One DMCA complaint shutters 1.45 million education blogs

On October 10th, web hosting company ServerBeach shut down nearly 1.5 million education blogs in response to a single DMCA takedown request from Pearson, a textbook publisher. Pearson’s request targeted copyrighted material published on only one blog owned by Australia-based EduBlogs, a ServerBeach client, but as Ars Technica reports, confusion on both ends resulted in the shut down of all 1.45 million sites. EduBlogs insists it was never given the chance to shutter the problematic blog itself, while ServerBeach says it notified the company on two previous occasions and therefore had no choice but to shut down all of its servers. The sites were eventually restored after just 60 minutes of down time, but the incident speaks to larger, more troubling issues about the power of a single DMCA request, and how that power should be handled.