If there's one thing we've seen plenty of here at Techdirt, it's the damage a single DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice can do. From shuttering a legitimate ebook lending site to removing negative reviews to destroying a user's Flickr account to knocking a copyright attorney's site offline, the DMCA notice continues to be the go-to weapon for copyright defenders. Collateral damage is simply shrugged at and the notices continue to fly at an ever-increasing pace.Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice issued aimed at a copy of Beck's Hoplessness Scale posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites (You may recall Pearson from such other related copyright nonsense as The $180 Art Book With No Pictures and No Free Textbooks Ever!). The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach. James Farmer at wpmu.org fills in the details.
In case you don’t already know, we’re the folks not only behind this site andWPMU DEV, but also Edublogs… the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite setup on the web, with, as of right now 1,451,943 teacher and student blogs hosted.
And today, our hosting company, ServerBeach, to whom we pay $6,954.37 every month to host Edublogs, turned off our webservers, without notice, less than 12 hours after issuing us with a DMCA email.
Because one of our teachers, in 2007, had shared a copy of Beck’s Hopelessness Scale with his class, a 20 question list, totalling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like you to pay $120 for.
Submitted by SnarkyWriter.
Textbook publishers are reprehensible greedy dbags. DMCA is a clusterfuck of a flawed law. And fair use is on life support, if not already dead.
ReplyDeletePearson is not only greedy, they are incompetent. I would nationalize their organization immediately.
ReplyDeleteThis is one argument in favor of Blackholeboard and other proprietary, password-protected LMSs: one can make readings available to students without making them available to the whole world -- and to the scrutiny of rapacious publishers eager to erode fair use as much as possible. Also, if there is a complaint/takedown, the university will be up in arms on the students' behalf (which gives proffies time to teach rather than protest). Of course, there are other systems with password protection, some of them open access (thought that requires some tech work on the part of the adopting institution).
ReplyDeleteMind you, I'm all in favor of individual authors (and presses that support/facilitate the publication of genuinely original, or even usefully derivative/synthetic, work) getting paid for use of their products in the reasonable -- pennies per page -- way that systems like the Copyright Clearance Center make possible, but at the moment it seems to be the middlemen who are making all the money from academic publishing. A good electronic reserve system, and/or a good set of library databases from which students can retrieve readings themselves (fair use, and good practice) is the proffie's friend.