Thank you everyone for participating in my little experiment. Thanks especially to Simon who started things off by noting he was in the UK. Many of you followed and noted where you are from. It was very fun to see how international this site has become.
Obviously, some things are going on with the site and I wanted to take a moment to explain them, and to talk about some upcoming changes.
The other day I received an e-mail from a woman who runs the estate of an artist I recently posted. She asked me to take the post down and vaguely threatened me with legal action. I immediately removed the post and told her I did so. She thanked me and then threatened me with more legal action if she ever saw that show posted anywhere else.
So please, if you downloaded the Richie Havens show from me do not share it anywhere else.
I don’t believe she will sue me over this, but the whole incident has made me nervous.
I’ve always known there was a risk in running this site and sharing these shows. I feel like ROIOs are a bit of a legally gray area. I don’t share any copies of official releases, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get sued and that I wouldn’t lose if I did.
I figure my site is too small to get noticed very often and so the chances of being sued are slim. But they aren’t zero. And this incident has made me nervous enough to make some changes.
I still want to share shows, but I want to make the risk minimal.
The obvious answer is to make the site private. That’s exactly what I’ve done for now. That will make the risk nearly zero. It will keep prying eyes from finding the site. But it also means potential fans of the site will not likely find it either.
This is especially irksome since I’ve spent the last year or so writing about movies and pop culture. I want the public to read that stuff. I want it to be seen by as many people as possible. Maybe that’s just ego-talking, but it is true. I hate the idea of my reviews and such not being public.
But what to do?
I’ve been playing around with the settings. There is a way to make individual posts only viewable to subscribers. That’s what the experiment was about. It still sends out an e-mail and if you are logged in then you can read the posts on the site. But if you are not a subscriber then you cannot read the post. Potentially I could make the shows only viewable to subscribers and that would help keep out unwanted eyes.
However, the title of each post is still public and presumably searchable to places like Google. That could lead potential suers to my site. They wouldn’t be able to read the post and thus see that I’m sharing download links, but if they were curious they could subscribe and then I’m busted.
Another thought was to keep the show posts public, but not actually post a download link. Then once a day I could do a subscriber-only post that would include the Google Drive links for the day’s shows. I’d make the title of that post vague and generic so the general public wouldn’t know what I was doing.
But that seems like extra work for me and it would probably be annoying to you all.
My next idea was to create a new site just for the movie talk. Midnight Cafe Movies I could call it. I’ve actually thought about doing this before as I sometimes think about contacting movie PR people to start officially reviewing things like I do for Cinema Sentries. But I worried that directing movie people to my site where I also share music downloads might cause problems. But a movie-only site would be cool.
The trouble is The Midnight Cafe has a certain amount of cache. It has a small amount of Google juice. It is a known site. I want that cache for a movie site, but not for the music…
I think I have devised a plan. I’m working on something I think might make it possible for me to continue posting shows, but in a very private way, but also write about movies in a public fashion.
I’ll reveal that in another later today. It is going to take a lot of work on my part, and probably be a little annoying on your part, but I think it just might work.
themidnightcafe.org 