NYT covers the seizure of OnSMASH

#FreeOnSMASH

Piracy Fight Shuts Down Music Blogs
By BEN SISARIO

Thanksgiving Day had barely begun when Kevin Hofman’s BlackBerry buzzed. It was one of the technical operators of OnSmash.com, Mr. Hofman’s popular hip-hop blog, telling him that the site had gone mysteriously blank just after midnight.

“At first I thought it was hackers,” Mr. Hofman said. But within hours a notice went up on the site saying that its domain name had been seized by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of the Department of Homeland Security; it was one of dozens of sites shut down, accused of copyright infringement and selling counterfeit goods.

But Mr. Hofman, a brawny Long Islander in his early 30s who formerly worked for a major record label, does not think of himself as a pirate.

OnSmash.com and the handful of other music blogs shut down by the government post brand-new songs and videos without licenses, but much of that material is often leaked to them by managers, music labels and even the artists themselves.

As a result, these sites have a complex symbiosis with the music business. While the Recording Industry Association of America wants to shut them down, the rank and file of the record labels — particularly in hip-hop circles — uses them as marketing tools and publicity outlets.

“To Joe Q. Public, ‘leak’ sounds like a bad word,” Mr. Hofman said in an interview at a pizzeria on the Lower East Side, his lawyer by his side. “But if you’ve ever been in a marketing meeting at a record label, it’s ‘Hey, can you leak this to the blogs?’ Leak is now a marketing verb.”

In addition to OnSmash.com, the music sites shut down included Dajaz1.com, RapGodFathers.com and rmx4u.com; another, torrent-finder.com, is a search engine for users of BitTorrent, a file-sharing system that can be used for any kind of data. (READ MORE)