Pearson takes down 1.5 million teacher/student blogs with a single DMCA notice

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121013/18332220701/textbook-publisher-pearson-takes-down-15-million-teacher-student-blogs-with-single-dmca-notice.shtml

by machrider • 14 years ago

192 88 14 years ago

techdirt.com

iProject• 14 years ago

I take Pearson's subtext to be: The eTextbook, eLearning field craves to be disrupted.

thaumaturgy8• 14 years ago

The 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.

gojomo3• 14 years ago

But 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.

cdrxndr2• 14 years ago

I'm completely with you on the reckless automated DMCA notice system. That does not seem to be the case here at all.

cdrxndr2• 14 years ago

Was 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.

farms11• 14 years ago

It'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!

lmkg• 14 years ago

That'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.

thaumaturgy8• 14 years ago

No, 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.

jeremyjh• 14 years ago

This 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.

farms11• 14 years ago

We have about 15-20 self-managed servers.

cft• 14 years ago

It appears to be true, until you look at this graph: 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• 14 years ago

I htink a solution might be to have to pay a fee that is proportional to the scope of the dmca take down request?

csomar2• 14 years ago

That 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.

farms11• 14 years ago

It's been a pretty crazy ride, and stupid setup, full story is here: http://wpmu.org/serverbeach-takes-1-45-million-edublogs-offl...

Happy to do any Q&A here too.

thaumaturgy8• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Are other providers, say heroku, known for handling these cases any better?

farms11• 14 years ago

The 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• 14 years ago

Do you guys plan on staying with ServerBeach? Was their hosting cheaper than rolling your own infrastructure on EC2?

grecy• 14 years ago

Every 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.

farms11• 14 years ago

For sure, although I think future restrictions would be the key, like a kinda trustworthy index.

rlpb2• 14 years ago

I'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.

toyg3• 14 years ago

There 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.

saraid2166• 14 years ago

It was legally justified, but Pearson's request was still silly. It would have been more reasonable for them to go directly to Edublogs rather than pulling out the big guns as a first move.

I'm not saying Pearson was fault--they're not--but they could have done better.

biot• 14 years ago

Does 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

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

farms11• 14 years ago

We don't, but we will certainly get one, thanks for the pointer...

dpe82• 14 years ago

Do 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._Yo....

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/second-circuit-ru...

xb952• 14 years ago

This doesn't stop ServerBeach, FWIW.

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• 14 years ago

Publisher knocks out 1.451mil blogs.

edit: People are missing the emphasis. This wasn't me being pedantic, it was pointing out a neat allusion.

saraid2166• 14 years ago

Numerology is not a neat allusion.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

Forgive me - I'm not in any way into numerology: what exactly is being pointed out here?

Lazare• 14 years ago

The 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.

farms11• 14 years ago

See 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• 14 years ago

This 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?

paulsutter• 14 years ago

The only change needed in the headline is to replace Pearson with Serverbeach. Im no fan of Pearson, or DMCA notices, but yes Serverbeach is the dangerous incompetent here.

mark_l_watson• 14 years ago

And, do you know what? ServerBeach is not even a good hosting service (my experience).

Good things sometimes come from shit: maybe ServerBeach will clean up their act.

bwb• 14 years ago

We do a lot of business with ServerBeach / Peer1, they are good and have gotten a lot better in the last 24 months. I just don't think they deserve total blame in this situation.

If you are you are providing unmanaged servers, that client misses the warning and doesn't respond, you have to take the next step and suspend that server because many times your contract prohibits you from going in and removing one URL. I wish they had called too but sometimes that isn't possible given the margins on some of these businesses.

Thanks, Ben (CEO at Site5.com)

saraid2166• 14 years ago

According to the article, ServerBeach did have justification: it's the letter of their policy. That doesn't make it smart or sane, but it is justified. They did what they said they'd do.

mikecane• 14 years ago

How weird. I submitted this story this morning but it was instantly marked DEAD due to the source. shrugs

farms11• 14 years ago

As 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!

farms11• 14 years ago

BTW, 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 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• 14 years 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.

robomartin• 14 years ago

My 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.

jspthrowaway6• 14 years ago

I'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.

aero1422• 14 years ago

I 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.

jspthrowaway6• 14 years ago

> Since you bothered to create a throwaway just to post this

It's one click to deduce that is certainly not the case.

saraid2166• 14 years ago

The best justification I can think of is that they deal with such a large volume of requests that they simply don't have the time or attention or legal latitude to be skeptical of DMCA claims.

I don't really find that sufficient, but it's all I can imagine.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

I'm neither arguing for or against the reactions you describe, but from that perspective, it's worse when a hosting company screws up because other companies are relying on them for business. When most startups screw up, the scope damage is limited to their direct customers, and the amount of damage is limited to the price of the startup's service.

jspthrowaway6• 14 years ago

That's a thin argument, because it really depends on what the startup does. There are plenty of turn-and-burn startups that have become mission-critical for other startups, I'm sure.

Whether that's wise, well...

ScottBurson• 14 years ago

The problem here seems to have been that ServerBeach didn't bother to make a phone call before shutting off the servers of a not insignificant customer, for what turns out not to have been a very good reason.

If they let the customer know that this really was just a mistake and is not their policy, okay, well, it's unfortunate but maybe not fatal to the relationship. But if it is their policy -- and until they say otherwise, it's natural to assume that it is -- then I can see why people would have a problem with that.

jspthrowaway6• 14 years ago

> The problem here seems to have been that ServerBeach didn't bother to make a phone call before shutting off the servers of a not insignificant customer.

Well, two things:

Most hosting companies don't call for anything, and most don't even take a number. I've dealt with many. Amazon, in particular, won't call you for anything. (I know because I work at an account several orders of magnitude larger than OP that hosts with Amazon.) Google won't call you before they terminate your Gmail, as has been shown before, and that's simply because the resources required to maintain a call center don't make sense for (the almost entirely automated) hosting industry. Margins are low. Calling every customer that receives a DMCA complaint would, at an average-size host, require probably a dozen employees just making calls. This is seriously busy work, and people outside the hosting industry don't see that.

The other thing is that we keep saying "pull the plug," "shut off servers," etc -- that's a pretty drastic intervention, and I'd be shocked if that was what was done. More than likely, the IP address was just dropped from the Internet, which is rather quickly reversible. The same thing will happen if someone points a DDoS botnet at you and starts disrupting service for other customers as collateral.

> for what turns out not to have been a very good reason.

ServerBeach does not have the liberty to debate whether a reason is good or not. A valid DMCA complaint is a valid DMCA complaint; to remain "carrier neutral" and preserve safe harbor for other customers, a hosting company must act as if every complaint is valid and enforceable.

Once a hosting company makes decisions about complaints and selectively enforces, safe harbor goes bye bye and the copyright holder claims ownership of the hosting company. Then many, many customers beyond the original customer are affected, which is a really big deal at a hosting company (scope).

> But if it is their policy -- and until they say otherwise, it's natural to assume that it is -- then I can see why people would have a problem with that.

I don't disagree about having a problem with a policy. I do, however, detest the directions these conversations take. Look around this thread. I don't see a lot of "that's a bum policy," I see a lot of "what horrible people" and implications that the employees are incompetent, and so on. I do take issue with that.

thaumaturgy8• 14 years ago

I've worked for an ISP and I'm working on a shared hosting offering now. I think there are manifold issues between service providers and customers, few of which have anything to do with this particular case.

1. The race to the bottom in pricing has had two effects: it has turned hosting into a commodity, and customer service has suffered. As an immediate effect, you get customers who aren't loyal to you because they can pay the same or less somewhere else, and you anger more customers because you don't have the money to hire good staff.

2. Lack of technical ability on the customers' end. Everybody wants a website now, but not so many people understand all of the technology involved, so you end up with issues that are technically the customer's fault, but look to the customer like they're your fault. Worse still is that any attempt to explain the issue to the customer just comes across as unhelpful technical jargon. Service providers really need to take a default "We like all of our customers (even the pathological ones)" position, or they won't be able to cope with this.

3. Hosting is largely a dinosaur. VPS hosting is the biggest thing in the industry in a long time; during the race to the bottom, way too many hosting providers got complacent and stopped inventing new software and systems, and just crammed as many customers as they could onto their servers. Customers really resented that, and I've talked to so few hosting providers at any regional conferences that ever really got that.

All of these add up to what looks to customers like a business that just doesn't care, and customers are eager to give that attitude right back. The question that hosting providers should be asking themselves is, "What's to love about our service?"

I happen to agree with the general opinion that hosting providers are in such a position of responsibility that they can't really afford to make mistakes like this. Most (not all!) startups get a pass because it's accepted that they're a small team building a service; if you build your business on top of that, well, buyer beware. But, if you choose to be a hosting provider, you're taking on some serious responsibility. You're no longer a small team, you're a commodity service that web-facing business absolutely live and die on.

jspthrowaway6• 14 years ago

Couldn't agree more with most of your points. Almost everybody defaults to assuming their broken Wordpress install is the provider's fault. I'm not sure that I agree with any company being beyond mistakes.

alanctgardner2• 14 years ago

What 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/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• 14 years ago

Serverbeach is the idiot in this situation. So incompetent.

xb952• 14 years ago

As another data point -- I run Dreamwidth Studios (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.

wpietri2• 14 years ago

That 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_wot4• 14 years ago

Don't wonder why, get the hell away from ServerBeach!

js951534• 14 years ago

f^&ck publishers, get millions of ebooks for free at http://legalreads.com

Pearson takes down 1.5 million teacher/student blogs with a single DMCA notice

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