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

Do hosting companies have a clue?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

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.

Re:Do hosting companies have a clue?

[Canazza]

"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."

IE, there was still a version stored in the server's cache, and that's why they took the site down.

I know it's against /. ettiquete to read the fucking article, but it does help some times.

"The copy of the blog entry was in this memory store - only visible internally - because of the way Edublogs readies web pages for display. When Edublogs did not respond within 24 hours to emails alerting it to the allegedly infringing content, ServerBeach shut down the entire site."

Re:Do hosting companies have a clue?

[1u3hr]

The key line missing from the summery is "ServerBeach said it had had to act because two requests to remove the content had been ignored." So, fuck Edublogs, they had their chance.

Edublogs took the offending text off their website when they were requested to. There was a backup copy though which WAS NOT ONLINE that triggered the takedown. So, fuck Pearson, fuck the hoster, and, on Edublogs' behalf, fuck you .

Re:Do hosting companies have a clue?

[tlhIngan]

Edublogs took the offending text off their website when they were requested to. There was a backup copy though which WAS NOT ONLINE that triggered the takedown. So, fuck Pearson, fuck the hoster, and, on Edublogs' behalf, fuck you .

Doubly so, since Pearson should've contacted Edublogs directly using their DMCA page rather than having to go through their service provider. (You can get to that page by going to "Contact Us" and scrolling to DMCA)

ServerBeach provided the servers to Edublogs, yes, but Edublogs provided services to users to post blogs and have their own DMCA page in case their users post something infringing.

Though this brings a question - how far up should one go for a DMCA request? I mean, if you can get the hosting company to do it, could you get the ISP providing the internet link to the hosting company?

Re:Do hosting companies have a clue?

[sjames]

You mean they were notified and promptly marked the blog entry hidden. Then they got another notice, saw that the blog was already marked hidden and decided this was yet another (of a great many, no doubt) bogus automated notice.

If it was in a cache, it was most likely reachable only through an orphaned direct URL. It is even likely that but for the publisher continuously refreshing the cache entry by checking up on it, it would have fallen out of the cache.

It's actually worse than stated...

[BMOC]

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.

Re:It's actually worse than stated...

[Quakeulf]

1984 and Animal Farm. George Orwell did not write books, he wrote the law.

Hahaha

[dyingtolive]

Something outright awesome about a HOPELESSNESS SCALE being the central topic of conversation in a COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT case.

Re:A good reason to host your own blog

[betterunixthanunix]

If I were serious about blogging then I'd host my own. I wonder why more people don't?

1. You need an Internet connection that is suitable for hosting your blog (static or rarely changing IP address, decent upload throughput, nothing in the contract that forbids hosting a webserver, etc.).
2. You need a computer that you can leave on all the time.
3. You need the technical expertise needed to install and configure a blogging system (and by extension, a web server and database server).

For us on Slashdot, the only problem is with the first one, and even then, most of us probably know a place that will let us run a server for our blog. For most people, the combination of those three is a daunting task, and so they just pay some hosting company somewhere to take care of it for them.

information it owned?

[mcgrew]

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!

moral of the story

[jest3r]

"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!!!

The original paper

[clickety6]

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)

Re:No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated

[causality]

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.

If by "legitimate" you mean:

• Terribly unbalanced against the public domain
• Pushed upon us with no connection to the will/demand of the people
• By a tiny minority of monied interests who long ago usurped the political processes of this constitutional republic
• Written and voted for by legislators who are not representing their constituents because they've been bought and paid for

... then yes, it is perfectly legitimate.

Re:No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated

[sjames]

Godwin be damned. You're saying that since the SS officers were just following the law of the land they should have gotten a pass?