A DMCA takedown noticed issued by publishing house Pearson resulted in approximately 1.45 million education blogs being taken offline without notice, according to the service that runs them.
James Farmer, founder and CEO of Edublogs, penned a blog post last week that said its hosting company, ServerBeach, “turned off our webservers, without notice, less than 12 hours after issuing us with a DMCA email.”
At issue was an Edublogs teacher who in 2007 shared a copy of Beck’s Hopelessness Scale, a 20-question list intended to measure aspects of hopelessness. Pearson sells access to this list for $120, Farmer said, and objected to it being posted freely online.