Pearson takes down 1.5 million teacher/student blogs with a single DMCA notice
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
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.
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?
Good things sometimes come from shit: maybe ServerBeach will clean up their act.
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)
Gosh, whose fault could that be? I'd say it's the people who set those prices. Given that the first item in their "Why Server Beach?" list is "Superior Service", they should price in some actual service. Including, say, checking to see if you had fixed the DMCA issue before turning off the site.
1. the Edublogs team removed the offending post within the 12 hours, thereby complying with the request.
2. apparently ServerBeach took it upon themselves to double check through presumably automated means and detected the file in a Varnish cache (which would be inaccessible to the public)
3. this led to ServerBeach deciding to shut down Edublog's servers on the grounds of non-compliance.
If my interpretation of the jumbled order of events is correct, it's pretty clear ServerBeach is at fault here - it's not illegal to have a copyrighted file on your server; it's illegal to serve that file without proper rights. Their system is flawed.
Guess I'll never use them. Ever.
Depending on the prior cases for that client (or; is this client a notorious spreader of illegal materials or someone who didn't paid in time on numerous occasions) you send automated warnings for a few days if the content remains in place and THEN you can decide to (manually) switch of the server. Unfortunately bigger companies forget about client support / contact and that client is king; Pearson is not your client, edublogs is; you are supposed to defend them, especially lacking prior cases over a larger period of time.
If edublogs called serverbeach to explain the case, telling them they removed the content (from varnish as well) through the open ssh connection, the support person can immediately check and switch it back on. That's normal practice to me and any host who doesn't do that is not worth paying more than $1.99 for some experimental landing page/site which doesn't mean much to you anyway if closed down.
Sorry to say if this is how Serverbeach or Site5.com treat paying customers, I will never bring my business there and I hope others do not either to show that we expect better from you in this day and age. There are clear ways to treat DMCA's and most can be done automated without actually removing anything yourself on the server; there are plenty of filtering rules to block outside the actual server while keeping the rest of the system up and giving the client ample opportunity to remove the offending content.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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/ 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.)
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.
they could at least have called us!
You do have backups, I hope? You can just be up and running on a new provider within a day or so?
In the past I would always have said "You must have backups, always, no exceptions". But I realised when reading your post that there must be some businesses that don't have backups. Some of those have made a rational sensible decision. And I'm trying to work out where the cut off is between explaining to a customer that their data has gone and buying a bunch of drives for yet another rack.
I've mostly gotten over giving people grief for not having backups when fate finally catches up with them, so that's why I was asking.
I don't understand your last sentence.
Blaming the law because the service provider isn't following it is absurd.
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.
Sorry to hear of the dreadful service provided by ServerBeach!
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
See also: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loo...
See Viacom v. YouTube:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Yo....
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/second-circuit-ru...
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.)
Happy to do any Q&A here too.
Go find a new host, you don't want to stay there.
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.
It's one click to deduce that is certainly not the case.
I don't really find that sufficient, but it's all I can imagine.
Whether that's wise, well...
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.
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.
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.
What would your visceral response be to a brand new bank that makes the news because it got robbed due to faulty locks, and oh-by-the-way they haven't gotten around to being insured yet? Is it fair that a bank is held to different standards than Mom & Pop's Corner Shoppe?
For most people -- maybe just about everybody -- a hosting company is the online equivalent of a bank. And that's totally fair.
Maybe it's a big vs small thing too?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A: Hosting companies are not held accountable for hosting illegal content if they cooperate with authorities. There are specific procedures for the gamut, including child pornography. The FBI is very active in working with established hosting providers to investigate and take down illicit and illegal content.
B: Your suggestion would shutter smaller startup hosting companies, raise prices at others, and cripple the startup community that Hacker News loves so much. The fallout from your suggestion would be so colossal that the harm to innovation from software parents would look minuscule in comparison. Should we punish the telephone company for every bomb threat that traverses the line? Dreadful.
B: you're misinterpreting what I said, which was rather: "Should we punish the telephone company for unilaterally disconnecting the line of people accused to send bomb threats, regardless of whether they actually did use it that way?" And my answer is hell yes. At the moment, ISPs pay no penalty for screwing the innocent, unlike the other two parties in the law. I don't think that's reasonable.
The third party can file a counter notice, at which point the second group has no legal obligation to screw the third, nor has any legal liability in not screwing the third. What am I missing?
You have a system that, de facto, introduces incentives for ISPs to disconnect, but no incentive for them to help an innocent third-party or even just carry out due diligence.
I'm not saying Pearson was fault--they're not--but they could have done better.
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.
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.
edit: People are missing the emphasis. This wasn't me being pedantic, it was pointing out a neat allusion.
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.
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.
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
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.