DHS Wants Mozilla To Disable Mafiaafire Plugin, Mozilla Resists 360
Davis Freeberg writes "The Department of Homeland Security is hard at work again, protecting the industry from websites that the big studios don't want you to see. This time they're targeting the Mafiaafire plugin by asking Mozilla to disable the addon at the root level. Instead of blindly complying with the government's request, Mozilla has decided to ask some tough questions instead. Unsurprisingly, when faced with legitimate concerns about the legality of their domain seizure program, the DHS has decided to clam up."
Knock yourselves out (Score:5, Informative)
for what its worth..
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ [mozilla.org]
Never heard of Mafiaafire, but I'll check it out.. (Score:5, Informative)
Streisand effect. Before today, I never heard of the Mafiaafire plugin... but I'm going to look into it right now.
probably download it, even if I don't use it whatever it may be.
Re:A reasonable stance (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. I was particularly glad to see, in the full list of questions asked [scribd.com], that they question the seizure program itself, not just the dubious claims about the plug-in. The list is as follows (the source linked above is apparently a copy of the official email):
April 19, 2011 email from Mozilla to US Department of Homeland Security Special Agent
To help us evaluate the Department of Homeland Security's request to take-down/remove the MAFIAAfire.com add-on from Mozilla's websites, can you please provide the following additional information:
1. Have any courts determined that MAFIAAfire.com is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
2. Have any courts determined that the seized domains related to MAFIAAfire.com are unlawful, illegal or liable for infringement in any way? (please provide relevant rulings)
3. Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
4. Has DHS, or any copyright owners involved in this matter, taken any legal action against MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domains, including DMCA requests?
5. What protections are in place for MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domain owners if eventually a court decides they were not unlawful?
6. Can you please provide copies of any briefs that accompanied the affidavit considered by the court that issued the relevant seizure orders?
7. Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down MAFIAAfire.com is based?
8. Please identify exactly what the infringements by the owners of the domains consisted of, with reference to the substantive standards of Section 106 and to any case law establishing that the actions of the seized domain owners consti tuted civil or criminal copyright infringement.
9. Did any copyright owners furnish affidavits in connection with the domain seizures? Had any copyright owners served DMCA takedown notices on the seized
domains or MAFIAAfire.com? (if so please provide us with a copy)
10. Has the Government furnished the domain owners with formal notice of the seizures, triggering the time period for a response by the owners? If so, when, and have there been any responses yet by owners?
11. Has the Government communicated its concerns directly with MAFIAAfire.com? If so, what response, if any, did MAFIAAfire.com make?
Re:Crazy glue (Score:4, Informative)
A search for addons called MAFIAAFIRE is yielding no results.
Re:Crazy glue (Score:5, Informative)
A link to the extension from the article:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ [mozilla.org]
Project has forked (Score:5, Informative)
There's now a fork called FireICE [mozilla.org] so DHS now has an additional extension to suppress.
DHS changes its name to Streisand... (Score:3, Informative)
Way to go, Mozilla, for standing up to these tyrants! I might just write Mozilla an email, congratulating them for it.
As for the take-down notice itself...having never heard of the add-on before, I've just installed it. Good job, DHS guys! (Who says they don't promote freedom?)
Re:Project has forked (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A reasonable stance (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A reasonable stance (Score:4, Informative)
I can encode any information as a rather large decimal (base 10) number, numbers can't be patented or copyrighted. In fact, I've even written a program that encodes and decodes in such a way (arbitrary bit-length & radix integer math) -- It's terribly inefficient in decimal mode; in Hexadecimal (base 16) it's blazingly fast, but it doubles the output size... You can avoid the size bloat by encoding & decoding your NUMBERS in base 2 --- Oh, wait binary numbers are what's claimed as infringing copyright. (How is this not a 1st amendment issue?)
If I understand copyright law correctly (yeah, fat chance), numbers can be copyrighted if sufficient creativity* has been necessary to produce it. If you need, say, a book in order to produce the number, all of the creativity used in producing that book is needed to produce your number, so yes, it can be covered by copyright. I think http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 [sooke.bc.ca] covers the points of your post pretty decently.
*Probably not the right word, but I don't know the English equivalent of the Danish "værkshøjde".