t know all the details as to why if failed, but there  were good reasons why it should have.

Like many tax propositions that get shot down in Oregon, it totally ignored how the industry works, making it overly complicated for the industry and unpopular.

The simple solution to taxing a glass of beer is to tax a glass of beer.

Go ahead and tax each served alcoholic beverage $.25 at the restaurant, inn or tavern – lets not leave out the wine and scotch and waters. Make it simply a  restaurant tax on the product, and put it on the serving itself, not an arbitrary amount of fluid ounces – in other words, it taxes the unit as a form of consumption tax.

Yes, that puts on the restaurants to collect, and there is a certain arbitrariness to unit sales. That’s $.25 on a pitcher or beer or on a 12 ounce glass.  So what? It is a ticket item that is in line with the process of delivering a single product unit to a customer.

When you create your hub, you will be sent directly to the hub, without setting up log in credentials. To do that, all you need to do is try to add another page – then you can claim your hub. Be warned though – Unhub will set up a cookie so that every time you return to Unhub, you are shuttled directly to your own Unhub page,  rather than to the site’s home page.