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."

Comments

Re:A good reason to host your own blog

[bhagwad]

There's nothing preventing a hosting provider from shutting down your website. I have my own blog, but if BlueHost chooses to, it can knock it offline.

Re:Do hosting companies have a clue?

[1u3hr]

ServerBeach further said that Edublogs uses "a failover system that allowed Web traffic to still reach the allegedly infringing material."

That would still make it available, and infringing.

CYA bullshit."Available" if you knew a backdoor to the server. Which would be a concern if we were talking about missile launch codes, but no reason to take a million blogs offline after it's been "available" for five fucking years without anyone noticing already.

Here's the text, courtesy of Scribd. Just as a comment on how absurd and disproportionate this all is..

1.
I look forward to the future with hope and enthusiasm.
2.
I might as well give up because there is nothing I can do about
making things for myself.
3.
When things are going badly, I am helped by knowing that they
cannot stay there whatsoever.
4.
I can't imagine what my life would be in 10 years.
5.
I have enough time to accomplish the things I want to do.
6.
In future, I expect to succeed in what concerns me most.
7.
My future seems dark to me.
8.
I happen to be particularly lucky and I expect to get better.
9.
I just can't get the breaks and there is no reason I will in the future.
10.
My past experiences have prepared me well for the future.
11.
All I can see ahead of me is unpleasantness rather than pleasantness.
12.
I don't expect to get what I really I want.
13.
When I look ahead to the future, I expect I will be happier than I
am now.
14.
Things just don't work out the way I want them to.
15.
I have great faith in future.
16.
I never get what I want, so it is foolish to want anything at all.
17.
It is very unlikely that I still get any satisfaction in future.
18.
The future seems vague and uncertain to me.
19.
I look forward to more times than bad times.
20.
There is no use really trying to get anything I want because I
probably won't get it.