Jeff- I completely agree. SEO quickly changed from unfamiliar to a huge topic that can get very heated very quickly. I try to steer clear when it comes to blogging about SEO, but every once in awhile I will give it a whirl.

How you could possibly conclude that is a complete mystery?, but most importantly, for anyone who happens to be reading this, 100% wrong.
I’ll explain:
If Mr. Bill leases the domain name greenpantsDOTcom, and has leased content from 3rd party affiliates (who own the Intellectual Property Rights) to exploit on his website, Mr. Bill does not own the content he is leasing, the domain name does not own the content, the rightful owner(s) that have leased Mr. Bill the material’s remain the rightful owners of all Rights thereon; these rights include the publicity rights, (the Rights required to make “Public Performance(s) of the “Works”.) the limited Rights Mr. Bill legally leased.

Mr. Bill has a legal agreement to make “Uses” of the Works, and to make public performances of the Works, because Go-Daddy leased him the domain name Go-Daddy has no legal Rights to Use the Works, the Internet Archive certainly DOES NOT because they managed to (illegally I might add) crawl, copy, store, and make available to the public the content on the website including the Works, and Nick you have absolutely NO LEGAL rights to Use Copyright Protected Works without express consent of the Rightful owner of the Works.

Contrary to your statement: “At this point the content is free for you to use.”, the reality is, at this point the Works remain Copyright Protected, and anyone making public Uses of the Works, whether for non-commercial and or non-profit, is in violation of someone’s Copyright.
What does an expired domain name have to do with the Intellectual Property Rights on the Works that were displayed on that expired website? Copyrights last for at least 50 years, how did you conclude the Copyrights have expired?, are the domain names you seek out and copy from the 1960′s?

“fair use especially if

a) the content is used for a non-commercial website
b) it could be stated you had provided information that was of use
c) you had done so in good faith & attempted to notify the copyright holder”

First off, “Fair-use” only applies to the American Copyright Act, should a Canadian copyright owner pursue legal actions the Canadian Copyright Act applies and there is no “fair-use” clause to argue.
(And not all content can be argued as “fair-use”.)
A commercial vs non-commercial website helps in determining damages, it does not prevent legal recourse for the Copyright owner.

“you had done so in good faith & attempted to notify the copyright holder”
Ignorance will be of no use with a “good faith” plea, the “good faith” is a reference applied to the individuals base of knowledge, not the individual’s complete lack of it.
If the individual has no idea what they’re doing, how could they possibly be doing it in good faith?
An “attempt” to contact the owner?, if you got no reply that’s the answer, move on to different content, it’s a foolish idea to think a legal board would agree that due to the fact no response was received ownership or user rights can be granted.

See below a copy of the response I received from Google. BTW, I don’t want to jump the gun, but I have seen some signs the last few days that my rankings are slowly re-emerging. I am in the process of working with my team to contact each and every site owner or registrar linking to me to remove links to my site. There are more than 5,000 sites (38,000 pages) We are around 1/3 the way through the list, and I’m surprised about the cooperation we are receiving from some webmasters, so I’m hoping this is starting to reflect positively. After we finish this link removal task, I will supply Google with a spread sheet documenting the contact email addresses we attempted to contact, as well as the log in details for a dedicated gmail address with proof of the emails that have been sent out.

You may ask, “is this really worth it?” if I told you how much money the site used to earn, you’d see why, so even if there’s only a 20% chance for this to work, the odds are pretty good.

I read an article on Searchengineland claiming that Google stated there will be no manual interventions with Penguin, so I don’t know why G got in touch with me?

Google’s email to me below…

“Hello Matt,

We’ve reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#3. These guidelines outline illicit practices which may lead Google to take action on a site in order to keep webspam out of search results. In addition to this email, you may also receive a notification in Webmaster Tools regarding the outcome of your reconsideration request.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Here are a couple of articles describing these techniques:

Buying links to pass PageRank
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

Link schemes
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

To illustrate how these articles could apply to you, here are examples of pages that contain inorganic links to your site:
http://www.blue##########/###-design/online/ – Anchor: online dating
http://####-#####-#######.net/70/#####-#####-#######.php – Anchor: singles

To find more links to your site, you can download a list in Webmaster Tools by doing the following:
1. Click on your site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
2. Click on ‘Your site on the web’ and then ‘Links to your site.’
3. Under ‘Who links the most,’ click ‘More.’
4. At the top of the page, click on ‘Download more sample links.’

Please correct or remove all content that is outside our quality guidelines. You might consider reaching out to the webmasters of the sites with the inorganic links on them. For advice on how to go about contacting them, read http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9109.

Once you have updated your site, reply to this email noting the specific changes you made. Only after there has been a significant decrease in unnatural linking will we consider reviewing your reconsideration request again. If there are still links that you could not remove, we will look for an explanation of why you were unable to do so.

Sincerely,

The Google Search Quality Team”

I think alot of people who aren’t normally whiny go to that place when they’re confused and have no idea what to do though.

I can deal with change. I actually adapt well to it. But this…this is just too much. I feel like every month we need to prepare to re-position our businesses. Every algorithm works differently and what we did to improve our sites could very well affect us (negatively) in future updates. It’s nerve-racking. There is NO other business that changes this much, this often… with absolutely NO clear explanation of WTF is going on. Nor is there a business that rewarded one thing in practice and shunned it in words. Then one day brings the two together and penalizes those who sought their rewards in the past.

Plus, when someone loses a business that they spent years on, builds it up again and then loses it again it really does feel like a profound loss. To be suffering that two times in such a short period of time is intense to say the least. This has been my experience and I do truly believe that I have to go through a period of mourning. Whining, I believe, WAS part of it

I do get where you’re going with this post. You want people to deal and move on. Fair enough. Hopefully, in a week or so all serious internet marketers/bloggers/whatevers WILL get back to business stronger and better than ever. But for now, many still have to be mourn…. Please try to be understanding as comments like yours only slow down the process.