Anti-Piracy Service Blasty is Back Online After a Week’s Downtime
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.
Edit: To clarify, Blasty submits DMCA notices to Google to get allegedly pirated content de-listed from Google’s search results. They use this route to respond to piracy because you can’t always get a pirate site to actually remove the content, and making it unfindable in Google is the next best thing.
That all changed last week when the service inexplicably went silent. The site went down, and no one was answering emails. The only part of Blasty that seemed to be working was the payment processing, which is a problem because there was no way to disable an automated payment and we had no way to tell whether service would be restored. There were even authors talking on Facebook about canceling their debit cards in order to stop the payments.
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.
I reached out to Blasty for comment, but have received no response.
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