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Millions of Blogs Knocked Offline By Legal Row
another random user writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "A row over a web article posted five years ago has led to 1.5 million educational blogs going offline. The Edublogs site went dark for about an hour after its hosting company, ServerBeach, pulled the plug. The hosting firm was responding to a copyright claim from publisher Pearson, which said one blog had been illegally sharing information it owned.
... The offending article was first published in November 2007 and made available a copy of a questionnaire, known as the Beck Hopelessness Scale, to a group of students. The copyright for the questionnaire is owned by Pearson, which asked ServerBeach to remove the content in late September."
Or are most of them just total crap? Frankly I think people need to sue a few of them real hard on this and lets see them cut the crap.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
If I were serious about blogging then I'd host my own. I wonder why more people don't?
The offending post was published in 2007, which is true, however the material (questionnaire) that was posted was 38 years old. Worse yet, the questionnaire was a suicide prevention questionnaire, so its existence in the public domain might actually save lives. So a DMCA request pulled down millions of blogs because one page that was originally published nearly 4 decades ago supposedly has some copyright value to someone. These times we live in, they're literally not far off from a lot of books I was encouraged to read in high school, but was told would never actually happen.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Broad censorship of everything without any responsibility.
The only question is, why we don’t do the same to those who do that, to show them the bad end of the stick.
Probably because we don't want to become what we hate.
Something outright awesome about a HOPELESSNESS SCALE being the central topic of conversation in a COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT case.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Oh yeah, the 'mericans...
I bet it's scored from 0 to "Soy un perdido"
You can't own information. You can have a "limited" time monopoly on its presentation, but you can't even own the document that holds the information.
Example: Your textbook says "Gravity was described by Sir Isaac Newton when an apple fell on his head." That little snippet alone would be fair use, but assume that one phrase is the entire work. Publish it and you're in violation of copyright. But reword the same information, "Sir Isaac newton developed his theory of gravity after an apple fell on his head" and you're not infringing anything.
If people keep saying you can own a work or even information, it will eventually be possible. So please stop it, you damned journalists!
Free Martian Whores!
It ranges from Loser to Satan gave me a Taco.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
All aside regarding how a 38 year old questionnaire still being protected under copyright and whether that is right or wrong, how does taking 1.5 million sites offline because of one site having a DMCA takedown request? Doesn't that seem completely ridiculous? That's like burning down the Library of Congress because we found termites in a shed out back.
-SaNo
"Unfortunately, in early October automated systems at ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of software Edublogs uses to make sure web pages are displayed quickly. The copy of the blog entry was in this memory store - only visible internally"
So Server Beach has an automated system that detected copyright infringement in a "cache" file and automatically shut down the server before checking to see if it was actually visible to the public (which according to the article it was not)?
Moral of the story ... stop using Server Beach I guess.
This is scary for Server Beach customers because any copyrighted material could end up on disk (ie. if someone submits a form that writes to disk or into a database. Then the Server Beach script will nuke your site no questions asked!!!
What happens when you let a bunch of FAGGET lawyers run the cuntry.
I sense a great disturbance in the blogosphere, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out about useless bullshit, and were suddenly silenced...
This row wasn't "legal" at all. Thanks to the fucking DMCA copyright infringement is now generally sorted out with the content "owners" functioning as judge and jury (because they're not at all biased or greedy). If the legal system isn't involved it's hardly a "legal" row, it's more like a shakedown.
Porquoi?
The offending post was published in 2007, which is true, however the material (questionnaire) that was posted was 38 years old.
Astonishing but still within the copyright term length. Abhorrent? You bet. But I wouldn't go around attacking publishers and would instead focus on reducing the law that governs said term length.
Worse yet, the questionnaire was a suicide prevention questionnaire, so its existence in the public domain might actually save lives.
So what you're saying is that if I want to make money publishing my research, I should stay away from publishing suicide prevention materials since placing a copyright on that is morally reprehensible because if it's public domain it might actually save lives?
So a DMCA request pulled down millions of blogs because one page that was originally published nearly 4 decades ago supposedly has some copyright value to someone.
So I'd like to point out that from what I've read they were given 24 hour notice from their provider and they failed to remove the article from their cache (although they did remove it from their site). If you're running a site that costs $6,954.37 just in hosting service per month, I would hope you would be a little more competent about complying with DMCA requests. Do they not have anyone on staff who knows how to flush a Varnish cache? And in defense of the hosting company, it's not their job to pick through and block each individual page you host and play their own version of whackamole. It's terrible that so many educational resources went down but the incompetence is shared between the people who run that operation, the hosting provider, the dumbass politicians who gave us the DMCA and the citizens who don't complain to their representatives about it. If you don't like the law, change it. But what you're attacking are symptoms of this law and you should be railing against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Be prepared, people are going to want to know how you think we should balance the rights of the artists and authors who create material (and subsequently their income) and the benefit of the public from that material.
I'm telling you right now, the way you described how horrible this is makes me never want to produce any sort of writing that might be construed as beneficial to society because then I won't be paid for my work or I'll be a monster. If Pearson can't make money off these texts, goodbye Pearson. It's that simple. And yeah, that might be the future with self publishing on the rise but right now they have those texts under laws that are legitimate US Laws.
These times we live in, they're literally not far off from a lot of books I was encouraged to read in high school, but was told would never actually happen.
Did you know that many if not all of those books are copyrighted and those authors benefited from copyright? Also before you go around equivocating this to burning books in Fahrenheit 451 you should probably come up with an ideal middle ground between where we are now and everything is public domain. Hyperbole doesn't really help this debate.
My work here is dung.
This is tantamount to the Muzzies burning the library in Constantinople because they didn't like the books
This is less of a censorship issue as a service interruption issue. The service was down for about an hour.
The DMCA is deeply fucked and this illustrates how broken it is. But this particular event did massive harm to the hosting companies reputation of reliability -- which is pretty much the only thing it sells -- while the blogs in question were restored in entirely, other than the apparently copyrighted page in question. No hosting company is look at this and saying, "That's how we'll do it!"
There are censorship issues today, real ones, but they are aimed at the fringes where authors are pressured, official accounts are bullshit or information is hidden. Look at, for instance, Apple's refusal to allow an app that pushed notifications when the US killed someone with a drone attack. Meanwhile Microsoft is looking at that and saying "Let's lock down Metro apps!"
We're not even going to pretend you can't own/hoard knowledge, anymore?
The original paper is available in a number of places - just search for PCA1clinical2011.pdf - and contains the original questions. Not sure how Pearson gets to claim copyright over something that was published in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology based on research probably conducted with public money (Univ. of PA, PA General HGopsital, Camden County Community Mental Health Program)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Copyright holder contacts ISP about possible infringement in blogs hosted by their customer, Edublogs. Like it or not, 38 years is well within UK copyright terms, so it probably still is under copyright. Edublogs marks the offending article so it cannot be publicly seen any more. However, it does NOT disappear from their systems. ISP runs a program that finds that the blog is still on the client servers and equates that with "Gasp! Entire world can see it! INFRINGEMENT ALERT!" and goes into panic mode. ISP contacts Edublogs via email and gets no response. Fearing the copyright holder's wrath, ISP shuts down ENTIRE Edublogs site to stop one blog that couldn't be publicly seen anyway. Edublogs basically says "Dude. You've got our phone numbers. Why didn't you call any of them instead of relying on email?".
i do agree that if you own something, you should get paid for it. however, i think things have just gone too far. 'they' allow companies to copyright anything and everything, but companies don't patent things ahead of time. people do. always have. now the ones that do are given bad names so the rest of us don't do something similar. suing over a 40 year old suicide questioner shouldn't happen. the judge should have thrown that out. the people suing over this should have their names made public. it would only be fair i think. if their going to do something so disrespectful and mean as to sue over the 'use' of that. i can see the CEO complaining about it now...
no, i don't care how many lives that could save, they did not pay me for its use, lets sue them bastards into the ground! we need to get all 15 cents that we deserve!
The Edublogs site went dark for about an hour after its hosting company, ServerBeach, pulled the plug.
ServerBReach?
ISPs are run by technical people, who are somewhat notorious for poor people skills.
The site owner TFA:
Rather than shutting down the site, he said, it could have done "something simple, like, calling any of the three numbers for us they have on file".
Why didn't they just call? Oh wait, that would involve human contact.
So the origin of the problem is Pearson's bullying tactics to ensure the quick buck, right? Let's take care of that and the problem disappears.
Being that the Fall semester is drawing to a close, the legion of book peddlers are out to ensure that all students in the Spring have only Pearson books. What if everyone with an interest in gettting EduBlogs back online makes sure to leave no doubt to Pearson's minions that no more books will be purchased till the silly DMCA notice is withdrawn and EduBlogs is back online. Pretty sure that a credible threat to the bottom margin is wonderfully persuasive.
The real problem is that there are too many copywritten, closed-source rating scales being used in mental health. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-2), the MMPI-2, the SIRS, the BIDR, the MMSE, and on and on... These are all used clinically and are also used in peer-reviewed research which affects clinical practice (e.g., they are used in human trials to get FDA approval for medications). They're important, and some of them are good (or at least interesting) tools.
But when copyright forbids you from revealing what is in the rating scales, this leads to a peculiar situation. You can publish a study saying "Drug X produced a 20% reduction in the BDI-2", but you're not allowed to describe the details of what is on the Beck Depression Inventory. You can publish a 50-page "validation study" of the MMPI-2, which is full of tables stating that "a positive response to question #211 correlated with this or that clinical outcome", but you'd better not indicate what question #211 was.
(The reader is expected to have paid $200 or whatever it is to obtain their own copy of the MMPI-2 so that they can follow along).
One consequence of this is that researchers are inhibited from discussing, or even thinking about, the "content validity" of the scales they use. You're unlikely to find a researcher commenting about scale items that are ambiguously worded, or which don't measure what they claim to measure. (Did you know that the MMPI-2 contains a "Psychopathic Deviate" subscale, and that one of the items on this subscale pertains to whether the subject has ever used illicit drugs? That sort of thing.) If any discussion of content validity takes place, it is conducted by the healthcare providers who actually use or develop the scales, and who have a financial and professional interest in seeing the scales as "valid". The general public doesn't get to have an opinion, because they don't get to look at the scales.
What's needed is an open source movement within the mental health field. Some researchers at St. Louis University have already created an open-source alternative to the MMSE (called the SLUMS)-- it's a good start, but much more is needed.
to the (in?)voluntary human extinction movement.
Hundred+ year copyrights on everything is a fubar.
It's more like a legbreaker. Now for a million people at a whack.
It was a handout and the whole thing was placed on the site.
What happens when you let a bunch of TEXANS run the edumacation.
Unfortunately, in early October automated systems at ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of software Edublogs uses to make sure web pages are displayed quickly.
What frightens me is that hosting apparently have these programs running and actively scanning *memory*
How many providers do this, and for how much content? Seems like it would be a significant performance hit if your server is running some app that is constantly scanning through RAM for a huge list of copyrighted material.
What else do they scan for? Music? Videos?
Why don't they shutter google too since google almost certainly has the page cashed, or the wayback machine, they probably have a copy too. It was an internal cashe, it would have been purged over time anyway.
The purpose of copyright is "to encourage the sciences and useful arts." A limited monopoly for a creator is just a tool it uses to attempt to achieve that goal.
A big part of the problem with modern copyright is exactly this misunderstanding. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, not creators.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Mr Potty Mouth AC. Funny thing is, I did read it, in fact I read a number of different things on the subject, both before and since.
It actually seems like a pretty good muck-up and it is POSSIBLE it isn't all the fault of ServerBeach. OTOH these sorts of places are FAR too lax and ready to crap on their clients than they should be. Remember, there aren't hard and fast time limits on action for this kind of thing, nor is it necessary for a provider like SoftBeach to be perfect. In fact they could have simply passed the request on down to Edublog and probably been fine. There needs to be some balance of consideration between one set of interests and another.
Ultimately the DMCA is just badly written but even so this kind of thing shouldn't happen.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The people in question are hosting over a million blogs. Edublogs is the hosting provider. For an operation if this size, there is no reason not to have at least your own vps with a company that will not snoop around on your disks, regardless of legal threats. There are a number of companies who will even sell you the server, preconfigured and with web-based admin consoles, for around 20EUR a month. Seriously, it is neither difficult nor expensive and I find it very hard to believe that an operation of this size does not have the resources to make it happen, especially considering some of the other technically difficult things that they had been doing.