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MPAA Violates Another Software License
Journal written by Alien54 (180860) and posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 18, 2007 01:46 AM
from the that's-a-little-cold dept.
from the that's-a-little-cold dept.
Patrick
Robib, a blogger who wrote his own blogging engine called Forest Blog recently noticed that none other than the MPAA was using his work, and had completely violated his linkware license by removing all links back to the Forest Blog site, not crediting him in any way. The MPAA blog was using the Forest Blog software, but had completely stripped off his name, and links back to his site. He only found about it accidentally when he happened to visit the MPAA site.
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MPAA Violates Another Software License
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Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday September 16, @03:39PM)
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't it be nice to send the friendly folks from the BSA to do a complete software audit of the MPAA?
Maybe an auditing circle-jerk could be set up: the BSA investigates the MPAA, who investigates the RIAA, who invesigates the BSA, etc. ad nauseum, and they could just leave the rest of us alone.
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Funny)
Their circle is already a bunch of jerks.
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The screencaps show very little detail
2) "Dan Glickman Forum" from the screencaps turn up nothing in Google.
3) The line provided http://www.mpaa.org/blog_default.asp doesn't exist, isn't found in google OR the wayback machine and the home page back in September 06 looks very much like it does today - I don't find any obvious links to this.
If the MPAA accuses me of stealing files they had better produce some evidence and I damn well expect (not that they desterve it) that evidence has to be provided on this.
Of course my Google skills might not be up to snuff - but come on community, find the evidence while it still exists - if it did at all.
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117931921.html?
Now, it's possible that he was lazy and just dumped an article he was paid for straight into his BLOG, but it's equally likely the screenshot was faked using data that was already out there.
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.giovannispina.net/)
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Informative)
Since they've admitted to having done it (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://symbolset.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday May 26, @11:53PM)
I'm certain their own seizure subpoenas could be referenced for precedent and legal justification.
But I Am Not A Lawyer.
True, but not exactly true - follow up needed (Score:5, Informative)
-Em
Re:True, but not exactly true - follow up needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, well they had it set up on a public-facing web server, accessible by anyone. You don't test software on a public server. Given that the MPAA is not exactly known for being a forgiving bunch, I don't think their excuses amount to much. If they had some public goodwill, I could see giving them a pass on it, but they seem to feel so strongly about copyright infringement that it just wouldn't seem right to let them off on this. I'm sure they would agree, right? If copyright infringement is so terrible, surely they should be facing a really hefty fine here, right? Maybe some jail time? If they're going to insist on strict enforcement, then they had better get their own affairs and people under some seriously tight control too.
Re:True, but not exactly true - follow up needed (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.on.net/)
So the actual reality is closer to this idea, that if you really want to hurt organised crime, you a far more morally compelled to pirate media and distribute it for free and as a result, cut off a substantial portion of their income.
As a bonus, just think of all the 'artists' (well at least in their own minds) you will be saving from a life of drunken, drugged up depravity ;-) (instead they will look forward to long healthy life as food service professionals and as a double plus, we get to avoid the endlessly monotonous exposure to their aberrant behaviour).
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Informative)
1) The screenshots show as much detail as possible, I can/could only view the output of my system and not the source.
2/3) I came across the blog through my website referals when they accessed the RSS feed from my site. The site was live and online but I'm unsure whether it was ever linked to or if it was spidered by google, but it was on a live web server that was accessable by any member of the public. It has been removed from their web server since the article was written after some dialogue between myself and the MPAA.
I have been in communication with Paul Egge and Richard Kroon (Director of Application Development) at the MPAA and have copies of all of the emails that were sent.
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.dolemite.com/)
http://blawg.bsadefense.com/2006/12/bsa_timeline.
Personally, I'd be tempted to farm out the communication with the BSA to the chaps who write the responses for the Pirate Bay. . . .
Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.rwven.com/ | Last Journal: Monday January 23 2006, @02:52PM)
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, come on. 150 pounds is not $97. 97 pounds is $150.
Besides, he could go after full penalties now, which is significantly more than 150 pounds. Sure, it's nothing to the MPAA, but still, it doesn't look good that they do so much to enforce IP then they lose in court for similar violations
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.pocketgamer.org/)
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://clintonhawk.net/)
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
No no no. It has nothing to do with the cost of the albu^H^H^H^Hsoftware. You see, since they didn't pay initially, they should have had a link. And if they had placed a link, then there would have been more users of Forest Blog, and thus they are liable for each user who did not use Forest Blog because they were missing the link. Therefore their liability should be $97 times everyone who has visited mpaa.org, and thus was a lost customer, plus punitive damages of $150,000 per page that should have had a link.
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporate criminals are clever enough to distance themselves from all crimes they oversee. They're going to release a statement about how this page was handled by some lowly contractor, who takes all fault, they removed it as soon as it was found, and walk away clean.
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
O
/ \
Its sorta legit.... (Score:5, Interesting)
short of it is:
MPAA Response:
Re:Its sorta legit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
Re:Its sorta legit.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual point of the software is to be used by large number of people to read/respond to postings - this was not done in this case, just an internal mock up of a site (which of course should not have been posted on a public website, but still).
And despite my dislike of all things with AA in the title (sorry AAA, aardvarks) and given our collective thirst for revenge against THIS *AA, it does not seem to be THAT outlandish to use the software in this way, and even the author of said software agreed.
-Em
Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
(http://sweger.net/~andrew/)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Should you happen to rent or buy This Film Is Not Yet Rated [netflix.com] the "incident" discussed in-thread is detailed during the audio commentary (by the film's director and producer) and again within a deleted scene (the phone call from an MPAA lawyer that informed the director of unauthorized copying was filmed, though the MPAA's half of the conversation was not directly recorded).
In a nutshell, the director had submitted the film to the MPAA for ratings review and was told that no one other than the raters would view the tape provided. He was also told that no copies would be made of the supplied materials. It came to pass that members of the MPAA admitted to not only screening the film for several non-raters but also to making at least one complete (and unauthorized) copy of the supplied tape.
Wikipedia covers this same ground [wikipedia.org] though that summary is about as lacking as mine in terms of substantive references.
How hard is it to check the license? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.sirsonic.com/)
If anything, this is like the futility to pointing out that MPAA or RIAA heads' family members pirate content. At the end of the day, what are people against the copyright lobby fighting for? Some say downright incorrect prosecution, which obviously happens, but underneath it all, its the result of a lack leniancy and less strict laws. The only reason that breaking a "Linkware" license is news is because of it highlites that copyright laws are, in the end, only selectively enforced, not because of some organizational hypocricy. The hypocricy basically is unintentional, and to me, thats really what the problem is. Its not some blatent flogging, its just the old adage of the impractibility of ensuring that those around you practise what you preach. Getting onto that soapbox and being adamant about how you live your life is in no way an argument against an organzation that is hypocritical for the very reason that it is not one single person but a large organization of people. Its like some company saying that j-walking in all cases, always, everytime, hurts their bottom line; it'd take you less than 10 minutes if you had full access to everyone at a company to spot apparent hypocricy, but that wouldn't be the time to point out, "Hey, *I* don't j-walk." Its not revelent, because at some point, the eagerness of enforcement is more relevant than the actual law.
Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the age of digital copies, strict copyright law is unenforceable.
Regular theft leaves evidence behind - the stolen item is gone - you know you have been robbed. Stealing a copy of something leaves behind no evidence. If you do not know it has been stolen, you can not even begin to start looking for the thief.
Someone is likely to pipe in that there is evidence of theft - the stolen item/copy itself. Before that someone starts piping, ask yourself just how many crimes are investigated because the cops found a guy with stolen items versus how many are investigated because something went missing? I am going to SWAG and say at least 1:10,000 maybe even 1:100,000, which is about as good an example of unenforceable as you are going to get. Of course those 1 out of 10 thousand cases have about a 100% success rate, but that's only because the crimes are already solved by the time they are discovered.
Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:5, Insightful)
Over and over.....copying is not stealing. It is copying. There is a difference. The powers that be LOVE when people call copying stealing. If I steal an object - you no longer have the object. If I copy an object, you still have the object. Copyright is a givernment granted monopoly so what I am doing in copying is ignoring your monopoly. What I actually do with that copy then defne the damage that potentially could occur to your income from that copy.
I grew up copying my friends albums on tapes. We all bought stuff, but no one bleated then about stealing. We called it sharing.
How many people out there are buying NOYTHING and only aquiring music via copying. Very few I would imagine.
Maybe... (Score:1, Insightful)
It looks like a replay (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday November 09, @01:36AM)
Who's laughing now! (Score:3, Funny)
(http://dimiter.dyndns.org/)
Oh, the sweet paradox for Slashdot. (Score:1, Interesting)
No, we get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
We want to remind the MPAA that "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." If the MPAA wasn't complaining about other people's copyright infringment, then I wouldn't complain about its. But it is, so I will. Get it?
Re:Oh, the sweet paradox for Slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3675.html)
It's not about whether or not anyone supports or opposes copyright law. The MPAA has claimed in public that copyright infringement is immoral and unethical. Their motivation for doing this is obvious: If they inform the public that some action is illegal, while the public thinks there's nothing wrong with the action morally and ethically, then they risk having the law changed to reflect the public's opinion. Convincing people that they have the moral/ethical high ground ensures that they can continue to benefit from the current legal system, or even lobby successfully for stricter measures in their favour.
Remember their ad campaign:
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A HANDBAG
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A TELEVISION
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A DVD
DOWNLOADING PIRATED FILMS IS STEALING
The message that they are obviously trying to advance is that copyright infringement is stealing, and therefore is immoral, unethical, and illegal. However, their blatant disregard for the exclusive legal rights of others under copyright law demonstrates the hypocrisy of this claim to the moral and ethical high ground. It shows that even the people behind the MPAA are not themselves convinced that the issue is as simple as "copyright infringement is stealing". How, then, do they expect the rest of the public to be convinced?
Middleman? (Score:1)
Re:Middleman? (Score:5, Insightful)
well yeah.... (Score:1)
(http://www.chrisllorca.com/)
Its not ok for you to download crap that you wouldn't have paid to see in the first place.
Civil (not criminal) (Score:5, Insightful)
As a civil issue ( the only other legal avenue ), you can only hope to obtain justice through the courts. It will cost $1000's to get a judgment, perhaps $100,000's. There is no justice. All we have is persecution it would seem with the powerful pretty much doing whatever they like with impunity.
While its not fair, the question any prosecutor is going to ask is if spending the taxpayers money on this is a good idea. Of course, spending the taxpayers money prosecuting a person charged with a traffic incident is always considered a good idea because its cheap (usually) and meant to keep the sheep in line and paying the fines.
Am I a cynic?
Contact MPAA about piracy (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.mpaa.org/ReportPiracy.asp [mpaa.org]
Please feel free to let them know about their own transgressions.
Here's the MPAA response: (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.agaresmedia.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday June 15 2006, @04:05PM)
Well, I must say I'm surprised;to after getting no response to my previous emails to the MPAA about their use of Forest Blog at the tail end of last year I got a result within five hours this time, unless they were just replying to the original email?
Anyway, thanks to Paul Egge and Richard Kroon the situation has now been resolved and they've removed Forest Blog from their web server.
Re:Here's the "/." response: (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of the targets of **AA action were afforded the opportunity to just say the same thing - "okay, sorry, I took it down, and it wasn't really meant for public consumption anyway, so we didn't do anything wrong", as opposed to being on the wrong end of a settlement demand?
traditionalist thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://yro.slashdot.org/~drDugan/)
Apply MPAA logic (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://telebody.com | Last Journal: Tuesday July 30 2002, @07:28AM)
I submit that a software author is the same as a music CD author on an artistic level, perhaps more so since he does not have all the studio people to massage his work into something palatable.
If this artist is left on his own, he could make some cash in small claims court, or at least his 150 pound license fee [hostforest.co.uk] if he is not the litigous sort perhaps.
However I think this is also a very good opportunity for a big guns lawyers supplied perhaps by the EFF to find the paper where the MPAA writes down its killer legal strategies, and tear it up into tiny pieces, much as IBM is doing to SCO.
Equate software to music. Equate running softare or viewing a webpage as a "performance" in the legal sense. Use MPAA rules. Since the license costs about $100, calculate based on a 300% markup over a $35 average MPAA cd price. The sum will be punitive damages for theft, plus the 300% of what the MPAA sues for a song, plus the price of a "performance" multiplied by the number of visits to any of the blog's pages, based on the evidence of the MPAA's server logs which is must produce in court. Although this sounds over the top, it is simply using the same non-common-sensical strategy the MPAA is using in court, and I think a judge and jury might just see justice in that, or at least a reason not to throw the case out.
I think this ought to net a nice award for the author.
When you think about it, SCO has lasted this long because it is like a pathogen that bends the organism that is the legal system to its intent, far beyond the realm of common sense: If they don't show the infringing code it is common sense that they ought not be able to argue beyond that. The MPAA also also exhibits pathogenic qualities; it sues its own customers for such outrageous sums that it is not only beyond common sense, you have to wonder if their worth is based more on legal games than actually what their members sell. Unless we take advantage of such amazing incidents as this one and use their own weapons against them, it will just continue. We now have a chance to stir up some talk about whether the MPAA is also over the top, and what to do about it.
Re:Apply MPAA logic (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
It might be, if it were even possible. You can't sue anyone for copyright infringement in small claims court. There is exclusive federal jurisdiction for copyright suits, which means you'd have to go to federal district court.
Equate software to music. Equate running softare or viewing a webpage as a "performance" in the legal sense.
First, why? What possible advantage would that get you? Second, that is not likely to work. Merely running software could only infringe the reproduction and perhaps derivative rights, but there's an exception under 117 which may well be applicable here. Viewing a webpage is pretty much reproduction only. Having a globally-accessible webpage could be considered a performance or display (depending on precisely what it consisted of) but the present caselaw leans toward distribution instead. But it could be a moot point anyway; this author didn't write the web pages at issue, he wrote the program used to write the web pages. Portions of the page are based on his work, but probably not enough, given the whittling-away effects that a decent lawyer could achieve by using things like merger and scenes a faire, to matter much.
Since the license costs about $100, calculate based on a 300% markup over a $35 average MPAA cd price. The sum will be punitive damages for theft, plus the 300% of what the MPAA sues for a song, plus the price of a "performance" multiplied by the number of visits to any of the blog's pages, based on the evidence of the MPAA's server logs which is must produce in court. Although this sounds over the top, it is simply using the same non-common-sensical strategy the MPAA is using in court, and I think a judge and jury might just see justice in that, or at least a reason not to throw the case out.
No, it sounds utterly moronic.
There are two ways to compute damages for copyright infringement suits. First, you can get actual damages and profits. This means you get money in the amount you were actually damaged (in this case a paltry sum, since the software was available so cheaply) and also in the amount of net profit realized by the defendant that is attributable to the infringment (Gross profits, and profits that are attributable to other sources don't qualify). Since this is MPAA's blog, there are likely to be no awardable profits. Maybe $1 as a token sum.
The other way is statutory damages, which range from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, and can go down to $200 or up to $150,000, depending on certain factors.