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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.
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...
Probably about half the people who host their blog in 'The Cloud'. The other half think they're hosting it in America, but 'The Cloud' is actually in Europe and they're breaking various privacy laws without even realising.
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!
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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!!!
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 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!"
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 -----------------------------------
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.
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