Back online
While I wasn’t thrilled to get shut down for 12 hours, I’m determined to salvage some sort of lesson for independent music business out of all this. That’s what I do.
Well, I’m not sure what caused the suspension of my account overnight, but it happened outside of the hosting service’s office hours, and as far as I can figure, it seems to have been the result of a faulty Wordpress plugin, exacerbated by a massive increase in traffic.
Sorry to the people who phoned and got my voicemail — I was actually out DJ-ing when it happened.
In the meantime, I’ve received a huge number of emails from people concerned about what might have happened to the site. After all, there was a lot of material for a suspicious mind to work with there.
Helpless Desk
Despite the company’s 24-hour email support, I wasn’t able to get any response from them after their initial notification that the site had been switched off. This morning, now they’re back at work, they’ve switched it back on and have asked me to resolve the technical issues.
Well — I’ll do my best. I know how to install and uninstall Wordpress plugins. I’m not the most technically-minded guy on the planet, and I’m certainly not going to go and learn how to debug scripts because of this. But I know some clever and generous people.
Legal threats and takedown notices
While most people who wrote thought that there was some link between the IFPI and the site’s disappearance, that does look unlikely at this point. I haven’t heard anything that might support that theory.
All the same, I was incredibly grateful to Richard Esguerra from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who wrote with this useful list of links:
EFF – Legal Guide for BloggersEFF – Bloggers’ FAQ – Overview of Legal Liability Issues
EFF – Bloggers’ FAQ – Online Defamation Law
EFF – Bloggers’ FAQ – Intellectual Property
EFF How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
EFF – Bloggers’ FAQ – Section 230 Protections
EFF – Bloggers’ FAQ – Index of Questions
Additionally, I recommend that you visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website. The Chilling Effects site is an online informational resource that addresses Internet law issues: (cease and desists, trademark/copyright claims, parody/gripe sites, anonymity, defamation, cybersquatting, UDRP process, reverse engineering, linking etc.)
The FAQ sections go into detail about situations similar to yours and how to tell if someone has a legitimate claim against you. The site has a database of cease and desist letters to which you can also submit copies of any take-down notice you receive.
I recall reading a bit of controversy about linking. The Chilling Effects Linking FAQ may answer some questions for you.
The Chilling Effects Defamation FAQ may also be informative.
Note that many of these resources frame the issues according to US law; depending on the nature of your dispute and the parties interested, the laws may work differently.
True. I’m in the UK, where the laws are significantly different. All the same, many of the basic principles apply, and Internet Freedom is a British website that will be of interest to anyone concerned with issues like these.
But there’s no legal wrangling going on here, as far as I can make out. Just a case of the wheels falling off while driving too fast.
This should happen to you
But it just goes to show that the tipping point from modest online venture to talk of the town can happen pretty fast. I don’t have to be able to do the coding thing in order to have a website that attracts tens of thousands of visitors in a 24-hour period.
And perhaps that’s the lesson here. With just a little bit of knowledge, it’s possible to get a website up online, talk about music, and get a lot of attention.
This should be your record label, your band, your venue, your publishing company. Except for the getting shut down bit.
Music is, after all, phenomenally important to most people. It absolutely boggles the mind that the people who run organisations that deal with something that adds so much value to everyone’s lives can make themselves so unpopular in the process.
Bring a friend
I’ve just heard that this site is approaching the front page on Digg.com, which is a pretty significant driver of traffic, so I’m bracing myself for the next onslaught.
Thanks to everyone who’s visited, linked to the site, thought about the issues and had their say. It’s been pretty overwhelming and a little bit humbling to get that sort of support from so many people — including people whose sites I read religiously so I can know what I’m talking about.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get any residual bugs ironed out quickly, and normal service will resume without further incident.
You’ll notice that the post about time management for music business that I wrote and timed to hit the site this morning went live with no difficulties.
Thanks for coming
Since you’re here, please help yourself to my free e-book as my gift. It won’t tell you what to do when your website gets closed down or how to deal with a sudden rush of traffic from every corner of the internet — but it will tell you 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online.
Thanks again.
12 Comments. Write a comment or link to this post
Spoons
Welcome Back!
That was a scary few hours!
Internet spanner ready and waiting to attempt to help fix as always! (I am of course referring to a imaginary device I just invented not referring to myself as said Internet spanner.)
Jun 16th, 2007
paolo
The link to Chilling Effects is wrong. It is http://newmusicstrategies.com/2007/06/16/back-online/www.chillingeffects.org
while it should be
http://www.chillingeffects.org
(you just forgot the initial “http://”)
Jun 16th, 2007
Dubber
Fixed — thanks.
By way of follow-up to the technical issues, here’s the latest.
Tech support says:
I have talked to Lewsi about your phone discussion and that it is not sending mail now but need to know what you did to stop the script doing what it was, as I think this is a coding issue and you would need to talk to wordpress about that.
I’ve replied:
I believe there are two issues to examine here in order to fix the problem that led you to suspend my site.
ISSUE 1: The script that caused my site to be suspended
First, what do you mean by script?
On the site, I am running Wordpress with a number of plugins. If you could identify or describe the activity that caused you to shut me down, then perhaps I could identify the plugin that caused you the problem.
ISSUE 2: The mail server
I had a php mailer plugin running happily for weeks that recently stopped working. I changed nothing, it just stopped. I have since installed a Wordpress backup plugin that uses the server to mail me a copy of the backup. This is also failing to deliver mail.
In the meantime, I have uninstalled the PHP mailer plugin, but I do not believe this to have been at fault, simply because it worked fine until it suddenly stopped without me having changed anything.
I believe there is something wrong server side with using PHP to send emails. Could you please investigate and get back to me with a resolution as soon as possible.
How you can help
Ever encountered anything like this before? Do you recognise the problem, or can suggest anything that might have contributed?
I am yet to get a response, but I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing I’ve done at my end to cause their servers to keep crashing — and I’m less and less convinced it had to do with all the traffic I’ve had recently.
I’m looking for solutions to point them to, so that they can resolve the problem as quickly as possible. I don’t want to be shut down again because of my errant site…
Jun 16th, 2007
Andrew J
This probably isn’t going to help with your problem, but just in case…
The webserver I occasionally write applications for at work sometimes has a similar problem sending mail from PHP – in fact it seems that when it gets in this state PHP is unable to open any new files or run external processes at all, although it still serves pages and talks to the MySQL database perfectly happily. We haven’t got to the bottom of what’s actually going on, but the solution is to get the sysadmins to restart the web server. This implies some kind of resource starvation is going on, but I haven’t tried to find out any more details. The web server software is not Apache though, which is why this may be of no use to you – it’s a SunOne server running on a Solaris/SPARC machine with PHP version 4.x.
Jun 16th, 2007
Stephen
Enjoying your writing which Digg has brought to my attention. Have been attending to these copywrite issues for some time now as it is one more example of the way the information revolution is changing our world faster than we can understand.
Obviously it is faster than the music industry can understand as well, though I suspect part of the problem is that the lawyers have a lot to gain by creating dissention and the executives have no leadership skills when it comes to navigating these new and dangerous seas. In fact it is probably through discussions on commentaries like yours where the anwers will begin to evolve.
I am quite puzzled about solutions to the copywrite protection that creative people have depended on for so long. How is this going to work in the future? Should copyrights last forever as they are beginning to do? I don’t know, but these are a couple of the issues to be resolved in a new era, and obviously the industry has only enough imagination to use the hammer approach, and as I recently heard a great bard say (Tommy Chong, perhaps): “to a hammer, everything is a nail…”.
I am very concerned when someone who is only reporting the news is threatened for doing so. It seems that that is your position. Similar trends have allowed the Iraq war to be started under very disadvantageous conditions and the “Patriot Act” to be passed without dissent in our country. Fear is a great motivator, unfortunately. Fortunately, more people MAY be starting to be more fearful of heavyhanded tactics. The experience of your blogg becomming much more read due to the industry approach is both ironic and instructive.
Jun 16th, 2007
Darren Landrum
I’m glad to see it was only technical issues that brought your site down, Andrew. I recently discovered you by way of Des’ Hometracked blog, and have been enjoying your writing very much. In fact, I read all the way through your e-book in a matter of a day or so.
I actually emailed Des when I saw your account was down, in the hopes that he might know what was going on, and he was nice enough to email me back to let me know you’re up and running again.
Jun 16th, 2007
Jason PMark
Thank Mr Birch for bringing your site to the forefront of many peoples computer screens. This is known as the streisand effect…. Try to get somethign taken off the net and you get a whole lot more exposure, plus the content mirrored in several thousand other loacations… (great for when he gets googled. ) I hope that Revolver and Mr Birch’s artists have the good sense to look for reprenstation that is more clued up on modern technology (they can start with an recording company who has a website) Otherwise they should read through your ebook and find out what a wonderful and profitable thing, self promotion and itunes publishing can give. I would personally never support any of revolvers artists again, and bearing in mind the attitude of the general manager of the organisation, I hope other people join me…
Keep up the great writing and don’t give in to bullies.
Jun 16th, 2007
Dubber
Wow. Really not having very good web karma today…
I have suddenly ended up on some sort of spam list, because the heavens just opened and my email inbox just filled up with a vengeance.
Gmail’s pretty good at identifying and categorising spam so that I never generally see it. But when you receive 2200+ pieces of spam in less than 10 minutes, some of it’s going to end up in the inbox.
Also, the site keeps going offline.
Ah, what fun. Does this just happen to be a bad day on the internet for me, or have I made a friend that’s playing a funny joke?
Jun 16th, 2007
Darren Landrum
Andrew… You just hit the front page of Slashdot.
Here comes the flood.
Jun 18th, 2007
So... What do YOU think?