Millions of Blogs Knocked Offline By Legal Row 162
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."
Do hosting companies have a clue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's actually worse than stated... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A good reason to host your own blog (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:A good reason to host your own blog (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
information it owned? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
"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!!!
Not a "legal" row (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [techdirt.com] 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.
Re:It's actually worse than stated... (Score:4, Insightful)
Deep breath, people. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
Re:Do hosting companies have a clue? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubly so, since Pearson should've contacted Edublogs directly using their DMCA page [edublogs.org] 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? (Score:4, Insightful)
So what if it was "in a cache that no one knew about"
So what? It was offline. That's what a DMCA "take down" is supposed to achieve. You don't have to erase every copy of the file in existence, just stop making it available, which they did.
The hosting company has apologised, so you're saying they were wrong to do so?
Re:Do hosting companies have a clue? (Score:4, Insightful)
"People like you"
"You're just stupid"
Well, so much for reasoned debate.
Re:No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do hosting companies have a clue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:No, Actually It's Exactly How It Was Stated (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately for the people, we live in a time when we don't have to fight ridiculous copyright laws, we can just ignore them. Entire IP industries ignore our fair use rights and abuse OUR legal rights and protections. Well, the tables have turned, haven't they.
Re:Do hosting companies have a clue? (Score:2, Insightful)
And their ISP, and theirs, up to tier one?
This is my DCMA notice, please shut down the Internet.