Takedown

"Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others."

So, Funimation, a subsidiary of Group 1200 Media, a company best known for ruining Dragon Ball Z, has taken action against my blog. Blogger, a subsidiary of Google, have taken down several of my entries of various, seemingly random episodes of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Kai for the incredibly loose offense of "copyright infringement".

Incidentally, Group 1200 Media only have one review on Google.

And it isn't favorable.

Interestingly, while I have shared various clips and videos related to Dragon Ball on this blog before, that doesn't seem to be the common thread with the episode entries Funimation, a company best known for being anti-tax and anti-union, had Google take down. As I said above, they seem random in their selection, other than them all being from Dragon Ball Z or Dragon Ball Kai. Specifically, Dragon Ball Z episodes 89, 277-287, 289-291, and Dragon Ball Kai episode 85, 89, 93, and 105. 

What's really odd there is that in their total purge of the Kid Boo Saga, they left DBZ 288 completely untouched.

Legal joke.

Illegal joke.

So this begs the question - what am I to do about Dragon Blog? On one hand, I like Blogger a lot. It's very user-friendly, runs great on desktop and mobile, and gives my site significant bumps in Google Image search results. On the other hand, if Blogger and Google are going to be this quick to kowtow to Funimation (a company best known for insisting that Sean Schemmel's Kaio-sama was a solid character choice and not a complete assault on good taste) at every whim, how can I trust my content to this website?

See, Dragon Blog is supposed to end.

(Not if they've got anything to say about it.)

Once I've watched, recapped, and reviewed every episode and feature in the Dragon Ball meta series, this website is intended to recede into an archival state - perhaps with the occasional bout of new content here or there until death's icy grasp keeps me from thinking about Goku - but still very much completed... and kept in a single place to be viewed at any time. If Blogger is going to take down these random episodes without explanation or my side of the story, how can I trust that my little blog will survive another sweep of corporate automated copyright flagging? 

The trick is, I don't know. I'm feeling a bit at a loss here.

But here's the good news. Those entries weren't deleted by Blogger, simply reverted back to their Draft state. Which means I can still see them, edit them, and even republish them. Or take screencaps of them and put them in this entry.

The Cell jokes Funimation doesn't WANT you to SEE!

Blogger's rub is this: "If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account." So if I don't take the copyrighted content out before republishing, and they find out, the post will be deleted. But what is the copyrighted content? They haven't said. Funimation (a company best known for giving an Evangelical Christian/Statutory Rapist a career in entertaining vulnerable underaged women) hasn't said. Which means I have no idea what I'm supposed to alter.

So I'm going to think about this. Feel free to chime in with your 2 cents below. I'm not going to leave these entries in limbo forever. But whether I republish them here, or take my entire blog elsewhere, I can't yet say. But for now, I think I know what I have to do.