May you live in interesting times
Sometimes the stars line up. Three events have occurred over the past two weeks that, in a strange way, are canceling each other out and making my life no harder than it could be given the recent DMCA complaint I've received and subsequent quick, unquestioning and compliant removal of much of this blog's content.
- Folks alerted me of issues with registration for comments that I was unaware of (sorry!). In the process of fixing those problems, several readers started informative conversations, and at least one real estate agent (Pacita Dimacali) started providing clarifications and additional information about some of the properties discussed here. Great stuff--I'm a strong believer in transparency and freedom of information when it comes to real estate.
- My ISP forwarded a content removal complaint (O1367 - knifecatchers com.pdf) from the East Bay Regional District demanding that I remove vaguely specified "copyrighted content". I was rather flabbergasted by the peremptory tone and blogged about it. A lot of my readers, who were suddenly able to post comments thanks to the events in (1), expressed their support for this blog (thanks!) in email and in comments.
- Because I also believe in copyright and have no interest in violating it, after I quickly and unquestioningly unpublished over 160 posts and started removing what seemed like it might be copyrighted, the real estate market in Alameda seemed to slow to a crawl. Very few, if any, new properties have appeared on, erm, real estate Web sites associated with large real estate trade organizations whose names are collectively abbreviated using 3 consonants that closely resemble the acronym the average person would come up with for concepts like "Medieval-Lite Slavery" or "Monoliths Litigating Solemnly" (for example). This gives me time to work on making sure that the blog posts that might be offending (2) are stripped of any copyrighted content, without missing any interesting topics.
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