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MPAA Goes After Its Customers
EyesWideOpen writes "The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is issuing 'takedown' notices to ISP's to alert them that customers are using their internet service to transmit or post copyrighted movies. The ISP's in turn send a letter to the customers threatening to disable their internet connection unless the offending material is removed. The MPAA is using software that 'cruises file-swapping networks like Gnutella to find copyrighted materials, hunts down the IP address of the poster, then discovers which Internet service provider is being used.'"
Please improve your spelling.
Hehe funny guy, their's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Like it or not, the US rules the world. The MPAA doesn't care what country you are from. They'll shut you down anyway.
So much for privacy.
Unless things have changed dramatically, the MPAA is still using software from Ranger Online to perform their searches exclusively. This software isn't all that technically impressive. Anybody with an understanding of protocols and search techniques can make the searches they do in public forums like gnutella and IRC. So then I imagine that they do a simple traceroute to locate the ISP or hosting provider and then a whois for the contact. THis all publicly available and frankly probably requires lots of human intervention. We're not talking banks of computers here, we're talking about a room full of MPAA flunkies doing jack Valenti's bidding.
The DMCA requires ISP's to takedown materials that are alleged to be infringing until the alleged infringer disputes the allegation. There's a whole messy procedure for the back and forth, and it favors the intital claim of infringment.
at the isp i worked for we logged who had what ip for a year and then archived those logs to dvd... was really for spam prevention but at times we had to access the logs to catch someone who was doing something illegal (we required a court order and ignored stuff like this.)
Shadus
transfering a file isn't considered speech. If this argument was true, then there are hackers that should have never been hassled because they were on dialups.... You do not have free reign just because you are on dial up.
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
Prof. Dave Touretzky at Carnegie-Mellon (yes, the same one with the gallery of CSS descrambler implementations) has a nice information page for how to provide counter-notification if you get one of these form letters and you believe the copyright infringement accusation contained in it is wrong.
The MPAA wouldn't have the right to tap your phone. However by using a public forum like Gnutella you waive any privacy you might have. For a similar example: mail is private, mail sent to a newspaper letters column is public.