Convicted by the Movie Cops

Reckless Visionary writes "Salon has a great article about what it's like to get on the MPAA's bad side. It's a first hand account of what happens when you are accused of violating the DMCA and commentary on the "guilty until proven innocent" nature of today's copyright laws." Pirate movies. Lose access. You are guilty. And this guy was on vacation when it happened, so there's no need for accountability. Hope you don't depend on your net access.

Comments

Honestly

[WinDoze]

If my ISP decided to shut me off because someone else accused me of something, and they didn't even bother asking my side of the story, I think I'd be more than happy to terminate my relationship with that ISP.

Guilty until proven innocent? Gimme a break

[bconway]

How many times have we seen this before? They had their connection to their ISP discontinued! This is hardly a conviction, nor would I in any way consider an ISP to be a government body. Okay, so it was an inconvenience, and the matter was settled, but the ISP was just doing what they felt was right in trying to resolve a problem, and inadvertantly targeted the wrong user. It's not like they were thrown in jail for visiting the US by Adobe. Come on.

Re:Guilty until proven innocent? Gimme a break

[JoeGrind]

Give you a break? The point that you don't seem to think is a big deal has nothing to do with the punishment. The point is that if you are paying money for a service you expect that service. They expect the money and you expect the bandwidth. If an organization which apparently can't even accurately determine the source IP of the traffic they are monitoring just needs to point a finger to get your access shutdown then that seems to be a violation of the contract you have with the ISP.

Not having the ability to surf for pr0n is one thing. However, lots of people use their connections for business uses. It supports their livelihood. When you consider that, it sounds a little more important.

The last point is that the idea of being innocent until being proven guilty by a jury of your peers is one of the tenents of the US, where this action occured. A lot of people jumped on boats and sailed across the see to avoid this sort of behavior. Without that, this sounds could be the Salem Witch Hunt, the Red Scare, or the Inquisition.

Right now it's just being able to check your email. But as we depend on bandwidth more and more in the future it becomes more important. Consider that.

Quick (legal) question...

[Noryungi]

Let me summarize:

• ISP thinks you are spreading pirated movies through Usenet
• ISP cuts off the line and tells you rudely you are violating whatever idiotic law they'd like to protect
• You have no recourse, no information on said pirated movie post and you can't prove anything

I believe that, in such as case, it should be possible to countersue both the ISP, the MPAA and the company doing research for both.

Something like "Unfair termination of service" or "Violation of service agreement" as well as "Slanderous attacks" seem totally possible in this case. Anybody with more legal experience cares to comment?

Chilling, nonetheless... =(

Re:Quick (legal) question...

[isorox]

Anybody with more legal experience cares to comment?

On slashdot?

lol!

Re:Quick (legal) question...

[Silicon Avatar]

> * ISP thinks you are spreading pirated moviesthrough Usenet

Not to split hairs ... the ISP didn't necessarily think the person was spreading pirated movies. The ISP, as a corporate entity, has just as much 'right' to fear lawyers as we do. There's a provision in the DMCA that basically says "if tell you a user is pirating, you *must* do something or we'll sue you into oblivion". The ISP didn't throw these people in Jail. The ISP didn't call out the police. The ISP didn't even terminate the account.

I think the ISP did a fairly reasonable thing. They directly cut off any ability for the users to further pirate. If the users had been home to see their service had been disconneted, its entirely possible this entire thing would've been resolved within 24 hours.

Now, another debate is whether or not the DMCA should give anyone the 'ability' to demand an ISP take this kind of action ... I find that reprehensible.

Been there done that

[isorox]

Something similar happened to me when I ran botf.com

The day after I left for a 3 week sail in summer 1999, my ISP received an anonymous tipoff - at least they wouldnt tell me who, although I have an idea.

The ISP shut the account down straight away, including email access. They then emailed me on webmaster@botf.com with an explanation. Naturally it was unreadable, as I couldnt log in.

About a week after I left I popped into an internet cafe to see what was going on, unfortunatly I couldnt read my botf email, hence had no contact with my ISP.

when I got back, eventually it sorted itself out. I refused to pay for the time though, and as the site had pretty much crumbled to bits (3 weeks with no site means people dont come back), I contacted my credit card company and told them to hold payment.

Why did they shut me down? I had 5 mp3's for download - these were mp3 versions of the wavs freely available on microprose's site. I had had permission to mirror the samples on my site.

The (5) samples were also in a zip file.

The ISP had heard about these files, obviously not researched them or contacted me - and just shut the site down ASAP.

I will never use them again, needless to say. I hadnt been with them long, having just moved from a wonderful ISP, that unfortunatly couldnt offer me the facilities I needed. I have 2 domains with them now, and couldnt be happier with allwebco. Unfortunatly I forget the name of the ISP that shut me down - I think they went out of buisness.

These mp3's were legal, but because of the hysteria of "mp3 == bad" arround then (and still arround today), I lost something ver dear to me.

Ahh well, the game sucked anyway :)

This is getting out of control

[eyeball]

Has anyone thought of filing a complaint with the MPAA's ISP, and telling them you have found evidence that there are copyrighted materials being pirated from their IP address? Create a dinky little mp3 song, then send a screenshoot of a text-based gnutella session saying it's being offered on x.x.x.x. Hell, why even stop at MPAA.. How would WB feel if they were down for a week? Or Disney? Or your congressman's web site?

Innocent until proven Uncooperative

[imadork]

Nigam also told me that if I told him my friend's IP address, he could find out exactly what had happened in his case. I told him I'd have to check with my friend first. Kutner then said that if my friend were truly innocent, he wouldn't have anything to hide.
The thing is, he didn't have anything to hide in the first place, and he was still accused.

I used to think that there was nothing wrong with the "if you're really innocent, you would have no problem with this" attitude. But now I see that it's a rather clever way to get people to give up their rights.

By that logic, since I'm really innocent, I should have no problem with letting the Goverment (or Time Warner) look at all the files on my hard drive whenever they want to. I do have a problem with that, not because I pirate music, but because I just don't want them in my hard drive, and I shouldn't have to cooperate with them if I don't want to. (Remember... I haven't even been charged in a court yet, and they're cutting off my access!)

I also have a problem with the "proprietary" techniques that are used to find copyright violators. How can you determine the difference between an illegal copy of "Titanic" and a two-hour streaming file of my dog on her floating raft in my pool named "Titanic"? The answer is that one has better acting, and the other has a bigger boat, but I can't believe that an algorithm can tell the difference between the two when they're all just bits anyway.

How would you feel if the cop pulled you over and said "You broke the law back there, but we can't tell you how we caught you because that's proprietary."? This is no different.

Re:Innocent until proven Uncooperative

[mcfiddish]

Wouldn't you love to live in the United States of Nigam? I wonder if instead of

"if my article had a moral, it should be that piracy is illegal",

he meant to say

"if my article had a moral, it should be that privacy is illegal"

methods

[twitter]

The MPAA looks for people who are distributing movies in any form that they are not authorized to. It uses Ranger Online's software to monitor multiple areas of the Internet, including IRC, Gnutella, Usenet, Web sites, auction sites and ftp sites. It does this on an international basis. When it finds a location that is distributing copyrighted material, it identifies the owner and the host of the material. Citing the DMCA, it sends a letter and notifies the alleged perpetrators that they are infringing on a copyright.

When I asked exactly how they find an instance of piracy (for instance, what search parameters they use), Nigam told me the methods were proprietary information.

Heh, judging from the results they must be using MS Access to keep their records! Nice work. Just a few minutes ago, I was talking to a looser who likes to traffic in warez and movies. While bragging of getting "Spy Kids" two weeks before opening, he was no more worried about getting caught than my grandmother. GET A CLUE, MPAA!
GET A LIFE, PEOPLE! Run your own ftp/http site and provide original content. Get movies from a theater, if you must, or rent them. Geazer! A whole week of bandwith consumption for something dumb like "Spy Kids"? And that crap is competing with me for Slashdot? GRRRR! You don't need this garbage, and it's providers are powerless when you quit demanding it. Sigh of relief.

I wonder what kind of cyber brains are looking for child porn. Loosing email is one thing, having your house raided and all your stuff broken/confiscated is another.