From The Digital Reader:
Since 2015 Blasty has been offering an anti-piracy service where they automatically scanned the web for pirated copies of an author’s work and gave authors the option of automatically sending DMCA notices with a single click.
That all changed last week when the service inexplicably went silent. The site went down, and no one was answering emails.
. . . .
Now that the website has been restored, they will have the option of canceling their service. Since we currently have no word as to whether Blasty is still scanning for pirated content, they might be wise to do so.
Link to the rest at The Digital Reader
PG has used Blasty for some time to track down illegal copies of Ms. PG’s ebooks and automatically send takedown notices.
After checking on results for the first few weeks, learning there are a billion piracy sites and viewing Blasty’s reports of responses to its takedown notices, other than noting Blasty’s periodic reports of its activity, PG dropped Blasty into his “check on it every few weeks” mental container.
As Nate indicates in the OP, Blasty seems to be back in operation, but Nate’s report brought to mind the many, many services and software-as-a-service operations that take a small nip at his business credit card every month.
Since he’s a big-picture guy, in some cases, it has taken PG some time to realize that he’s paying for things he’s no longer using via a business credit card. In some cases, the service he’s paying for has a different name than the billing provider for that service.
He’s wondered whether cancelling his current business credit card and beginning to use a different business card, adding the services he is really using might be one way of cleaning things out. He is certain all of the various service providers will promptly contact him within the following thirty days.
thanks Iola.
TDR says Blasty issues DCMA takedown notices, but I recently read an article that said that’s not what they’re doing – they’re actually submitting the sites to Google etc. and asking that the search engines don’t deliver that as a search result. What’s your understanding?
Iola, can you give a link to the article you read? I’d like to read it too. Thanks
I think this is it:
https://www.authorclicks.com/blog/2018/8/4/things-to-know-before-you-use-blasty-for-book-piracy-takedowns
That’s exactly what they do. One of my affiliate sites triggered a DMCA from Blasty and because I had the site set up in Google Web Console, they kindly sent me a notice saying Blasty was claiming I was hosting some author’s books and pirating them. Which is an abosolute joke. I link everything to Amazon or another retailer where I can actually make a penny when someone clicks through.
Suffice to say that I emailed the author whose books Blasty claimed I was pirating and told them what exactly Blasty was doing. The reported page on my site was down for 10 days as Google processed the dispute I put in and I lost affiliate sales during that time, which are the only income that site has supporting its hosting costs.
There will be authors who will never be promoted through any of my sites again. When I find out someone is using Blasty, they go off my lists.
My personal opinion is that Blasty is run entirely by bots, with no oversight at all, and no one doing the proper due diligence before reports are turned in. It would have been clear with one hasty glance at my site that there was no infringing content whatsoever.
Blasty is collecting oodles of money from authors and its costing those authors book bloggers and fans.
Blasty submits the DMCA notices to Google to get the pirated content delisted.
I could have been more clear on that point, sorry.
I also misremembered the post I quoted (I was on my mobile, and couldn’t search for it when I commented).
“He is certain all of the various service providers will promptly contact him within the following thirty days.”
Don’t bet any money on that!
In more than one case thew card provider ‘give’ the new card info to companies pulling monthly charges from the old card.
ADT and Discover in one case I had to deal with. Had to get still another card and demand that Discover ‘not’ give the new number to ADT and several online ‘junk ideas/gift card’ sites my mother couldn’t get to cancel. (Several fun calls from ADT begging her to stay/come back …)
MYMV and your credit card company remember that you are their customer – and that you can close your account if they can’t.
VISA and MASTERCARD do this as well. It won’t be worth it to cancel the card to just “clean it out” because it won’t “clean it out” when your new card from the same card vendor has the same recurring charges on it without reporting to them what is and is not a legitimate charge.