That's true as far as it goes, but one can still argue that this situation shows a weakness of DMCA. Whenever the host is in doubt about how to respond to a takedown, the law encourages them to over-react.
No, one cannot. The law left the door wide open for service providers to work out the situation with customers, so long as they do it quickly (I believe the actual term in law is "expeditiously").
Blaming the law because the service provider isn't following it is absurd.
It is not absurd. More blame may go to the service provider. But the actual consequences in the real world matter.
The whole tone from the government is to encourage the rights of those making claims against those taking advantage of their rights to publish. It is not at all surprising to repeatedly hear of draconian actions taken on the basis of DCMA. Exempting the DCMA from criticism based on what is actually happening is not sensible.
DCMA, and the related pressure from the government on related matters, is of course likely to cause people to make decisions to essentially turn of the printing press (the server) when confronted with DCMA notices.
Granted, in this instance I would blame the host for a large portion of the problem.
I also find Pearson's actions ridicules. The consequences of their silly action were very bad. The host shouldn't have made the bad decision, but they wouldn't have been put in that spot without a silly action by Pearson. To me the host deserves most of the blame but DCMA (and all the hype around government's get tough policy for the copyright industry) and Pearson deserve blame also.
I do not see why we cannot blame the law. The argument seems pretty trivial to make. If a company does not overreact they have a low chance of being hit with a very large penalty (loss of safe haven and lawsuit), whereas if they overreact they have a high chance of facing a small penalty (loss of some customers and some bad publicity). The logical decision for any business would be to take a high chance of a small penalty over a low chance of a high penalty, to maintain stability. So the law here is systematically encouraging businesses to overreact, which seems like a bad law to me.
As far as I can tell, ServerBeach did follow the law. And 'farms' response elsewhere in this thread suggests WPMU manages their own servers, so there may not have been any way for ServerBeach to take down a single blog/post/subdomain.
