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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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".