It’s not often I blog out of spite* but Jeremy Keith has just blogged a story of an internet bully that gets my blood boiling.
Jeremy has the full story here, but a quick summary is that a forum had a discussion on whether having perfect pitch was a born or learned skill. In a comment, someone referenced a website called www.perfectpitch.com and mentioned politely that they didn’t think it would work.
I think that is referring to www.PerfectPitch.com. I’m not saying anything about such commercially-oriented courses because I don’t know them, but I think we’d all be wise to bear in mind the general comments voiced in the first two posts on this thread.
The owner of www.perfectpitch.com then filed a cease and desist citing the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act so Google have removed that page from their index. This is such a blatent, cynical and hideous abuse of the DMCA that I can’t quite believe they’ve done it.
Jeremy explains he believes they did this as his site ranked higher in the search engine results pages than www.perfectpitch.com.
The Session has pretty good Google juice. The markup is pretty lean, the content is semantically structured and there’s plenty of inbound links. Could it be that the owner of perfectpitch.com sent a DMCA complaint to Google simply because another site was getting higher rankings for the phrase “perfect pitch”? If so, then that’s a whole new level of SEO snake-oilery.
I just can’t believe I’ve spent the last 3 weeks trying to defend the SEO industry and saying we’re trying to do good, and then some stupid ignorant company does this to prove everyone’s point, that we’re a sick and self-serving industry.
So anyway, I love what BoingBoing do when they’re served stupid and irrelevant abuses of the DMCA - they mock them and ensure more people see what the abuser want hidden than would have seen it before the notice. Hey www.perfectpitch.com, I believe it’s called the Streisand Effect.
So here is a blog post about Perfect Pitch - hopefully given that my pagerank is higher than theirs, this might appear in the search results.
* Ok that might be an exaggeration, but I’m trying not to.
This post is tagged under: SEO
Official Statement from PerfectPitch.com
Re: Google DMCA Removal of a Blog Page
To All Readers:
Here at PerfectPitch.com we made a big mistake.
We instructed Google to block a blog site managed by Jeremy Keith, citing that they were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA). As per our request, Google did indeed remove this page from their search listings.
We wish to formally apologize to Mr. Keith and his bloggers for this mistake, for which we are deeply regretful.
Please understand that we had no intention whatsoever to suppress the speech on Mr. Keith’s page. Please know that we are ardent supporters and advocates of free speech for everyone.
We recognize this was a careless error, and there is really no excuse for this. Nevertheless, please permit us a moment to explain.
Here’s what happened:
We were actually submitting to Google a list of sites that were illegally distributing copies of our copyrighted intellectual property. We of course have every right to request that Google have these sites removed from their search engine results because we believe these sites violate the DMCA, which prohibits the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials over the internet.
To our shock and horror, an employee of ours mistakenly included Mr. Keith’s site in our list, merely because it made a reference to illegal copies of our course. Naturally, this is not grounds for removal of this page at Google. Our intention was only to remove actual pages where the course is being illegally distributed, and not any pages of free speech, such as Mr. Keith’s blog. This was a misjudgment and error on our employee’s side, and on behalf of our company, we sincerely apologize.
This event has never happened to us before when reporting illegal distribution of our materials. Please rest assured that we will redouble our efforts to ensure this never happens again.
We have requested that Google immediately reinstate this page in their search results, along with our apology to Google as well.
If we have offended any potential musicians who wished to purchase our best-selling, university verified ear training methods, again, we sincerely apologize. To make it up to you, we would invite you to try our courses at a substantial discount not offered to the general public, valid until the end of this month. Please go here to retrieve your special offer with our apologies:
http://www.discount-offer.perfectpitch.com
Again, please accept our sincere regrets for this goof.
Happy blogging, everyone.
Sincerely yours,
Gary Boucherle
http://www.PerfectPitch.com
Contact: http://www.PerfectPitch.com/contactus.htm