Yesterday, NBC helped pull the plug on one of the more popular sites in the blogosphere — albeit briefly.
Usain Bolt‘s world record victory in the 200 meter dash, as many likely know, took place on Wednesday morning and was delayed several hours before finally being telecast at night on NBC. The race had already been broadcast in other countries. Awful Announcing posted a video of the BBC feed of the race a few hours before NBC had a chance to air it in prime time.
By the end of the night, the video, as well as the entire site had been taken down. NBC Universal notified Google, which owns Blogger, of possible copyright infringement, which led to Google knocking Awful Announcing offline for approximately 90 minutes.
Brian Powell, who operates Awful Announcing, explains:
“Yes, it was NBC Universal who sent in a copyright infringement to Google/Blogger. Sometime last evening, to cover their own backside, Google decided to shut my site off and post that it was in violation. No warning, no notice. I was away from the computer when it happened so as soon as I noticed I got to work on figuring out what the issue was. … I was in the process of seeing what else could be done when the site magically came back on after about an hour and a half. Still no notice from Google or NBC.
At about 10:30, I received a message from NBCU’s piracy department stating that I was in violation for using the BBC feed of the Usain Bolt 200 Meter Finals and ordered to remove any related. There was a brief email exchange about lawyers, copyrighting ‘newsworthy events’ is unlawful, etc, but in the end I decided to just cut my losses and remove the video.
Google reserves the right to remove whatever they want, and as long as I’m under their umbrella there’s nothing I can really fight.”
