Friday 29 September 2017

Archive of Howard Stern's Trump interviews offline after DMCA takedown

There used to be 25 years of Howard Stern interviews with now-president Donald Trump to listen to. But not anymore: the unofficial archive's been taken offline after a DMCA takedown notice came by FedEx.

On Wednesday afternoon, roughly 48 hours after it was put up, the audio trove has been removed from YouTube and SoundCloud. For now, the transcripts remain on Factba.se, a website created by the startup FactSquared.

 

Factba.se published a total of around 15 hours' worth of audio—exclusively of the minutes when Trump was on The Howard Stern Show—gathered from nearly 25 years of shows, starting in 1993 and ending in 2015.

"We were in the process of putting [the audio files] on our own server, but then FedEx showed up and that was the official stop," Bill Frischling, the CEO of FactSquared, told Ars. "So we had a good conversation with our attorneys today, and we’re going to be reaching out to [SiriusXM’s attorneys] pretty darned soon. We’ve already exchanged brief notes, everybody is hoping to get it resolved amicably. Our goal is to preserve the record. At least right now, this is the only public version of a massive, quarter-century trove of interviews."