Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, service
providers are allowed ‘safe harbour’ on content posted, but must act on any infringement
notice that is served on them. Pretty straight forward and it is a process that
happens everyday.
However, it can break down and go wrong and in the
case one notice appears to have closed down not one piece of content infringement
but 1.5 million teacher and student blog articles.
Pearson raised a takedown notice on ServerBeach who host Edublogs'
websites. Edublog claims to be the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite
setup on the web. The infringement cited was aimed at a teacher's blog, which in 2007, had shared
a copy of a 1974 Beck’s
Hopelessness Scale's questionaire with his class.
Pearson requested $120 for the 38 year questionnaire, which
was posted in 2007 and ServerBeach contacted Edublogs. The notice sent to Edublogs had apparently already been actioned and the offending post removed and not being displayed. However as many of us know, deleting something doesn’t remove it from the search engines’ cache so it is still effectively there and in this case ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of Edublogs. When Edublogs did not respond within 24 hours to emails alerting it to the allegedly infringing content, ServerBeach shut down the entire site and some 1.5 million innocent blogs. The action over one DMCA notice impacted a whole community. Was this
in fact compliance or over zealous compliance?
There then followed
a open internet spat between ServerBeach and Edublogs.
A whole innocent community of teachers and
students have been effected by something that they should not have been exposed
to. Who was right, wrong and whether it could have been handled better is subjective today. What is clear is that it is a bad day’s PR for DMCA, Pearson, ServerBeach
and Edublogs and a worse day for a significant education community.
