Re:Pearson takes down 1.5 million teacher/student blogs with...
by cdrxndr on Monday October 15, 2012 @08:11PM
(#4657772)
I'm completely with you on the reckless automated DMCA notice system. That does not seem to be the case here at all.
Re:Pearson takes down 1.5 million teacher/student blogs with...
by gojomo on Monday October 15, 2012 @09:56PM
(#4658110)
Yes, 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/ 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.)
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.