Slashdot Mirror
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
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...
Because it takes effort, and skill, as well as having some cost.
Yes, it may only take a few hours to research the best way of doing it from scratch, for someone not into computers, but if they are not deeply involved, they are not likely willing to invest that, when there are solutions that are in some ways better.
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.
Because most people don't want to either move to an area where they can get "business class" broadband (or buy colo service), purchase their server, install and configure and be responsible for all the setup and continued maintenance (including security patches, etc). They just want to write their blog, which more than likely is not about any of those topics.
If I were serious about blogging then I'd host my own. I wonder why more people don't?
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.
Palm trees and 8
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!
"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 -----------------------------------
Exactly. But if you control the DNS of your domain, and have a backup hosting provider on hot standby, you could switch from BlueHost to that other provider very quickly.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
$99.00 a month. Well within the reach of a blogger who is claiming to make money off their blog.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's no big deal for much of the demographic here, but it might as well be written in Aramaic for a lot of people who just want to blog a bit about things that interest them.
Put another way: