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Pearson takes down 1.5 million teacher/student blogs with a single DMCA notice
- robomartin 14y agoMy takeaway: Don't do business with ServerBeach. They get a standard (my standard) one week benefit-of-the-doubt treatment awaiting the other side of the story. You just never know. Although, as someone said, it's hard to imagine a reason for taking down 1.5 million blogs. You'd think and hope that your hosting provider might have people who do a little thinking before taking such action. If it is the case that nobody from ServerBeach picked-up the phone to try to contact the customer there's something seriously wrong with that company.
- iProject 14y agoI take Pearson's subtext to be: The eTextbook, eLearning field craves to be disrupted.
- thaumaturgy 14y agoThe DMCA does not require a service provider to take down an entire server without notice. This is a problem with ServerBeach, not with the DMCA. But, I guess that would get fewer page views. (What a strange world I find myself in to be defending the DMCA so many years after being part of the opposition to it on Slashdot.) ed: "farms" has posted a link downthread which explains more of what's going on. It's more complicated than the TechDirt article makes it sound; it's also still not primarily a DMCA issue, but a ServerBeach customer service issue.
- gojomo 14y agoBut if the 'unit of service' being provided is a full server, that may be the natural atom of enforcement... or even the only practical one. Let's concern ourselves with the general case, setting aside the specifics of the WPMU/ServerBeach service arrangement. A customer could be purchasing a full server, or perhaps just rack space, and the provider might not have (or reasonably want) finer-grained server access or traffic-blocking options. Faced with a DMCA notice, and in the sort of knee-jerk cover-thyself mode of thinking that the DMCA encourages, such a service provider may have only one crude switch to throw. Reckless/automated notifiers face few penalties for misdirected or overbroad notifications. For example, they can ignore a particular website's DMCA contact information, and just start firing away at more foundational services whose contact info can be auto-discovered, like the IP-block managers or even domain-name service providers. Those are a problems arising from the DMCA's liability/incentive setup, not the service provider.
- cdrxndr 14y agoI'm completely with you on the reckless automated DMCA notice system. That does not seem to be the case here at all.
- gojomo 14y agoYes, I didn't mean to imply that was the exact case here... rather another often-related problem. This case is bad enough, in that even a relatively well-considered notice, and a default reaction, can crudely impair a lot of other legitimate publishing. It's not clear to me, though, whether Pearson tried contacting the Edublogs administrators first, or just skipped to the ISP. (I'm also not sure if http://edublogs.org/abuse/ http://edublogs.org/abuse/ existed before the incident -- but even if not, DMCA practice should require an attempt to contact the narrowest service-providers first, and only move 'upstream' if that doesn't generate either action or a counternotification.)
- cdrxndr 14y agoWas going to note the same thing. Pearson executed an appropriate request for taking down copyrighted material with all the rights for opposition that the DMCA enables. The question, which the link-bait-y article didn't bother answering, is whether or not ServerBeach expressly outlined its response to DMCA takedowns beforehand. If not, they have more than a PR problem. If so, then not a very good idea to host a blog site (or any user-generated content site) with them ... Also, at $75k/yr seems they're well beyond hosting and should be collocating their own hardware.
- farms 14y agoIt's so not link-baity, it's trying to change stuff for the better... I tried emailing them before, they palmed me off and ignored me to such an extent that we didn't have a choice... either go public about it or shuffle off and change hosts at great cost and pains to ourselves. they could at least have called us!
- thaumaturgy 14y agoI agree, ServerBeach screwed the pooch on this. But, the link-baity part is in pointing this out as a problem with the DMCA, when the actual problem is ServerBeach. You do have backups, I hope? You can just be up and running on a new provider within a day or so?
- farms 14y agoMany and numerous backups, but moving ~2m blogs (there's at least 750k splogs that live in dbases but dont show on our numbers) 'aint that easy!
- DanBC 14y agoJust out of interest, but when is the acceptable answer to this question "No"?
- thaumaturgy 14y agoI wasn't asking so that I could judge him; I was asking so that I could better understand his situation.
- lmkg 14y agoThat's true as far as it goes, but one can still argue that this situation shows a weakness of DMCA. Whenever the host is in doubt about how to respond to a takedown, the law encourages them to over-react.
- thaumaturgy 14y agoNo, one cannot. The law left the door wide open for service providers to work out the situation with customers, so long as they do it quickly (I believe the actual term in law is "expeditiously"). Blaming the law because the service provider isn't following it is absurd.
- curiouscats 14y agoIt is not absurd. More blame may go to the service provider. But the actual consequences in the real world matter. The whole tone from the government is to encourage the rights of those making claims against those taking advantage of their rights to publish. It is not at all surprising to repeatedly hear of draconian actions taken on the basis of DCMA. Exempting the DCMA from criticism based on what is actually happening is not sensible. DCMA, and the related pressure from the government on related matters, is of course likely to cause people to make decisions to essentially turn of the printing press (the server) when confronted with DCMA notices. Granted, in this instance I would blame the host for a large portion of the problem. I also find Pearson's actions ridicules. The consequences of their silly action were very bad. The host shouldn't have made the bad decision, but they wouldn't have been put in that spot without a silly action by Pearson. To me the host deserves most of the blame but DCMA (and all the hype around government's get tough policy for the copyright industry) and Pearson deserve blame also.
- gojomo 14y agoAs far as I can tell, ServerBeach did follow the law. And 'farms' response elsewhere in this thread suggests WPMU manages their own servers, so there may not have been any way for ServerBeach to take down a single blog/post/subdomain.
- kevin_06s 14y ago
- jeremyjh 14y agoThis is either a dedicated or co-located server. Either way, unless they have a fully managed hosting plan ServerBeach has no login to the server. Likely the only things in their power are to cut the power or stop routing the IP. Possibly they could use a more fine-grained firewall rule but ... they don't have to. They only have to control the service they are offering, which is probably just power and bandwidth. Furthermore, if they don't respond satisfactorily to the DMCA the complaint can go to THEIR upstream who has the same sort of choices to make.
- farms 14y agoWe have about 15-20 self-managed servers.
- chris_wot 14y agoThey apparently have top of the line supprt staff. They also have access to a technology called "phones" - this technology works by picking up a handset, dialing a number, the other person picks up the phone and you explain that there is infringing material and will you please take it down and make me aware when this is done. Sorry to hear of the dreadful service provided by ServerBeach!
- cft 14y agoIt appears to be true, until you look at this graph: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/ The number of DMCA requests is exponentially rising. Many of them are bogus, too broad and request removal of the entire domain. There are no effective legal penalties for overly broad requests. If you operate a large hosting or web company, it is unfortunately becoming economically unfeasible to examine each request to narrow down its scope and/or to even determine its legitimacy, and the most cost-efficient route is to comply blindly. This is not to say that ServerBeach is a good hosting company: I hope it's a good lesson for them: turning off such a large customer without getting on the phone with them is setting a precedent that is suicidal for their business.
- chii 14y agoI htink a solution might be to have to pay a fee that is proportional to the scope of the dmca take down request?
- wmf 14y agoUnfortunately the DMCA isn't written that way. You can't charge any fees.
- csomar 14y agoThat might be also the end of DMCA. If anyone figured out that they can abuse the system, the hosting company may receive enough requests that it can go out of business and instead not comply until the sender take more serious legal action.
- farms 14y agoIt's been a pretty crazy ride, and stupid setup, full story is here: http://wpmu.org/serverbeach-takes-1-45-million-edublogs-offline-just-12-hours-after-sending-through-a-lame-dmca-notice/ http://wpmu.org/serverbeach-takes-1-45-million-edublogs-offl... Happy to do any Q&A here too.
- Joe_Knapp 14y agoI will never use Serverbench.
- thaumaturgy 14y agoI wish your link had been submitted instead. It looks like a pretty simple case of miscommunication, except that ServerBeach is blowing it by not working with you to fix it. Go find a new host, you don't want to stay there.
- hayksaakian 14y agoAre other providers, say heroku, known for handling these cases any better?
- farms 14y agoThe sad thing is that we've been super happy customers of ServerBeach for ages now, they do a great job, but they really shafted us here. So, as long as they agreed no to do this to ya, I'd heartily recommend them... I'm hoping that we hear that from them shortly too.
- earless1 14y agoDo you guys plan on staying with ServerBeach? Was their hosting cheaper than rolling your own infrastructure on EC2?
- farms 14y agoGood question, and one we've already looked into a fair bit as we already host all of our uploads on Amazon. Back in the day we figured that it would probably be cheaper and more extensible to use Amazon... however given that things weren't broken, and the amount of time and effort we'd put into our SB setup we decide that it wasn't worth switching. We're lucky enough to have one of the best SysAdmins in the business, I wouldn't trade him for his weight in gold, but even with him and his assistants working flat out at that the cost and time of moving to another setup would far outweigh the other cost benefit... after all we're pretty freaking big: http://www.quantcast.com/edublogs.org http://www.quantcast.com/edublogs.org So previously that's how we've figured it out... if SB agree that they won't do something like this to us again without first at least making sure they call and speak to us, then we'll probably continue... it just makes sense. With a bit of luck all this publicity will make them realise how important it is.
- grecy 14y agoEvery time I see these articles I keep thinking there needs to be a penalty for every site taken down due to a DMCA take down that was not part of the original request. The penalty should be financial, and restrict future take down notices from the issuer. i.e. you can't make another request for 12 months, because your last request took down 10,000 sites. The fines should grow exponentially with the number of sites taken down.
- farms 14y agoFor sure, although I think future restrictions would be the key, like a kinda trustworthy index.
- rlpb 14y agoI'm going to defend the copyright holder today. It's not what I usually end up doing, but I think it is only fair in this case. It seems to me that the original takedown notice was legally justified. It doesn't matter that it was a little harsh; that isn't enough to make it DMCA abuse. The only thing that went wrong here was the hosting company's harsh response, by going far beyond what the DMCA required of them. The DMCA didn't cause the problem; the problem was caused by the hosting company's decision to shut down the site when it was not required by law and not demanded in the takedown request. And that's simple to resolve: switch hosting provider to a more reasonable one.
- toyg 14y agoThere are three parties involved in a DMCA request: presumpted rightholders, hosting organizations, and website owners. The law, as currently written, basically allows the first group to pressure the second into screwing the third. There is indeed a (rarely exercised) chance for site owners to get back at "malicious rightsholders"; however, there is no real accountability for hosting companies, which are then free to "err on the side of caution" (i.e. quickly pull as many plugs as possible to avoid a costly lawsuit). This should probably be rectified: hosting providers should be held accountable for unwarranted terminations as much as they are held accountable for hosting illegal content. One could say that "the market will hold them accountable", but looking at the increasing frequency of this sort of takedown shenanigans, I'd say that's a naive view.
- biot 14y agoDoes Edublogs have a registered agent to deal with copyright notices under the DMCA? The directory of designated agents is available at: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/e_agents.html http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/e_agents.html I don't see one for Edublogs, nor for Incsub which Edublogs is "a project of" according to the footer of their site. Unless they're listed under a different name, then they open themselves up to liability such as this story indicates. Had they been listed, Pearson would have had to deliver their DMCA notice to Edublogs' agent rather than ServerBeach's. Because they're not, ServerBeach is the one who must take action in order to be protected by the safe harbor provision and Edublogs is now the one legally responsible for any infringing content. Short story shorter, if you publish any sort of community content you really need to spend the $105 and protect yourself by availing yourself of the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agent.pdf http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agent.pdf See also: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loophole/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loo...
- farms 14y agoWe don't, but we will certainly get one, thanks for the pointer...
- dpe82 14y agoDo it yesterday. Send it registered mail. Until the copyright office receives it, YOU DO NOT HAVE DMCA SAFE HARBOR PROTECTION! It's not the only thing you have to do, but an important one. See Viacom v. YouTube: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Yo.... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/second-circuit-ruling-in-viacom-v-youtube-is-a-bummer-for-google-and-the-ugc-community/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/second-circuit-ru...
- xb95 14y agoThis doesn't stop ServerBeach, FWIW. http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/d/drmwidth.pdf http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/d/drmwidth.pdf My business, Dreamwidth Studios, has a duly registered agent and has since 2008. We pay roughly $8,000/month to ServerBeach, and we've had bad experiences with ServerBeach's AUP and mishandling of DMCA notifications. In our case, they refused to send us the DMCA notification, claiming that there were privacy concerns. (Sending it to us would violate the privacy of the person submitting it... yeah, blew my mind, too.)
- mmanfrin 14y agoPublisher knocks out 1.451mil blogs. edit: People are missing the emphasis. This wasn't me being pedantic, it was pointing out a neat allusion.
- saraid216 14y agoNumerology is not a neat allusion.
- chris_wot 14y agoForgive me - I'm not in any way into numerology: what exactly is being pointed out here?
- saraid216 14y agoFahrenheit 451. Numerology is the reading of meaning into the odd coincidence of numbers with events. GGP's "neat allusion" is that some of the digits on the number of blogs taken down coincides with the Fahrenheit temperature at which books burn which was the inspiration for the title of a book about censorship.
- Lazare 14y agoThe headline seems misleading. Pearson seems to have executed a valid DMCA claim on a single dis-used blog from 2007. Maybe a little silly, but within their rights, and certainly not egregious. And then ServerBeach decided to pull the plug on an entire rack of servers with no real notice, no real justification, and AFTER the customer had removed the content. Unless ServerBeach has a really amazing explanation (and frankly I can't imagine what that might be) this is simply horrifying. If ServerBeach will pull the plug on a customer paying $7k/month without warning and with essentially no justification, imagine what they'd do to someone smaller? My takeaway from this: DMCA still not a serious problem. Pearson no more assholeish than any other publisher. ServerBeach a bunch of dangerous loons who need to be kept away from your servers.
- farms 14y agoSee my comment re: call I just had with them , hope to be able to report some new policies that'll stop this from happening to their other customers shortly!
- 001sky 14y agoThis is an interesting point. But the story does raise the issue of "social-engineering" other people to do your bidding using (or as a consequnce of) DMCA notices. There's still the troubling question as to why ServerBeach felt compelled to take down 1.5 million blogs over a single DMCA notice. There's nothing in the DMCA process that demands an entire "ecosystem" be killed off to eliminate a single "bad apple." In that context, and perhaps with a re-written headline, the issues raised here are more generally extended a single company, no?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cft 14y ago>What would you have them do instead? They're bound under OCILLA and the DMCA in general to act in a certain way. Any other host on the Internet will, if they are interested in remaining in business, act exactly as ServerBeach did. No, not EVERY host. FusionStorm for example actually read and comprehend DMCA claims, to narrow down their scope. You DO NOT turn off a customer of this size WITHOUT GETTING ON THE PHONE with them FIRST. I hope this will teach ServerBeach a lesson. However, as I said in another comment, the overall landscape here is deteriorating is far beyond ServerBeach's control: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657833 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657833 PS. I should also add here that the revenues of a company that pays $70,000 for hosting annually could well be above $2m/yr, and such company could be capable of raising serious legal issues with their hosting company.
- mikecane 14y agoHow weird. I submitted this story this morning but it was instantly marked DEAD due to the source. shrugs
- farms 14y agoAs did we, last week when we published it... I think HN reckons we're spam for some reason, it'd be great to have that erroneous judgement fixed up too if anyone's listening!
- farms 14y agoBTW, just got off the phone with their GM, really nice guy, sounds like they are definitely going to be fixing this up for us and more generally... mucho relieved. Will post more details on http://wpmu.org http://wpmu.org when we have it, at the end it just sounds like a stupid fail of policy (we've all been there) - but it's a shame it had to get to this point to change it. We've been happy customers of their for years, hopefully now we can continue to be.
- tsycho 14y ago>>We've been happy customers of their for years, hopefully now we can continue to be. ServerBeach should be the one concerned about retaining you as a customer, their $75k/yr is at stake. While painful in the short run, you have the option of moving to a more empathetic provider. In any case, I hope this gets resolved quickly for you.
- jspthrowaway 14y agoI've been in the hosting industry for some time, and I'm always appalled at how quickly stories like this, regarding hosting providers, escalate. It's such a contrast between startups in this community that make a mistake ("I'm sure they just made a mistake, and they'll get it cleared up"), versus a hosting company ("they're incompetent, dangerous loons and I'm never giving them my business"). This attitude prevails beyond Hacker News, and finds itself into support tickets at hosting providers. I can't tell you how much support tickets made me resent the customers; the gloves come off when there's a mistake. I've personally been called much worse than has been shown in this thread thus far after I helped people in tickets. Honestly, I have to ask this -- why do those in the technical community here feel like their hosting company is automatically out to get them? Hosting companies are drowning in policies, and acting upon DMCA complaints is a particularly dangerous area because the DMCA is very vague, particularly in the expediency of provider action. Is the hatred for hosting companies rooted in their ability to take you offline very quickly? I deleted out of a thread here where I asked a similar question, because this is obviously a controversial topic, based upon those comments' scores within minutes. I just wish I understood why it's never okay for a hosting company to mess up, and why it's okay to attack them personally when they do. Of course, having been on the other side of this line, I don't actually think ServerBeach erred here but I'm also hesitant to draw a conclusion without both sides of the story. It's an unfortunate situation for both sides, and this sort of thing never makes it better.
- aero142 14y agoI would love to hear even a theoretical version of this story where pulling the plug so quickly is not a error on ServerBreach's part. Since you bothered to create a throwaway just to post this, you might as well offer some specifics. As it stands, it just sounds like you are trolling.
- jspthrowaway 14y ago> Since you bothered to create a throwaway just to post this It's one click to deduce that is certainly not the case.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoWhat I find astonishing about this is the material that's covered, the Beck Hopelessness Scale. This is a diagnostic test of 20 questions to help assess depression. To get a copy, it costs $120! http://www.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-us/Productdetail.htm?Pid=015-8133-609&Mode=summary http://www.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-us/Prod... Thankfully, they include 25 questionnaires, and you can buy more (in English or Spanish) for only $52. $2 per patient isn't a huge cost, but psychological care is already dangerously out of reach for those who need it. I'd be interested if anyone in the field (a practicing psychologist, maybe psychiatrist) could provide an idea of: a) How many copies do you buy for an office? One per psychologist, or would it be shared? b) How many tests like this does a psychologist typically employ? I haven't anecdotally heard of any being administered, but I also live in Canada, and maybe socialized medicine takes a tougher view on $2 pieces of paper from the 70's.
- rorrr 14y agoServerbeach is the idiot in this situation. So incompetent.
- xb95 14y agoAs another data point -- I run Dreamwidth Studios (http://dreamwidth.org http://dreamwidth.org) and we host on ServerBeach. We received a DMCA notice a few weeks back that had the same notice, almost, ours said: Dear Mark Smith: We have received a valid claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, codified at 17 U.S.C. 512 (the "DMCA"), that materials on your web server hosted at ServerBeach may violate the copyright interests of the party filing the complaint. In accordance with the DMCA, we hereby inform you that your web server has been or within the next 24 hours will be, disabled to the extent necessary to comply with the DMCA. Your web site will remain disabled unless we receive a valid counter-notification from you. Note that it says that it could have already happened, and it's immediately hostile. Also, this notice DID NOT CONTAIN THE NOTIFICATION. I was concerned, as Dreamwidth has a fully functional DMCA policy and we pay people to manage DMCA complaints. We have a good team, fast turnaround, and obey the law. I got on the phone with ServerBeach, and they flat out REFUSED to show me the DMCA notice. They said that it was a privacy issue, they could not show me the DMCA that was filed against my company. The notification they sent me included a random URL on my site -- but didn't tell me what content was actually infringing. I was told I had no choice but to take down content that was NOT infringing -- overbroadly censoring my user, HOPING that was enough to pacify the ServerBeach AUP team. I was not about to risk my business (we pay ~$8,000/month to ServerBeach) over one user's content. But honestly -- that's a terrible position to be in. We're a site that believes strongly in fair use and transformative works. We have worked hard to fight for our users -- but if our host is fighting us... there's precious little we can do about the situation. So -- be wary of ServerBeach. It seems that lately their AUP team has gone off the deep end and they're throwing customers under the bus. I wish I knew why.
- wpietri 14y agoThat is a giant heap of bullshit. The "we have secret orders that you must obey" bit is incredible. How could privacy possibly be a legitimate excuse? If I were in your shoes, I'd be looking for better hosting. A company that doesn't understand that service businesses require good service rarely restricts that cluelessness to just one facet of the company.
- chris_wot 14y ago
- js951534 14y agof^&ck publishers, get millions of ebooks for free at http://legalreads.com http://legalreads.com