By Paul Homewood
As many of you aware, there have been strange goings on in the website recently!
Now that things are hopefully settling down again, I can briefly explain what happened.
A couple of weeks ago, I receive a Take Down Notice from WordPress. This means that someone has claimed copyright to some of my posts, and asked WordPress to disable public access, ie delete the post. By law, they must comply. It is a common event – you often see videos disabled on YouTube.
The request this time came from the Wall Street Journal, via an outfit called NA Media Access in Kent, who specialise in this sort of thing. About ten posts were involved, none of which were recent and one of which went as far back as 2016!
I have only had one Take Down Notice before – from the Telegraph concerning a Jillian Ambrose article which I showed to be full of nonsense. Clearly Jilly did not like being criticised!
But WordPress always add a reminder that repeated incidents of copyright infringement could lead to permanent suspension.
I did not think any more about it, until I received a second Notice last week, this time concerning half a dozen Telegraph articles. I have always assumed that republishing parts of newspaper articles for discussion are covered by Fair Use, and always of course quote the links to the original report. Many websites do the same.
But a second Notice in a week set the alarm bells ringing! Two Notices in a week could not be coincidence, so how many more might arrive.
I soon realised that it would take forever checking every post, so I decided to bulk delete all posts, month by month, which I did the next day.
Deleted posts stay in Trash for thirty days, and I am now in the process of working back month by month, and republishing posts which contain nothing that could be possibly seen as infringement. Most of my posts are what I would call “transient” – that is they cover news items at the time, but have little usefulness later on. These I will not repost.
So far, I have managed to work my way back to April 2024, and hope to cover all months back to at least the start of 2023. Most older stuff is generally superseded eventually anyway, so what is left will be the important stuff. I’ll also try to pick some of the older posts which have continued relevance – Little Ice Age stuff, hurricanes etc.
It is worth pointing out that I have all of my spreadsheets and sources of data, so can easily recreate.
Finally a lot of old stuff can still be downloaded on Wayback, on the link below, which allows you to search via the Tag cloud.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Hopefully I will get no more hassle from NA Media Access!