Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA

cshields2 writes "A recent post to the Gentoo mirrors mailing list passes along a DMCA violation claim that one of the mirror admins recieved. Supposively their bot saw the words "Pac" and "Man" in the filename INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip and assumed it was an illegal copy of PAC-MAN. The file is actually for Unreal Tournament Infiltration. This is comical in one sense, but to be read by a hosting company who does not know any better can be frightening. Has anyone else ran into this with good (or even bad) outcomes?"

Comments

This is stupid

[mjmalone]

This is one of the major problems with the DMCA. By negating the need for a court order to be allowed to send these orders they have opened the door to thousands of frivolous and invalid claims. Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished. At least they should be held liable for any damages if an ISP removes contents that they claim are infringing. Are these letters totally automated? Didn't somebody actually try to download the file and see if it was indeed an unauthorized copy of pacman?

Also,

>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the >person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential >and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, >dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, >this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient >is prohibited.

What is this all about? They are trying to hide the fact that they are sending out these letters?

Re:This is stupid

[umrgregg]

The note is just to make sure that if the letter gets to the wrong recipient, that recipient cannot disseminate the information in the letter. It does not restrict the right of the intended recipient to do whatever they wish with the information in the letter.

Re:This is stupid

[YaRness]

>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the >person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential >and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, >dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, >this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient >is prohibited.

that's just standard CYA. a lot of lawyers and such include it at the end of every email.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

This trailer is common in many email systems of large companies. I found it very comical the first time I saw it. Its almost as if they really want to deny that the email was even sent. Some (Enron's for example) even told you that if you were not the recipient and you were looking at it, you were instructed to destroy all copies and that reading it would violate some legal protection they had. The funny thing is this: how do you know you werent supposed to read it until you've already done so?

Re:This is stupid

[Ogrez]

OMG!!

I reviewed it, and Im not the intended recipient... thats prohibited!!

I guess im going to have to turn myself in... But to whom? and where?

Oh well I guess I will just have to get over it...

Re:This is stupid

[cdporter00]

Regarding the 2nd part of your post, it must be a copyright violation since he reproduced this message on the web!!!

Re:This is stupid

[Blue Stone]

Personally I think the FPP post saying "This is comical in one sense, but to be read by a hosting company who does not know any better can be frightening," is considerably overstating the case.
The file is easily certifiable as non-infringing. (Pretty much) end of story.

Of course that's not to say that copyright infringement notices should not require judicial oversight, to prevent frivolously, harassing behaviour, like this case. But this instance is not new or significant. (I suspect a slow news day?)

As for the prohibition statement at the end of the e-mail: pure bolleaux.

Re:This is stupid

[Elwood P Dowd]

Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

What is this all about? They are trying to hide the fact that they are sending out these letters?

That's all standard boilerplate that is included in most any legally confidential communications. My mom is a shrink, and every fax she sends contains that text. It doesn't restrict the actions of the intended recipient. My mom's clients can still show the fax to anyone they please. It's so that if my mom sends it to a client, and someone else picks it up out of the fax machine, they aren't supposed to give it to all their friends. It's weak juju to indemnify the sender of lapses in confidentiality.

If they wanted to stop the intended recipient from spreading the message around... they couldn't, but they'd be much more threatening.

Re:This is stupid

[Moofie]

Uh, what if the recipient wants to disseminate the information?

Re:This is stupid

[rf0]

Freedom of speech? Doesn't seem like it

Rus

Re:This is stupid

[rifter]

Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished.

That's the real problem here. Part of the system of Checks and Balances here is that the company alleging infringement must do so under penalty of perjory, which implies a need for due diligence on their part. Since the Attorneys General in question seem to refuse to prosecute any of these entities for their numerous perjories under this law, they see no need for due diligence and employ the automated techniques which result in scenarios like this article. Until that changes there will be more of the same. I think we should move to recall any attorney general who refuses to prosecute one of these cases.

Re:This is stupid

[Sloppy]

It's just noise to be ignored.

Whenever someone says something is "prohibited", just ask yourself, "prohibited by what?"

It isn't prohibited by a law. It isn't prohibited by a contract or promise. It isn't prohibited by a "technical measure." The only thing it can be prohibited by, is your own judgement. If you decide to not be prohibited, then you're not.

Re:This is stupid

[umrgregg]

Then they can. Read the restictions, it only restricts people who intercept the original transmission. It's not rocket science.

Re:This is stupid

[theflea]

Considering that copyright infringement is starting to carry such enormous penalties, and puts the accused in considerable legal jeopardy, I'd say that this is turning into a due process/denial of life/liberty/pursuit of happiness type thing. Although IANAL.

I mean, the penalties are going the route of the "mandatory minimum" and property forefieture laws. Some congressmen have talked about jail time!

Anyone who accuses folks of DMCA violations, etc, should have considerable hoops to jump through, and not be able to litigate by mail order.

Re:This is stupid

[s20451]

I get a laugh out of these confidentiality addendums. The note is garbage, and is clearly only intended to scare. If by your incompetence, I suddenly find myself with incriminating information about you, what legal obligation do I have to keep that information confidential? I signed no agreement with you, and you have no other legal recourse.

At worst, the sender could claim copyright over the message text, so arguably I wouldn't be able to post the exact message to my web site. However, I could just as easily post a summary to my web site, or show it to a journalist / the police / my stock broker / my coworkers / whoever, and be perfectly within my rights.

Then again, IANAL. Can any L's out there contradict me?

Re:This is stupid

[Moofie]

...which explains perfectly why I'm a rocket scientist, not a lawyer. : )

Re:This is stupid

[Gortbusters.org]

Yeah! What do they think this is, some sort of end user license agreement?!

Re:This is stupid

[umrgregg]

Of course your right. Even if the original transmission is intercepted by a third party and posted, this statement means poop (especially if the statement is made public soon after). It is a scare statement, but the grandparent post misinterpreted that the statement was trying to prohibit the intended recipient from posting the information.

Re:This is stupid

[ryanvm]

Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

Like anyone who uses email, I see this standard corporate sig all the time. However, I doubt the strength of such a directive. Does anyone really think there's ANY legal power in such a statement.

You can't stand in the middle of your town square and yell to your buddy that his fly is open and then issue a directive to everybody there that, "IF YOU ARE NOT THE INTENDED RECIPIENT OF THIS INFORMATION YOU MUST FORGET IT!!"

Who thinks this shit up?

Re:This is stupid

[fulldecent]

VERY SIMPLY PUT: These DCMA bots need to be sued

This is a frivilous order like SO many others. Would a lawyer please respond to this post and explain the method or suing the operator of this bot. Something needs to be done about bots initiating legal matters with humans. It's bad enough cameras can mail you tickets for going through red lights.

Re:This is stupid

[DrSkwid]

how can you commit perjory when you are not under oath?

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You're close, but the real reason is a control on how the document can be entered as evidence. The document will never be brought in as a surprise.

Re:This is stupid

[mobileskimo]

I mean, the penalties are going the route of the "mandatory minimum" and property forefieture laws. Some congressmen have talked about jail time!

Some have proposed an automated destruction device, a bomb, on your computer.

Sounds like a terrorist tactic to me.

Re:This is stupid

[LehiNephi]

I have not read the DMCA, but it would seem that if the file actually is PacMan, it would violate regular copyright law, not so much the DMCA. Hosting a file that allegedly infringes on a copyright is not the same as circumventing a copy-protection mechanism.

Does anyone else sense that companies are using the acronym DMCA as a buzzword and for intimidation purposes, instead of using the proper term?

Besides, I think PacMan should have been in the public domain long since. I can't imagine that these companies are going to make more money off of people buying old versions of PacMan. Anyone with any decent experience could program his own. I even had a version on my calculator at one point.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Who thinks this shit up?

Buttman and Buttman, Attorneys at Law.
Covering Your Ass since 1973.

Re:This is stupid

[why-is-it]

The note is just to make sure that if the letter gets to the wrong recipient, that recipient cannot disseminate the information in the letter.

I suppose that all depends on what country you live in. I have been seeing disclaimers like this on email quite a bit lately and I asked our legal department about them. They told me it depends on whether there is a pre-existing NDA between me (or the company I work for) and the sender (or the company they work for). If there is, then I must abide by the terms and conditions of that NDA. However, if there is no NDA in place and I receive information that I did not request or was not intended for me specifically, from a legal perspective I am free to do whatever I want with that information. I may be subject to ethical and moral restraints, but legally, I can act as I please.

So, if someone sends me confidential information by accident or their workstation is running the latest microsoft trojan and it sends me confidential information that was never intended for me, there is no legal requirement (here in Canada at least) for me to inform the sender about it or delete the message unless I choose to do so. I could also legally act on that information as well (e.g. buy/sell stocks based on the quarterly financial reports I received before they go public). Presumably, I could forward that information to other people and not be committing any crime, although I did not ask that question specifically, so take that part with a grain of salt.

The lawyers reminded me that it may not be ethical to do any of those things, but from a strictly legal perspective, I would have done nothing wrong.

Re:This is stupid

[1u3hr]

Who thinks this shit up?

Lawyers, of course.

They've had that stuff on their letters and faxes for decades. Now every corporate drone has it in his sig file, without thought.

Where it gets annoying is that first, it often is longer than the actual message, and more so, when people have it quoted in their reply, and sometimes several times, making their messages totally impenetrable -- encouraged by the quote-everything-and-reply-at-top style that seems to be the corporate (that is, Outlook) standard.

Personally, with Eudora, I can edit incoming messages, and though it's quite illegitimate, I routinely strip all formatting and boilerplate from messages before archiving them. Saves about 75% of space altogether.

Re:This is stupid

[named]

I seem to recall, from a post on yet another DMCA article here on slashdot, a lawyer (who was definitely not offering advice, naturally) saying that the "under penalty of perjury" part doesn't apply to the claim of copyright infringement. It applies, instead, to the assertion by the sender of the letter of said sender's right to represent the owner of the copyrighted material.

In fact, I believe that it was the interview with the IP lawyers from the DOJ...

So, you can't punish the company sending frivolous claims unless they don't have the right to be making silly claims about that particular material.

Re:This is stupid

[russotto]

Nope. Read the interview with the US Attorney a while back. The "under penalty of perjury" part of the DMCA notifications only applies to claiming to be the author or agent of the allegedly infringed work. It does not apply to whether or not the file in question actually contains the infringed work.

Re:This is stupid

[CatPieMan]

I personally want to know what they hell they put in that pac man game to make it 161 MB

>Infringement Detail:
>Infringing Work: Pac Man
>Filepath: /mount/3/gentoo/distfiles/
>Filename: INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip
>First Found: 8 Aug 2003 09:38:44 EDT (GMT -0400)
>Last Found: 8 Aug 2003 10:42:12 EDT (GMT -0400)
>Filesize: 161,212k
>IP Address: 12.165.49.28
>IP Port: 21
>Network: FTP
>Protocol: FTP

This must be some new Uber pac man with cool 3-d graphics that require a Radeon 179002038487483 or an nVidia gForce 405 to run. I mean seriously, how much bloat can you put into pac man to make it 161,212k, the old Atari version could not have been more than 100k at most (I don't know the limit of an Atari from that time).

-CPM

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You magnificent bastard. I hope you're able to sleep at night with your travesty.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

IANARS

Doesn't sound as good as

IANAL

Re:This is stupid

[Simon Brooke]

Personally I think the FPP post saying "This is comical in one sense, but to be read by a hosting company who does not know any better can be frightening," is considerably overstating the case. The file is easily certifiable as non-infringing. (Pretty much) end of story.

No it isn't and no, it isn't. With good steganography it's possible to hide pretty much anything in pretty much anything else (provided the thing you're trying to hide is sufficiently smaller than the thing you're trying to hide it in). It's extremely difficult to certify that a given file does not contain, steganographically, an encoding of another. You could easily hide an 8 bit game in the whitespace of a bundle of documentation, and, unless you knew the algorithm of the encoding, it would be pretty hard to prove it wasn't there.

Re:This is stupid

[arkanes]

Part of a DMCA letter is the avowing, under penalty of perjury, that you have good-faith reason to believe the infaction occured, and that you have legal authority to act on behalf of whoever holds the copyright on whatever you're complaning about.

It's for a court to decide, I guess, but personlly I feel that good-faith would require human supervision of a these systems.

On the other hand, maybe they do, and these are just ones that slip through. It's gotta be mind-numbing reviewing these things all day.

Re:This is stupid

[Misch]

Title 28, Section 1746 "Unsworn declarations under penalty of perjury".

The sentencing guidelines for the crime are covered in Title 18, section 1621, among other places. Penalty is a fine and/or imprisonment of up to 5 years.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Organizations like ESA, RIAA, MPAA do not have the tech savvy or the resources to carry out these scans and verify them. They contract to several vendors who are staffed with an army of temp workers that have probably just figured out how to use the water cooler. Both the *A and the vendors have "policies" dictating the scan and verify procedure, and all the files the bots find are given to a temp to verify. So if the temp who keeps drinking hot water all day sends out a false notification, they can cite their policy, retract the claim, fire the temp, and chalk it up to a "no-harm-done honest mistake".

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bad enough cameras can mail you tickets for going through red lights.

And how is that a bad thing? You think speeding through red lights is OK?

Yeah, they mail you tickets but you can go and see the photographs first hand and, if necessary, say that it's not you. Then it's their burden to prove that it's you.

It's about time that the car driving maniacs are put to their place.

Re:This is stupid

[CERDIP]

that the company alleging infringement must do so under penalty of perjory

According to the DOJ lawyers who recently responded in a Slashdot Interview, the "penalty of perjury" clause applies to their representation as being an agent of someone, and not to the validity of the claim or allegation.

Re:This is stupid

[fermion]

I have a lot of problems with the recent lawsuit reform crap, but if such reform goes through, I think it will still make a lot of lawyer rich.

Here is the scenario.
1. Set up a public server with various web pages. Name the pages stuff with BritneySpearsBoys, PacManEXE, MSOfficeXP.
2. Wait for the cease and desist letter to come. Respond with form letter stating you are hosting no copyright content.
3. Wait for the lawsuit begin. Bring in proof that there is in fact no copyrighted material.
4. Sue for frivolous lawsuits, corporation has to pay all your legal fees and fines.
5. PROFIT

There may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Re:This is stupid

[optikSmoke]

Quite frankly, this argument is (no offense) mostly hot air -- Obviously, you could (by your logic) run around claiming everyone is hiding something illegal in something else. It may be difficult to prove it isn't there (indeed, even if you knew "the encoding" you could argue that a different encoding might possibly have been used), but it would be impossible to prove that is there. The classic example: I could tell you that there is a race of little green men living on the far side of the moon, but they always remain hidden so we can never see them and if you try to find them, the will run away in their perfectly invisible spaceships. You can't tell me they don't exist, but how can I prove they do?

Q. What evidence do you have?

A. Ummm.... none. But theoretically.......

Good-bye

Re:This is stupid

[Prong]

You're missing the point. The fact that I can hide an 8-bit game inside documentation is completely irrelevant. The sender of that letter is required to make a good faith effort to determine if the alledgedly infringing file is what they claim it is. In this case, I would suggest that they didn't do that.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

nope you can commit perjury though.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a law firm. We have a .sig disclaimer that automatically get placed on all on all email and faxes that leave the firm. It's attached by the server automatically. Kind of a pain when our alerts and messages get forwarded to an SMS device that has small size limits.

The contents of this message may be privileged
and confidential. Therefore, if this message has
been received in error, please delete it without
reading it. Your receipt of this message is not
intended to waive any applicable privilege.
Please do not disseminate this message without
the permission of the author.

I've never actually discussed the true intent with any of the partners.

Re:This is stupid

[Igmuth]

Well technically you could claim that a given data block is simply an encoded version of equal or smaller data block. You are simply lacking the key needed to decode it.

However you could also argue that the opposite way as well....(Yes I'm more refering to one time pads than steganography, but hey...)

Re:This is stupid

[unixfan]

Yes, yes! Every time I see one of these stupid notes I want to post it on a newsgroup! Of course I do have better things to do than that so it never happens. They have absolutely no legal recourse when they use a totally insecure medium like email to then claim confidentiality. It's purely wishful thinking. We should all agree on a day, for all of us to post one of these dumb notes each to some public forum. To top it off, as you said we don't have any contract between us. Duh!

Re:This is stupid

[thomas.galvin]

Uh, what if the recipient wants to disseminate the information?

IANAL, and I Am Not A Postmaster General, but from my understanding, when something is mailed to you, you can do whatever you want with it. Copyright law still applies, but since this is a legal notice, I don't think it can be coyrighted. Distribute as you like.

Re:This is stupid

[Dan Stephans II]

The complainant states that they are an authorised agent of the copyright holder, under penalty of perjury. They do not make the rest of the claims under such restrictions. This is an important distinction obviously. From the DMCA (section 3A): `(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed The penalty of perjury clause only applies to the predicate. I deal with these every day as astound's DMCA agent.

Re:This is stupid

[lightcycle]

Why would this even have to go to a lawsuit? This behaviour of sending out threatening letters left and right based solely on pattern matching a file name should be flat out illegal. Anyone sending these letters should be forced to verify and double verify what the file contains before doing anything else. In Sweden we have authorities which I'm sure would be more than happy to sink their teeth in companies behaving like this, aren't there similar possibilities in USA, besides dragging someone to court (which is expensive and time-consuming)?

Re:This is stupid

[kilgortrout]

It's standard legalese for all emails/faxes that an attorney sends to a client. The purpose is to preserve the attorney-client priviege in all attorney-client communications. The attorney-client privilege is one that prohibits disclosure of all communications between an attorney and his client. You can waive that privilege by disclosing the attorney-client communication to third parties. This is an attempt to preserve the privilege in the event the communication is misdirected to some third party. It has no relevance to communications that aren't with your client but the biolerplate is usually there on all faxes/emails from a law firm anyway.

Re:This is stupid

[El]

Didn't somebody actually try to download the file and see if it was indeed an unauthorized copy of pacman?

Wouldn't they have to actually run the file to see if it was infringing? This sounds like an excellent way of getting virii onto the lawyers' machines, doesn't it?

Re:This is stupid

[panxerox]

Its my understanding FWIW is that the statement at the end of the email is a "method" of keeping the communication private not simply because thay tell you to keep it quiet but because the "statement" itself is copyrighted and therefore you can't transmit it to anyone else and if you do you are in violation of the writers copyright. oh yeah I'm like sooo not a lawyer.

Re:This is stupid

[lobsterGun]

Close, but no cigar.

Here's the bit of the DMCA you're thinking of (or t least the part I think you're thinking of)

`DMCA(512)(3)(c)(A)(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

The perjury clause only state that you represent the person that owns the IP that the DMCA notification is refering to.

That is to say: I can't send the notification of infringement if I don't represent the owner of a piece of IP.

If someone falsely accuses of infringement, you'll have to turn to some other form of remedy. The DMCA won't save you.

Re:This is stupid

[sealawyer2003]

"Part of a DMCA letter is the avowing, under penalty of perjury, that you have good-faith reason to believe the infaction occured, and that you have legal authority to act on behalf of whoever holds the copyright on whatever you're complaning about."

Unfortunately, that isn't quite right. Only the part indicating that the sender is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder is under penalty of perjury.

Re:This is stupid

[Patrick]

That's the real problem here. Part of the system of Checks and Balances here is that the company alleging infringement must do so under penalty of perjory,

On the contrary, the only statement that they must make under penalty of perjury is that they own the copyright for Pac Man. Their statement that a copyright has been infringed must be done in good faith, but there's no criminal liability if they're wrong.

Read the DMCA more closely, or go back and read the question that dealt with exactly this distinction in the recent Slashdot interview of DoJ copyright lawyers.

Re:This is stupid

[xoff00]

Isn't this the SCO argument?

Re:This is stupid

[Vindicator9000]

Of course, /. has a large number of IP zealots (not including me) who would howl that these people deserve what they get because copyright infringement is always "theft," and the legitimate copyright holders always have a right to wrecklessly go after offenders regardless of how many innocent people are harmed. After all, we have to protect intellectual property...

Re:This is stupid

[AvitarX]

The EULA is before the action (installing software).

The confidentiality blurb is read after the action (reading the letter).

They could put it at the start have lots of black lines and say scrolling down is accepting the agreement, but even that is weak.

Re:This is stupid

[merlin_jim]

>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the >person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential >and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, >dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, >this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient >is prohibited.

What is this all about? They are trying to hide the fact that they are sending out these letters?

Standard boilerplate legalise. Every email I send out gets this automatically tacked on by our e-mail system. This exact phrasing, IIRC...

Re:This is stupid

[Ploum]

I'm not sure but I'm remember such thing with the french server : http://www.via.ecp.fr

They was accused to have illegal copies on MS-Office, but it was OpenOffice...

This is against the presumption of innocence... I don't like such things. 1984 is back and free software are pirated software.. :(

Re:This is stupid

[BlackHawk-666]

I have a flock of killer butterflies on that side of the moon who assure me there are no little green men. What, you don't believe I have the killer butterflies? Prove it!

Re:This is stupid

[KjetilK]

Yeah, but since they're saying that they represent the PacMan author it shouldn't help, because they have still not made a good faith confirmation that it actually is PacMan they have found.

What they found was a work by another author, and by claiming they act on behalf of him, they are perjuring themself, because clearly they aren't...

OK, this stuff is really confusing, so any clarification would be great. But I would really think that something like this needs to go to court, because it is really damaging.

Re:This is stupid

[twisty7867]

You are incorrect. Senders of the letters must certify under penalty of perjury that the person submitting the notice has authority to assert claims on behalf of the copyright owner. They must only have a "good faith belief" that the recipient is infringing. Check out this article from a promient IP attorney for further info.

Re:This is stupid

[Software]

I have not read the DMCA, but it would seem that if the file actually is PacMan, it would violate regular copyright law, not so much the DMCA.

Wrong; it violates both. See here for example. As the text from the link says (in part):

[I]f the service provider has the right and ability to control the infringing activity and if the service provider receives a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, the service provider will not be protected by Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The DMCA does allow prosecution of hosting companies, etc., if they receive a letter such as the one in the article and do not take down the offending material. The DMCA is not limited to cracking encryption! Google for DMCA text safe-harbor for more info.

Re:This is stupid

[4of12]

I suddenly find myself with incriminating information about you, what legal obligation do I have to keep that information confidential?

None, I guess, but you could be in a position to make a great deal of money if you're willing to take some risk:)

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

in soviet russia, the DMCA saves you ??

Re:This is stupid

[BdosError]

Really, this would come down to the line from their letter about:

ESA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at {IPAddress} continues to infringe the rights of one or more ESA members

The only real thing you could complain about is what constitutes "good faith". How much effort is required on their part? Does a reg-exp matching bot count as good faith? Doesn't seem like it to me, but unless there were a number of hits, I suppose the courts would consider it too trivial to penalize.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Scary that a potential lawsuit can be formed without human inervention (ie a person looking at the file name, or the file itself).

Fscking idiots. Who approved this bullshit legislation again?

Re:This is stupid

[finkployd]

All we are technically talking about here is copyright. Any email I write is technically has been copyrighted by me, and I can tell you that you cannot republish this (or claim it as your own). However trying to say things like "any review by persons other than the intended recipient is prohibited" is silly.
Think of it like a book, since a book is copywritten by the publisher, I cannot copy it, or claim it as my own work. However they cannot stop my from showing it to someone else or even making use of my "fair use" rights regarding it.

All that said, I do not know of any cases where someone got burned by forwarding a "confidential" email based only on this disclaimer. Maybe if by forwarding they violated an NDA or contract of some kind, but not on the basis of a silly legal sounding disclaimer alone.

And of course, IANAL, and I could very well be completly wrong.

Finkployd

Re:This is stupid

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Constitutional freedom of speech protects political speech. Nothing else.

Re:This is stupid

[bn557]

I believe it was 4 or 8 K, although quite possibly smaller.

Pat

Re:This is stupid

[Dyolf Knip]

You have to make certain that anyone with a brain would have been able to tell that the files weren't actually the ones they claimed to be. Like make them 1 byte each or some such.

Re:This is stupid

[Xenographic]

You must not have been reading the recent slashdot interview with the folks in the government who are now assigned to prosecute those charged under the DMCA and such.

The asked about the clause that's listed under pentalty of perjury and the people (who were actual lawyers) replied that that clause only asserts that they actually represent the copyright holder in question. E.G. if it were over content alleged to be an illegal copy of PacMan, the person sending it would be asserting that they actually have the rights to PacMan (rather than having to assert that you actually possesed infringing materials).

If you want to fight these silly DMCA claims, learn to file "Counternotice and Put-Back" claims under the DMCA. I think I've seen some information on doing that online, though I certainly wish there were more and better templates for writing them. The problem with the counternotices, however, is that ISPs may well assert their right to terminate your service for any reason whatsoever (it's a pretty standard clause in the TOSs I've read) without giving you much of a chance to fight the DMCA claim.

Re:This is stupid

[1u3hr]

"please delete it without reading it"

A bit Zen -- "this statement is a lie"-like. How could you know you're not allowed to read it until you've read that you're not allowed to read it?

Re:This is stupid

[swillden]

However trying to say things like "any review by persons other than the intended recipient is prohibited" is silly.

Particularly since this boilerplate statement typically comes at the *end* of the document, where you're not going to see it until after you've "reviewed" the content.

Re:This is stupid

[bitspotter]

If that is the case, then go down and file your frivolous infringment with the court today!

It doesn't have to be accurate. Just make up a URL and and stick it on the form, and tell them it was some story you wrote!

If there's really no perjury penalties for such "good faith allegations", then the flood of paperwork will highlight exactly how stupid this capability is.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Custard]

Nope. Read the interview with the US Attorney a while back. The "under penalty of perjury" part of the DMCA notifications only applies to claiming to be the author or agent of the allegedly infringed work. It does not apply to whether or not the file in question actually contains the infringed work.

By that logic, anyone could claim literally anything was infringing on their work, without any proof at all.

So what happens? Who bears the burden of proof? The accuser or the accused? I hope it's the accuser, since otherwise the accused could be smothered in an avalanche of completely unfounded claims (I accuse that you put a poem that I wrote in the source code of every program you've ever worked on). Do you have to go through the source, or does a judge, or do I?

Re:This is stupid

[mpe]

This is one of the major problems with the DMCA.

The problem here predates the DMCA just that whereas before we just had machines finding "smut" where no human would look we now have machines just as bogusly finding "copyright violations".

Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished. At least they should be held liable for any damages if an ISP removes contents that they claim are infringing.

Supposedly these kind of things should contain boiler plate that they are sent on penalty of purjury. Thing is that this requires a human to be lying, it dosn't cover a machine generating bogus hits.

Re:This is stupid

[Suidae]

In the US we have some stupid laws about trade secrets that make it illegal to reveal information that a company deems a 'trade secret'. So if they were to accidentally email you their super-secret process for turning lead into gold, it would be illegal for you to reveal it.

By trying to keep it secret instead of patenting it they get some legal protections. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the details.

Re:This is stupid

[MntlChaos]

Make them have size 7 bytes. content: "SUCKER!"

Re:This is stupid

[zakezuke]

"Unsworn declarations under penalty of perjury"

Perjury is a crime with pentalities.

Being wrong or just plain stupid unfortunatly isn't a criminal offence.

Re:This is stupid

[Lord Ender]

"This is one of the major problems with the DMCA. By negating the need for a court order to be allowed to send these orders they have opened the door to thousands of frivolous and invalid claims. Companies that have made invalid claims such as this one should be punished."

You should read the DMCA. Any DMCA accusation made comes under penalty of perjury. If this guy cared to press charges, he could charge the company with perjury.

Re:This is stupid

[PetiePooo]

Dear Sir:

The file your organization is claiming as infringing material, INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip, is part of a Gentoo Linux distribution. It is not related to the Pac Man(tm) product in any way. This should be obvious by the path and nature of associated files and, indeed, the file name itself. A look inside the file could easily confirm this.

It is obvious that the ESA's claim to a "good faith belief" is a result of a computer matching strings within a filename. Such a match is obviously not being reviewed by people smart enough to weed out false positives. We have been required to follow up on each claim received to see if it is truely an infringement. As a result of this, we here at SmartISP, Inc. have instituted a new service and a claims processing policy to protect our customers from libelous claims and wrongful service denial.

Violation Claims Verification (VCV) Service: Fixed fee of $134.95 per claim.
Our new service is a solution to the needs of organizations like yours which do not have the knowledgable staff required to determine the validity of a computer generated name match. Since it involves real people, we employ real intelligence in determining the accuracy of an alleged infringement. Once a violation is verified using this service, the infringement will be corrected immediately at no further charge.

Summary of Violation Claims Handling Policy:
Effective immediately, all claims of infringing material must employ our VCV Service. Claims not accompanied by payment will be returned unprocessed with a bill. We insist on pre-payment of this service, and do not offer a credit option. Claims must be submitted individually, and cannot be combined, either by filename or by location.

Since you can see the value to our VCV service, we have assessed a charge for the verification of this particular claim. No further infringement claims will be processed until your account has been settled.

Regards,

Smaart Ayespi

3 encl:
Copy of original claim
Brochure: VCV Service
Invoice for VCV Service

Re:This is stupid

[mausmalone]

It's so that if my mom sends it to a client, and someone else picks it up out of the fax machine, they aren't supposed to give it to all their friends. It's weak juju to indemnify the sender of lapses in confidentiality.

It's not actually all that weak. In the case of a Psychiatrist, there's a reasonable chance that the message will fall under the auspices of doctor-patient confidentiality, and that if someone purposefully breaks that confidentiality, then they can be prosecuted. The bottom is a notice to anyone who would intercept any such confidential communications.

This also comes along with a lot of lawyers' e-mails because there is a good chance they're communicating with a client and the firm wants to cover its ass. The lawyers themselves don't have the option to remove this text, it's automatically appended by their e-mail system. But, since it's automatic, it also gets sent to people they don't represent.

My little brother works at a phramacy and whenever he sends me e-mails they come with similar boilerplate (the views in this e-mail are not necesarily those of the pharmacy, etc...). He never puts that text on, it gets appended after he hits "send."

Kinda like a .sig:

Re:This is stupid

[wastaz]

YES!
Something like this would be perfect!
Why hasnt anyone thought of it before?

I wish I had mod points right now.

Re:This is stupid

[finkployd]

At worst, the sender could claim copyright over the message text, so arguably I wouldn't be able to post the exact message to my web site.

Actually they don't even have to claim copyright.

"Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright."

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wccc

Finkployd

Re:This is stupid

[Geek of Tech]

Unless you preformed the transformation enough that you could afford to buy a few votes in congress changing the law and/or doing a hostile take-over, buying all the stock in the company with your new found riches.

Re:This is stupid

[ChaosDiscord]

Presumably, I could forward that information to other people and not be committing any crime, although I did not ask that question specifically, so take that part with a grain of salt.

True, but. Be careful. Forwarding the information is fine, forwarding the actual correspondance probably isn't. The correspondance is (by default thanks to the Berne Convention) protected by copyright. So if you summarize the facts from the message and pass those facts on, you're fine. If you copy the message, you might be opening yourself up to copyright infringement.

Ethically, well, that's your business. Personally, I'd follow the directions (delete the message, maybe warn the sender of the accident if I was in a good mood), unless the message represented something dangerous or criminal (accidental release of medical information, insider trading, whatever). Then I'd pass the message on to the appropriate authorities.

Re:This is stupid

[nomel]

Didn't somebody actually try to download the file and see if it was indeed an unauthorized copy of pacman?

Of course not. That would be commiting a crime! :)

Re:This is stupid

[MrLint]

well this one sounds like a clear case of perjury.

oh BTW these are the asshats we can blame for this kind of shoddy 'patrolling' Im going to sending out some nastygrams about this one. Snailmail.

Re:This is stupid

[ChaosDiscord]

On the other hand, maybe they do, and these are just ones that slip through. It's gotta be mind-numbing reviewing these things all day.

If you're sending out this sort of message, you damn well better be shooting for 100% accuracy! Every single false positive must be investigated to assure that it never happens again.

Well, it's a nice theory at least.

The point of a DMCA letter is to notify the ISP. The ISP, to remain safe from prosecution, must take down the file in question . Even if the person who posted the file claims that it is not infringing and files a counter-claim, the ISP cannot return the file for 10 days. This amounts to a non-judicially reviewed gag order for 10 days, a horrible infringement on the first amendment.

In the worst example, several web forums were posting leaking prices from the post-thanksgiving sale at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart wrongfully claimed copyright protection on the information (you can copyright fliers, but not the actual prices, as the prices are just facts). The people running the web site objected, but thanks to the DMCA, the posts came down for the required 10 days, coinciding with the end of the post-thanksgiving day sale. At that point, Wal-Mart declined to push the claim (they knew it was bogus) and the posts went up. A free gag order, just when Wal-Mart needed it, without any pesky checks-and-balances to protect the public.

Re:This is stupid

[stripe]

This would be very interesting for a few large companies. I worked as a consultant for a few years and as a result installed systems in a lot of companies. Sysadmins being a varied and onery lot the computers have been named for the 7 dwarfs in Snow White's cartoon, Loony toons chracters, Buffy's the vampire slayers characters, Snakes, spiders, Pop-stars, actors, Monsters etc.. I imagine interesting things happening as each of these companies send diagnostic information to their vendors support staff. eg, DaffyDuck.syslog.tar etc..

Re:This is stupid

[gotem]

next time they will say: This message will self destruct in 5..4..

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's for a court to decide, I guess, but personlly I feel that good-faith would require human supervision of a these systems."

It's coming right for us! (BOOOOM!)

Re:This is stupid

[number11]

Forget the perjory. They have made a false accusation in writing that you have committed a criminal act, and sent it to a third party. That's libel. Let a jury decide whether a reasonable man acting with reasonable prudence would make a good-faith mistake that "INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip" was "PacMan".

The law probably doesn't govern acts of robots. (That's ok, the robot doesn't have any money anyhow.) But if you own a machine that you know may injure innocent people, it's up to you to control it adequately.

Re:This is stupid

[perlchild]

What's even more stupid is that the only infraction one could possibly infer from a filename, is the use of trademarked material in the filename itself. As usual, lawyers can't make the difference between name and content.

Re:This is stupid

[Grizzlysmit]

Then again, IANAL. Can any L's out there contradict me?

I'm an L .... oh you ment lawyer not loony :-)

Re:This is stupid

[plague3106]

The correspondance is (by default thanks to the Berne Convention) protected by copyright.

Somehow i doubt that. If i write directions to a local bar for you, is that really something that gets copyrighted just because i wrote it? If i have a conversation with someone, do we exclusively own the copyright to that conversation? I doubt that either of those examples would be something that can be copyrighted, any more then a students notes from a class are copyrightable.

Re:This is stupid

[thisgooroo]

if you want to keep a secret, you better make damned sure that it stays a secret (and i think the laws take that position as well, even in the US). if they send it to me by accident, it no longer is a secret

Re:This is stupid

[EvilAlien]

Yes, a lot of these kinds of DMCA-invoking takedown orders are automated. Its completely retarded how blatantly off-base many complaints are. That quoted bit is likely some sort of "just act on it and don't ask questions scare tactic" to try to discourage ISPs from thinking and challenging the takedown order. What it seems to do it prohibit a "notice-to-notice" regime wherein a carrier simply notifies the alleged violator about the complaint since they are indemnified by common carrier exemptions.

Good thing the US's bullshit DMCA means nothing up here in Canada ;P

Re:This is stupid

[ChaosDiscord]

Somehow i doubt that. If i write directions to a local bar for you, is that really something that gets copyrighted just because i wrote it?

Actually, yes. My directions are copyright by me the moment they're transfixed in some media. Your writing them down theoretically counts.

That said, facts cannot be protected by copyright. The majority, if not the entirety of my directions will like be facts. So if you just write down "South on Maple Street, turn left onto Johnson (near the gas station), and go three blocks, bar's on the left", that's darn near pure fact. However, if you transcribe my entire directions including my idiomatic language and quirky side notes, well, you'd have something I could definately claim copyright to.

If i have a conversation with someone, do we exclusively own the copyright to that conversation?

So long as it was transfixed in some form (say, I tape recorded it), sure enough. Heck, many documentaries are filled with conversations of this sort; you'd be hard pressed to air such a thing without permission. (There is an important exception when you're reporting the conversation as news. You can't use copyright to stifle something idiotic you said to a reporter.)

I doubt that either of those examples would be something that can be copyrighted, any more then a students notes from a class are copyrightable.

This is actually the most obvious case. The facts that the teacher conveys cannot be protected by copyright. The specific way in which he conveys them is protected, assuming that it's transfixed (Say, through someone taking near-exact shorthand, or tape recording it). The specific notes a student takes (Assuming that it's largely their own rephrasing of the facts conveyed) are protected by copyright for the student. There is even a very real argument that the student's notes represent a derivative work of the teacher's class, thus redistribution or sale could be controlled by the teacher. Some examples are here and here. I don't actually agree with this point of view, but it's definately not a crystal clear case.

All of this is, believe it or not, for your protection. Your creations are protected, even if you didn't think to protect it in advance. The specific examples you give are a bit silly, but it's true. Maybe during a conversation on politics you give a brilliant rebuttable that convinces everyone that you are right. I'd be pretty ticked off if the journalist who happened to be recording an interview with someone else at the next table over noticed my brilliant speech in the background of their tape, transcribes it, and passes it off as his own work.

Re:This is stupid

[Dyolf Knip]

Nope, remember that article on /. a while back about the smallest possible executable? A judge might look at that and think, "Well, maybe they could fit MS Office onto a grain of rice". And remember, the FBI has arrested people on even less sane reasoning than that.

Re:This is stupid

[DavidTC]

Trade secret laws do not protect themselves from their own stupidity or incompetence.

Unless you're the one who gave the the virus, you can do whatever you want. (In fact, you can do whatever you want even if you did, you'll just be sued. But even a lawsuit cannot stop you from sending out the information, it is completely impossible for the courts to stop you from doing that.)

Re:This is stupid

[DavidTC]

No kidding. This is basically akin to saying 'He has mud on his tires. It might have rained last night. Hence I will inform everyone he got a speeding ticket last night.', and that's not even your car!

I mean, they're making assertations you're a criminal with absolutely no grounds for it. They didn't do the slightly fact checking at all.

Yes, informing one person that someone else is a copyright violator isn't a very big libel, in the greater scheme of things, but I think that would be countered out by the complete lack of bothering to do the slightest checking whatsoever before said accusation.

Re:This is stupid

[RedWizzard]

I get a laugh out of these confidentiality addendums. The note is garbage, and is clearly only intended to scare. If by your incompetence, I suddenly find myself with incriminating information about you, what legal obligation do I have to keep that information confidential? I signed no agreement with you, and you have no other legal recourse.

Not only that but by sending it to your address you are the addressed recipient. The whole thing's ridiculous.

Re:This is stupid

[goldfndr]

I don't know about 161MB, but I'm guessing that Pac-Man World was no shrimp.

Re:This is stupid

[MntlChaos]

is it realy possible to make a "good faith" assertion that a PUBLICALLY ACCESSIBLE file infringes a copyright without actually viewing the file in question? btw. 7 bytes... 56 bits. if someone can get a metallica song to fit into that they should be awarded a HUGE reward. suddenly lots more music can fit on a tiny amount of storage.

Re:This is stupid

[BillX]

> The note is just to make sure that if the letter gets to the wrong recipient...

Sounds kind of toothless in the case of stopping distribution of misdirected mail:

The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed

If it wasn't addressed to you, you would not have received it :-)

Re:This is stupid

[PetiePooo]

*sigh*

And, of course, I can't mod myself up.. that would just be narcissistic! Never fear, I'll repost the next time something like this gets some /. attention. Feel free to use it yourself as well.

And, if you're an ISP:
1. Provide a paid verification service for the RIAA/MPAA/BSA
2. ...
3. Profit!!!

(Sorry, it had to be said...)

Re:This is stupid

[chgros]

if you want to keep a secret, you better make damned sure that it stays a secret (and i think the laws take that position as well, even in the US)
Isn't DeCSS illegal because it is a trade secret ?

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

"At least they should be held liable for any damages if an ISP removes contents that they claim are ifringing. "

Damages? By law damages is just what you`ve lost out on. Which in this case comes to....$0.

Re:This is stupid

[thisgooroo]

Isn't DeCSS illegal because it is a trade secret ?

no, they tried to keep CSS secret, but did a pretty lousy job at it, but it is illegal because they put a passage into DMCA which makes "circumventing protection mechanisms" (in this case the encryption) illegal.

there probably is a law that protects tarde secrets insofar that passing on to others trade secrets that have been shown to you after you promised to keep them secret is punishable in some way (probably breach of contract). but otherwise keeping it secret is the only protection. why do you think coca cola keeps their recipe under lock?

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

If by your incompetence, I suddenly find myself with incriminating information about you, what legal obligation do I have to keep that information confidential? I signed no agreement with you, and you have no other legal recourse.

Nice kneecaps you've got there, boy... be a shame if something were to happen to them...

Oh, wait. You said "legal". Ah well.

Re:This is stupid

[rifter]

The DMCA gives these people the power to send the notices to take down "infringing material." The DMCA also requires the complainant to make the statement that they represent the copyright holder of the material that is being offered under penalty of perjury. Therefore if they are lying, they are indeed under penalty of perjury.

Some people have tried to nitpick that the "penalty of perjury" only applies to the fact the complainant indeed represents or is the copyright holder of the offending material. That was not my reading of the DMCA last I looked at it, but it honestly does not matter. Even if they do represent the copyright holder of Pac-Man, they do not represent the copyright holder of teh material offered on the net, and would still fall under the penalty.

The whole point of this clause in the DMCA was to prevent what is happening now by requiring the complainant to excercise due diligence to ensure that they do not falsely accuse people. It is a simple matter to detenrmine whether the offending material is really what they are claiming it is. In the recently publicized cases (Professor Usher, OpenOffice, Gentoo) it was blindingly obvious to the meanest of minds these were not infringers.

It would have taken a few seconds to download the material to see it was not offending material. In fact a brief look at context would have easily revealed the truth. There is not a court in the world that would rule that having automated systems do text searches for strings constitutes due diligence. The prosecution currently stands derelect in their duty by not bringing these criminals to justice.

Re:This is stupid

[instarx]

The legal statement is primarily intended to preserve legal privilege so that any confidential information in the message can still be claimed to be confidential. They are just saying that if you got this message and you are not the recipient, then it was a mistake. It isn't really a threat. They have to be able to say in court that it was an accidental release of privileged information and they said so in the message.

These notices are regularlyappended to any and all email messages by corporations. If they email the corner deli for a lunch order this gets appended to the bottom of their message. The real purpose of statements like this is CYA. In case one of their attorneys accidentally sends out their entire legal strategy for an upcoming case to the corner deli it gives them some chance to keep it out of court at a later date.

Re:This is stupid

[instarx]

That is a very interesting point that has escaped the attention of many a corporate lawyer. Because you received it, it WAS addressed to you. Almost all the corporations have this wording in their confidentiality/privilege statements and they should know better. It should probably say "...to whom it was intended." I get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that all these corporations are smugly thinking they have CYA coverage when they really don't!

new trouble

[deander2]

oddly, while he may not be violating copyright laws using gentoo, it looks as if he may be in trouble for posting the email he got!

>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the
>person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential
>and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission,
>dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon,
>this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient
>is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender
>and delete the material from all computers.

"Any review, reproduction, retransmission, ... is prohibited." I wasn't the intended recipient, so i guess it's illegal for me to review it, or even reproduce it on my screen to be reviewed. ;-p

Re:new trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

and now YOU just reproduced it! Holy cow!

Re:new trouble

[gamgee5273]

Technically, no. I've been over this before with the lawyers at the university I work for.

E-mail is the property of the sender and receiver, and both have the right to do with the text as they see fit. Thus, posting it is legit.

Anyone who says otherwise is merely trying to utilize scare tactics.

Re:new trouble

[PurpleFloyd]

Why would he be in trouble? To quote:

Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

He's within his rights to "reproduce" and "retransmit" it; it's just boilerplate saying, in effect, "if you got this message in error, delete it NOW or we might sue you."

It's there to save the sender's butt if something happens like <SCENARIO TYPE="HYPOTHETICAL> a merger notice is leaked, someone trades on inside information, and the SEC looks into the matter. With that notice, the company is protecting itself from the accusation that it was at fault for sending the data in the first place.</SCENARIO>

Re:new trouble

[henrik]

It is not a signed contract so it is not valid in court. At least not in countries with a valid legal system.

Re:new trouble

[deander2]

haha...because i can't imagine they would try and use scare tactics! ;-p

Re:new trouble

[umrgregg]

The note is just to make sure that if the letter gets to the wrong recipient, that recipient cannot disseminate the information in the letter. It does not restrict the right of the intended recipient to do whatever they wish with the information in the letter.

Re:new trouble

[Xerithane]

"If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers."

That's the line I found hilarious. Which material are they talking about? The email or the "infringing file"?

You received this notice in error, so please delete the file we thought was a violation so that we don't send it to you again. Thanks!

Re:new trouble

[pestilence4hr]

E-mail is the property of the sender and receiver, and both have the right to do with the text as they see fit. Thus, posting it is legit.

So, if I send you the text of me new book entitled "Teh meaning of life" as the body of an email, along with appropriate copymark markings, that means you are free to make as many copies as you want and post it wherever?

I don't think so

Re:new trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

repeat after me:

zsh repeat 10000 lynx http://gauley.ucs.indiana.edu/~cshields/dmca_lette r | mail dmca@theesa.com

Thanks for your participation.

Re:new trouble

[rifter]

"If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers."

That's the line I found hilarious. Which material are they talking about? The email or the "infringing file"?
p>You received this notice in error, so please delete the file we thought was a violation so that we don't send it to you again. Thanks!

Better be safe and delete all the material from all the computers :). This would have been funnier in a sewing-pattern infringement case :).

Re:new trouble

[PFAK]

I find this slightly amusing. What if I don't fall under the DMCA ruling, and someone that is under a DMCA-governed country emails me?

What should I do with the email, should I disregard it? What happens if the claims in the email are false, and in fact the file is just renamed to something that does not actually fall under a copyright.

Do the issuers of these notices even bother to check to see if the file is actually infringing on their copyright laws, or do they just send out random emails, hope to get a response and forget about it. More then likely these are just run by bots, and therefore they don't do much.

I had one of these "copyright enforcement" companys constantley hammer my IRC network, which in fact did not contain any warez, and in the end I had to Z: Line the a whole net range to stop the bots from coming on, registering a nickname, quitting and doing the process again. In the end the "copyright enforcement" bots registered about 11,000 nicknames on my IRC Network in total, wasting the resources of my network and causing me to do extra work.

Should I be able to email their ISP and complain about the abuse that's coming from their network, I do not live in the United States, so I do not believe I should have to put up with these bots that are constantley scanning networks looking for "illegal" content.

Re:new trouble

[jpmkm]

I know, reading can be hard sometimes.

by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

If he is the intended recipient then he can do whatever the hell he wants with it.

Re:new trouble

[Nodatadj]

Of course not.
But those weren't "appropriate copymark markings" in that disclaimer

And hey, if the spelling in your book is as bad as that post, I don't think you've got anything to worry about really.

Re:new trouble

[gamgee5273]

Okay, obviously you need a hit upside the head with the Common Sense Stick, homeslice.

Just stand still and don't move your head...

Re:new trouble

[galgon]

E-mail is the property of the sender and receiver, and both have the right to do with the text as they see fit. Thus, posting it is legit.

Actually this is incorrect. As with regular mail the receiver only has rights to the physical mail, in this case the file containing the mail. The copyright of the message contained in the letter is still held by the sender. This has been publicized a few time when lovers of famous people have attempted to publish books of love letters from that person such as the princess diana love letters. These attempts are always shot down in court unless agreed to by the copyright holder. However the receiver can sell the actual letter as the receiver owns the physical object of the letter but does not hold the copyright of the words on the page.

So in the most technical reading of the law forwarding email or posting recieved email to a webpage or listserv is a violation of copyright and illegal. When I asked my ethics teacher who is also an ip lawyer how this is illegal when it happens millions of times each day his reply is "Speeding is illegal too but that doesnt seem to stop anyone."

Re:new trouble

[Mawbid]

It seems to me that the wording here (if it has any weight, that is) would limit the distance to which the letter can travel to 2 hops. From the sender to the intended recipient, and from the intended recipient to third parties. Third parties could not further distribute the letter (or read it) because they're not the intended recipient.

Then again, I'm not a lawyer and I've noticed that logic works differently in lawyer-land.

Re:new trouble

[gamgee5273]

Looks like this is a case of "my lawyer can beat up your lawyer," but I'll stick by mine since they have to deal with IP, and more, every day. ;)

Re:new trouble

[Scudsucker]

You don't *need* copyright markings, anything you write is automatically copyrighted to you.

Re:new trouble

[Scudsucker]

I noticed you didn't answer his question. He didn't even need "appropriate copyright warnings", and I think your University needs to hire better lawyers. If you take Fred's email and forward it to a big listserv, there's not much Fred can do about it. But that doesn't make it legal and a-o-k.

Re:new trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like asking if you must buy a new house because you wet the bed. troll.

Re:new trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing stops you reporting the content.
Nothing stops your fair use rights to 'review' a copyright work and supply reasonable excerpts from it in the process. For a small email that might easily be almost the whole thing.

Re:new trouble

[3dr]

How many more people are going to post this same ridiculous claim?

Re:new trouble

[gamgee5273]

There wasn't a question - there was a challenge.

The copyright question at play with this subthread is so infantile that it isn't worth getting into. Of course it would be illegal to take copywritten text and use it in the fashion nimrod mentioned above. It was a silly example to begin with.

I just like to think that people who read try to think as they're reading.

Unfortunately, /. posters prove me wrong on the whole "common sense" thing. Again.

Now, where's my stick...?

Re:new trouble

[aziraphale]

Yet again, we get into a conflict between what the legal system wants to think e-mail is, and what e-mail actually is.

When I send an e-mail, I open up a TCP connection to port 25 of a mail server, and stream the text of my e-mail to it. I have an understanding that in doing so, that mail server will then, at minimum, store the mail, and subsequently make one or more attempts to send it on to another mail server, possibly belonging to a third party unknown to me. That mail server will then store the mail, until such time as the eventual recipient of the e-mail downloads it. I have an expectation that, once the messages have been passed on, they will ultimately be deleted by the servers they pass through.

But, since I don't attach a license agreement granting any of the intermediate servers the right to store or copy the message, the only laws that could possibly apply are those of copyright. Therefore, SMTP servers are illegal. That can't be right, though...

Lawyers try to get around this contradiction by talking about the intentions of the user. I intend for the mail to reach the recipient I intended, so I must implicitly be granting some rights, allowing the SMTP servers to function. The question I have is, what is the extent of those rights? To what extent can a server deviate from the plan I set out above, as what I expect to be its behavior? Can a server automatically publish the mail to a web site (as happens with some mailing lists, for example)? Can it keep a permanent logged copy of every mail it processes? Can it forward it to another recipient in addition to the one I intended? What control can I resonably expect over what copies will be made of the email once I stream it to port 25 of that server?

Disclaimers such as that on the bottom of this mail deal with the possibility that one or more servers along the route might misdirect the mail, or are configured to forward messages to someone other than the intended recipient, or log the message text somewhere where someone other than the recipient may see it. Now, since I sent an e-mail, it could certainly be argued that I can't assume none of these things will happen, so the inclusion of such a disclaimer is necessary. But if it can be argued that these consequences could occur, and must be anticipated (to the extent where disclaimers such as this are necessary), then surely I'm granting a lot more rights to the SMTP server when I open that connection and send it my email in the first place...

I still maintain that lawyers just don't get how internet protocols work. No matter how far you stretch the metaphor, e-mail isn't like sending letters, or postcards - it's a lot more like passing a message through chinese whispers. Conventional copyright and ownership arguments just can't be applied....

Re:new trouble

[Scudsucker]

My point was that there is a difference between 'legit' and 'nothing you can do about it'.

Unfortunately, /. posters prove me wrong on the whole "common sense" thing. Again.

Uh huh. Well if you don't want to strain your 'common sense', avoid copyright discussions on /. :)

Re:new trouble

[Nodatadj]

But I believe anything sent to someone else is owned by the recipient, which is the problemm unless otherwise stated

Re:new trouble

[usotsuki]

Just like EULAs.

-uso.

Re:new trouble

[Scudsucker]

Well, the physical copy *does* belong to the recipient, but the copyright still belongs to the sender. Sort of like how you can own a DVD or a book but the copyright is still owned by the studio.

Good Faith?

[Anonymous Coward]

ESA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at {IPAddress} continues to infringe the rights of one or more ESA members by offering for download one or more unauthorized copies

I think a good faith effort should involve a little more than lame pattern matching.

Re:Good Faith?

[Doctor7]

'Good faith' just means 'we really do think there's an infringing file, we're not doing this for ulterior motives'. It has no element of actually requiring effort to confirm the belief.

Which is a shame, it would be a good balance to the law if the property owners did have to invest some time and effort before getting a file taken down. But of course the whole law was drafted by people who were specifically trying to avoid having to go to any effort to protect their IP.

Re:Good faith?

[fo0bar]

When AT&T forwarded that threat to me, they included a legal contact at the company to speak to about any questions, etc (I removed this before I posted to the gentoo mirrors list, including just the stuff the ESA sent to AT&T). I called him up and got the general idea that companies like AT&T see hundreds of these per day, most of them invalid, and just forward them to their customers out of courtesy. They never seem to actually disconnect service because of an automated threat.

It seems the only people these days that take the DMCA seriously are organizations like the ESA.

Still, good point.

Re:Good Faith?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought a new Chrysler Pacifica. Man, is it a nice car.

OMG! I just violated the DMCA!

Re:Good Faith?

[thomas.galvin]

I think a good faith effort should involve a little more than lame pattern matching.

Lame pattern matching would be something like pac.*man.*. This is more like "yep, it hac 'P', 'A', 'C', 'M', 'A', and 'N' somewhere in the title, must be ours!" The only way they could get worse would be to look for filenames containing letters.

Re:Good faith?

[GreenCrackBaby]

It seems the only people these days that take the DMCA seriously are organizations like the ESA.

While I'm glad you can shrug this off with a laugh, you've hit the nail on the head with that quote above. The thing is, the ESA aren't the only ones taking the DMCA seriously. The RIAA will soon be issuing over 1000 lawsuites against music sharers -- thanks in whole to information obtained via the DMCA. The problem is, what if they used the same techniques to find violators?

Re:Good faith?

[arth1]

The MAFIAA (RIAA+MPAA) are, to some extent, using the same techniques.
The problem is that with the current politicojudicial situation, you have to have boatloads of money to prove your innocence.

If it can be proved, even. How could you possibly hope to explain to a non-technical jury that it's fully possible that the file you downloaded was a result of files being renamed by others?
Yes, this happens all the time, especially on the eDonkey network. Some people don't want their gf or parents to find "deepthroat.mpg", so they rename it to something more inconspicious like "doom3preview.mpg". Problem is it still returns the same checksum, and when MAFIAA searches for deepthroat.mpg, it finds both files, and when a user searches for and starts downloading what they see as "doom3preview.mpg", MAFIAA registers this as someone downloading deepthroat.mpg.
Of course, the file itself might contain just anything too -- it might even have been renamed the other way by someone who wanted to increase their upload/download credit ratio.

Thing is, a lawyer would have no problems "proving" to a jury that you're guilty, because the explanation about why you're not would be too complicated for a jury to grok, and would thus be ridiculed by the accuser.

If you even go to court, that is. Spending tens of thousands of dollars, and probably losing your job in the process is beyond what most people can be expected to do, even if innocent.
But that's the way the system works -- it favours the accuser, who doesn't even have to be there in person (represented is good enough), while the defender has to be both rich and available.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Good Faith?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. They've screwed up before using pattern matching, so they should expect it not to work. They can no longer claim it's a good faith effort.

Re:Good Faith?

[AtariDatacenter]

To make it even better, the ESA won't tell you what the infringing item(s) are. But, instead, they're willing to license that content to you for only $100,000. That easily is far less that you'd pay in litigation and damages over the offending material. They're doing you a favor!

Re:Good Faith?

[Feztaa]

Lame pattern matching would be something like pac.*man.*. This is more like "yep, it hac 'P', 'A', 'C', 'M', 'A', and 'N' somewhere in the title, must be ours!"

Actually, the filename was "INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip", so m/pac.*man/i would have matched.

Counter sue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it possible to sue people who make false claims when issuing DMCA FUD letters?

Re:Counter sue?

[Master Bait]

I hope so. Just who is the 'ESA' anyway? After all, I or you could form a company called MBSA (Master Bait's Software Association) and perform the same audit nonsense that the BSA does. I could demand people pay me 'fines' for using unauthorized software or from people who put naughty files on their ftp server, etc.

Scam, scam, scam.

Re:Counter sue?

[Lane.exe]

If you can show that you or your business was damaged in some way (even if it was only your reputation) by one of these letters, then yes... you can go to trial and probably collect.

It's like going to stand in the town square and denouncing a local shopkeeper for selling drugs. Even though he's not selling drugs, and it's plain to see that he isn't, you can still damage his reputation this way.

I'm not sure of the exact legal status of this letter (it's not published, so it's not libel, and it's not spoken, so I don't think it's slander) but I am pretty sure that you can't defame someone's reputation, even if you do so without really knowing what you're talking about.

Re:Counter sue?

[sqlrob]

ESA == IDSA. There was a recent name change.

Makes your wonder

[dBLiSS]

If companies are you throwing out Cease and Desist letters at random by their bots.. How often do they ever actully follow up on them, or do they just send the letter in the hopes of scaring people off.

Re:Makes your wonder

[garcia]

I used to get letters of C&D when I would hop on a Warez'ing FTP server (way back in the day).

It was obviously automated and it didn't scare me, but I am sure that there were people that did listen.

Re:Makes your wonder

[fulldecent]

Are you suggesting to disregard all legal communications that are sent obviously from a bot?

That's not bad

Re:Makes your wonder

[notque]

Would it be legal for me to get a copyright for the worlds first dancing monkey rocket ship pen, and then email everyone in the free world to cease and desist using my dancing monkey rocket ship pen?

Now replace "dancing monkey rocket ship pen" with something that a lawyer team would actually have to do research for, i.e. spend money to figure out if they are using my ip, and what legal actions they have, so on.....

Re:Makes your wonder

[HiThere]

They don't try to follow up on them. They try to get the ISP to follow up on them. And the way the laws are written, it appears quite dangerous for the ISP to tell them to piss up a rope.

Secondary DMCA violation?

[A nonymous Coward]

Note the following from the posting:

>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the
>person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential
>and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission,
>dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon,
>this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient
>is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender
>and delete the material from all computers.

Seems like the mailing list (and now /., courtesy of l'i'l ole me) thus open themselves up to real DMCA violations ...

Re:Secondary DMCA violation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"other than the intended recipient
>is prohibited.
"other than the intended recipient
>is prohibited."
"other than the intended recipient
>is prohibited."

the recipient can do whatever he pleases. read before you post.

Re:Secondary DMCA violation?

[EmagGeek]

My website's terms of service explicity state that all email sent to recipients at my server become my property and that the sender agrees that he/she has no guarantee of confidentiality, regardless of any content within the actual email.

Neat trick eh? It either becomes yours, or the sender commits fraud... my lawyer says it probably wouldn't hold water, but it sure as hell might scare somebody :)

Re:Secondary DMCA violation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you received this in error"

Hey, it wasn't my fucking error; it was theirs, so tough shit!

Re:Secondary DMCA violation?

[AJWM]

Better yet, just configure your SMTP server to include that notice in the 220 response it sends on connection.

It's not your problem if their mail software doesn't report such comments back to the sender, the point is that your software announced it immediately upon connection.

Re:Secondary DMCA violation?

[EmagGeek]

You know what, that's a FANTASTIC idea :) I like that a lot - time to start digging through documentation.

Seriously?

[tevenson]

So if I've got a file called "HalfLifemappack.zip" on my server they are going to assume that I have an pirated version HL on my webspace/ISP?

What are the factors that decide if a file is really in violation of the DMCA? I can see lots of lameness coming from this type of system.

Re:Seriously?

[dBLiSS]

A big problem with the DMCA is that there is no punishment for companies that don't even bother to check to see if the file even violates the DMCA. They just send out cease and desist letters in the hopes to scare people and if the company is wrong, no big deal to them. There is definetly something wrong with this this setup. A scary letter from a big company to Joe Blow makes you feel pretty scared, no one wants to spend thousands in legal fees even if they know their right.

Re:Seriously?

[WTFmonkey]

Would I be violating anything if I released some perfectly legal program but renamed the file "thisIsIllegalSoftare.tar.gz"? How about "thisIsPiratedMSWord.zip", but it was just a renamed file of my own source code?

Re:Seriously?

[dBLiSS]

Not to my knowledge, you might get a nasty letter from whatever company that owns the copyright to whatever you named it after, but I doubt it would go much further then that..

Re:Seriously?

[flibuste]

Isn't that plain harassment or a kind of blackmailing ?

I would consider it that way if I'd receive such a letter.

Re:Seriously?

[denzombie]

I can see lots of lameness coming from this type of system.

So let's help them see the futility of their system. Why don't we all add an empty file called pacman.zip to our webspaces.

Re:Seriously?

[Misch]

There is a penalty, however, most attorney generals ignore the crime.

Re:Seriously?

[Pieroxy]

Just a small post to notify you of a misuse of the word "then" for the word "than".

From Dictionary.com, Than is used to compare or contrast things, as in "He is a lot smaller than his older brother." Then refers to time or consequence: "And the Canaanite was then in the land" (Gen. xii. 6.); "If all this be so, then man has a natural freedom" (Locke).

So if one thing follows or results from another, use then.

Than is also used before a pronoun, as in "Paul loves pizza more than me."

Have a nice day.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a penalty only if ESA wasn't the legal body meant to represent the copyright holder of Pac-Man. Ie, they're not commiting perjury in that regard. The problem is, obviously, that there's no penalty for going after any work so long as you represent the work you claim is being infringed. So, if you wanted to, you could find every file on riaa.com and claim it infringed some essay assignment (you automatically own the copyright on any work you create), and you'd not be committing perjury. We could, really, DDoS companies pretty easily if we wanted to based on this law.

Re:Seriously?

[kiwimate]

Or what about a graduate physics student who's writing a dissertation centered around the half life associated with a radioactive element?

Re:Seriously?

[moncyb]

This is a lot worse than just scaring Joe Blow. When they send these letters to Joe Blow's ISP or hosting service, Joe Blow may lose his account, or at the very least, his site will be down until he can get the problem resolved.

Just imagine if you have a small business on the internet, and you happen to sell a product called "Man on the Pacific" and the filename is man_on_pacific.html. You could lose a lot of money if the ESA sent a DMCA complaint, your hosting dropped you site, they reqest you sign a affidavit saying you didn't violate Pac Man's copyright (like they are supposed to under the DMCA), and it took a few hours (or even days) before you could assure the hosting company there wasn't a problem. The hosting service may even just drop you because they're afraid of legal action.

This is pure crap and shows how the DMCA hurts legitimate interests while does little or nothing to stop copyright infringment. The people who infringe copyrights will just move on to another ISP/hoster and consider it "the cost of doing business."

Re:Seriously?

[Suidae]

So, if you had a non infringing file up, and they sent you a C&D, would it be appropriate to send them back a very strongly worded letter telling them to go do nasty things to their lawyers and that you refuse to remove the file (making no mention that the contents of the file are not infringing)?

If you managed to piss them off enough to spend some more resources actually persuing the matter, you could have some fun consuming some of their resources without risking anything.

Re:Seriously?

[Noren]

Just a small post to notify you of a misuse of the word "me" for the word "I".

From english.purdue.edu,

2. In comparisons. Comparisons usually follow than or as:[snip]

He is taller than I (am tall).[snip]

NOT: He is taller than me.
(Would you say, "than me am tall"?)

The sentence, "Paul loves pizza more than me (do)." is incorrect, it should be:

"Paul loves pizza more than I (do)." The word "do" may be omitted.

Hope this helps. Have a nice day.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they would assume you make a typo on "man" when you typed "map" and assume you have a pirated version of Pac Man ;).

Re:Seriously?

[JosefK]

The sentence, "Paul loves pizza more than me (do)." is incorrect

Unless he actually meant, "Paul loves pizza more than (he loves) me."

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine if you have a small business on the internet, and you happen to sell a product called "Man on the Pacific" and the filename is man_on_pacific.html. You could lose a lot of money if the ESA sent a DMCA complaint, your hosting dropped you site, they reqest you sign a affidavit saying you didn't violate Pac Man's copyright (like they are supposed to under the DMCA), and it took a few hours (or even days) before you could assure the hosting company there wasn't a problem. The hosting service may even just drop you because they're afraid of legal action.



Immagine you are the ESA, and a thousand (okay- a dozen) /.'ers send DMCA complaints you YOUR ISP....

Re:Seriously?

[Channard]

Or for a triple word score, who had a girlfriend using the same PC who was training to be a seismologist and zipping up her essay on quakes. Just after he'd archived the digital pictures of them packing for their trip to manitoba.

Re:Seriously?

[dBLiSS]

I don't think sending out false positive cease and desist letters under the DMCA falls under this law.

Re:Seriously?

[Pieroxy]

Ha! Thanks!

Note about note.

[umrgregg]

The note is just to make sure that if the letter gets to the wrong recipient, that recipient cannot disseminate the information in the letter. It does not restrict the right of the intended recipient to do whatever they wish with the information in the letter.

Re:Note about note.

[dnoyeb]

Anything that arrives in your mailbox belongs to you. I can't imagine email would be any differrent.

Re:Note about note.

[umrgregg]

And this has to do with the original transmission. Once its been made 'public' by the intended recipient, it's public. You don't have to be a lawyer to read and understand the statement.

Re:Note about note.

[heikkile]

Note: Unless you have a signed NDA from me, do not send me confidential information. I will use and discuss what ever bloody well pleases me. If you wish to purchase a NDA, do so before sending me stuff, or the price will go up!

Not the first time

[rf0]

There was a report here on /. where someone had the DMCA invoke as they had Office (as in openoffice) in a URL. Again same exact problem. However the submitter makes a valid point what if its a hosting company that doesn't know any better? Why should a customer be turned off for someone elses mistake

R.

Oh, come on...

[Noryungi]

Simply replying to the letter/emaim they received, and providing a clear, simple-to-understand and short description of the file should be enough to clear any and all misunderstanding.

Don't turn anthills into mountains, people. I am sure even the dumber PHB can understand that this file has nothing to do with "Pac Man"... Ooops... There goes another DMCA violation!! ;-)

Re:Oh, come on...

[beorach]

So now it's going to be DMCASpam... I'm sure the admin's have better things to do with their time than reply to an email generated by a bot that was obviously never reviewed by a person for validity.

Re:Oh, come on...

[Doctor7]

Except that the letter goes to the ISP, so the owner of the file may never see it, let alone get a chance to reply before losing the account.

Re:Oh, come on...

[91degrees]

Delaing with this is trivial if there is only one or two, but it's still remarkably bad form for them not to go to the trivial effort required to check that it was actually a pirated file.

Re:Oh, come on...

[PurpleFloyd]

What happens when your ISP recieves the letter, though? They HAVE to shut your connection off, thus making it impossible to reply to the email. That's what makes the DMCA Evil with a capital E: you are punished (your connection is cut off) before you're given a chance to defend yourself.

Worse yet, it's not even the legal system that does the punishing, it's the company which thinks its copyright might have been infringed. Using bots to automatically send out cease-and-desist letters, with no human oversight, is legal under the DMCA. All that's required is that the copyright holder make a "good faith effort," something that has no real meaning other than they have to have done something - what exactly they have to do under the law has never been established. Scary, no?

Re:Oh, come on...

[Anonymous Coward]

why should the burden be on me to explain to these dipshits that my files are legit. I think they need to better refine there bot so as to prevent obvious mistakes like this.

Re:Oh, come on...

[mobileskimo]

Don't turn anthills into mountains

before they do it first?

"It always starts small" - Eggroll, the tour bus operator

Re:Oh, come on...

[russotto]

There is nothing in the DMCA which requires an ISP to shut off your account in response to one of these letters. There isn't any requirement for a network provider (as opposed to a hosting company) to do anything with these letters at all -- see 17 USC 512(a).

There is a nasty catch in that the DMCA does require a _hosting provider_ to take down files named in a DMCA notification -- and even if you submit a counternotice, the files are still required to be down for a certain time before being brought back up, in order to give time for the notifier to sue. And if the notifier sues, the files have to stay down. It's an automatic and non-appealable restraining order.

Re:Oh, come on...

[anagama]

If businesses get in on this game - how long till the government. Sure officer, you can search my house because yes, I own a television. Please check the make/model/serial number against your list of TVs stolen last night. Thank you for your trouble ... no problem, search for anything else as well. I'm not worried - I would only refuse if I was (but then, you could just shoot me on site so I probably would just give up) ...

Pretty soon, Americans are going to be hoping someone can step in to liberate us!

Re:Oh, come on...

[zenyu]

Don't turn anthills into mountains, people. I am sure even the dumber PHB can understand that this file has nothing to do with "Pac Man"... Ooops... There goes another DMCA violation!! ;-)

Ummm, yeah except my internet connection was down for almost a week because of one of these dumb ass letters that was obviously never verified by a human being. These things cause real damage. I'd be very willing to join a class action we could call it "Humanity vs. Evil Monopolists" to avoid listing all 6 billion of us and the evil DMCA using bastards.

My letter just spurred me to e-mail some friends at the BBC and NYT and set up a few freenet nodes, but I wish I could do more. At the very least each of these letters should require them to put a few hundred dollars in escrow payable to the innocent victim. Then they might hire someone to verify their claims or at least make a good faith effort to contact the person, they could have Googled for my subnet and gotten my e-mail.

Re:Oh, come on...

[Misch]

The owner has the right to see the complaint. In fact, it is required by law.

"Once notice is given to the service provider, or in circumstances where the service provider discovers the infringing material itself, it is required to expeditiously remove the material from its network. The safe harbor provisions do not require the service provider to notify the individual responsible for the allegedly infringing material before it has been removed, but they do require notification after the material is removed."

Re:Oh, come on...

[Gaijin42]

The DMCA does not require a hosting provider to do anything.

The DMCA just says that IF they take it down right away, they wont be held liable because they had it up in the first place.

Its a "hey, take this down right now, and we wont sue you because you had it up for the last 6 months"

If they choose not to take it down, they dont get punished, except via the normal copyright infringment stuff, the DCMA is not involved at all at that point.

Re:Oh, come on...

[El]

What happens when your ISP recieves the letter, though? They HAVE to shut your connection off...

So, what's to stop anybody that receives one of these letters from sending a simular letter to the sender's ISP? Do corporations have legal recourse, bet individuals don't?

Re:Oh, come on...

[twifkak]

Heh, I envision a future where automated ESA/RIAA bots will send out e-mails to alleged infringers with "X-Copyright-Infringement" tags, and mailservers at the ISP will detect those tags and automatically close the account of recipients of such e-mails. :P

Re:Oh, come on...

[russotto]

Technically you're right, but in practice "take it down or be potentially liable for $100,000 or more in 'contributory infringement' penalties" is one of those offers you can't refuse.

Re:Oh, come on...

[Sancho]

But for a hosting company, this is a big deal. Imagine how Fileplanet must react--they host millions of files; presumably, many of their files will get tagged by the bot. So they have to answer each letter, explaining the mistake. You can't have a bot respond to the letters, can you? Even though you can have a bot sending them out. This is worse than spam, because you can't just delete it and move on, you actually have to respond or risk legal action.

Re:Oh, come on...

[91degrees]

hadn't thought of it like that. Perhaps spam blockers should add any IP addresses that send automated DMCA emails to their block lists. They certainly fit many of the criteria for spam - automated incinvenient, and targetted fairly arbitrarily.

Of course, Lawyers would have a lot of fun determining whether this is legitimate behaviour.

Re:Oh, come on...

[Anonymous Coward]

The owner has the right to see the complaint

Yes, but only after the ISP has deleted the file.

Doesn't that sound like "Hi, you've been tried, found guilty and punished. Here is a copy of the accusation."

Isn't this in violation of the constitution (the right to confront your accuser, stuff like that?)

Re:Oh, come on...

[Anonymous Coward]

The DMCA does not require a hosting provider to do anything.

The DMCA just says that IF they take it down right away, they wont be held liable

Oh come on.

That's like saying "You're not required to breathe, but IF you don't then you'll stop living."

They are required, by law, to remove the material, or face copyright infringement charges they are not a party to.

"Guilty until proven innocent."

This is exactly why...

[dodell]

...everybody who is trying to enforce the DMCA should be taken out and shot to put them out of their horrible misery.

That's a big Pac Man

[TexTex]

161MB for Pac Man, eh? Must be all fancy and stuff...

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[Ummite]

Well, if it require the .NET Framework 1.1, including the requirement of Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2, latest Windows Updates, MDAC 2.7 and Microsoft Jet 4.0, it only give you some kilobytes to program Pacman.

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[Drathos]

Well.. There have been several new Pac Man games in the last few years. Pac Man World 1 & 2 and Pac Man Fever on the consoles and Pac Man: Adventures In Time on the PC.

I still wonder what they have to do with the classic except for the big round yellow guy..

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[KillerHamster]

Maybe it's based on the leaked Doom 3 alpha engine. I bet the ghosts look way cool.

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[FrankoBoy]

That's because this package is in fact an alpha release ( 0.2 ) of "Pac Man Forever", and since we've been waiting for it all these years, they've loaded it with neat stuff like 2.5D and multiplayer modes and shit.

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[Anonymous Coward]

161MB for Pac Man, eh? Must be all fancy and stuff...

Actually, Mr. Pac-Man has become obese by eating too many of those yellow pills. Those lazy ghosts aren't forcing him to exercise enough.

Since Ms. Pac-Man eats just as much as Mr. Pac-Man, do you really think that he'll want to marry her now... even though they've had a kid together (Junior Pac-Man) who btw also has an eating disorder?

(note: I've been escaping the heat by retreating into my basement and playing on my M.A.M.E. cabinet)

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[TheRaven64]

Actually, 5 years ago I did play a 3D (or maybe 2.5D, it was difficult to tell) version of pacman. It was at the Live '98 show, running on a Playstation with a VR headset. Those ghosts look scary in VR...

Re:That's a big Pac Man

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably just Microsoft PacMan

Yolk's on me! -99, redundant

[A nonymous Coward]

Ha! No sooner had I submitted this than two others showed up with the same observation, who got their post in before me. Well, rats, mark it down as redundant :-)

This is insane

[Anonymous Coward]

The bot is causing a false accusation.
You can't blame it on the program. If your bot is unreliable .. DO NOT USE IT. You cant go around automating an accusation lawsuit process if it doesnt even work properly.

21st century witch hunt is what this is.
At least in the 1600's they got the witches right. Somewhat.

Re:This is insane

[MMaestro]

So if Windows is unreliable, blaim Bill Gates?

Re:This is insane

[LilMikey]

You "signed" a click-wrap agreement when you installed Windows indemnifying Microsoft from damages caused. But either way that's not what's happening here. For this to be the same case, it would be like a Windows user hacking someone or posting slanderous information and the target trying to blame Microsoft for enabling it. Just because it's not MS's fault doesn't mean there is no fault. The people that use this software to accuse others of copyright infringement should be held accountable.

So did anyone catch the joke about a Windows user hacking? Hahaha

Re:This is insane

[mopslik]

21st century witch hunt is what this is.

She turned me into a newt!

I got better...

Re:This is insane

[Elwood P Dowd]

At least in the 1600's they got the witches right. Somewhat.

Uh. Hehe. Boy, the ACs get funnier every day.

He was kidding, right?

Re:This is insane

[Lord_Slepnir]

Actually, their pattern matching routines had some problems. For further refrence, see "Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail"

Re:This is insane

[Purosesuchi-Zu]

It's almost as funny as someone hacking from Linux.

Re:This is insane

[Anonymous Coward]

He was kidding, right?

I'm not the original poster, but, yes, at least here in Finland most of the people who were convicted as witches were actually guilty for the crimes that they were charged.

The usual chain of events was something like:

1. Person A annoys person B.
2. B does some "magic spell" to harm A. (Or in the simplest case, states out in public that something bad will happen to A)
3. Something bad happens to A
4. A accuses B of sorcrery
5. B is found guilty and convicted.

Of course, the connection between steps 2 and 3 was purely accidental.

Re:This is insane

[Elwood P Dowd]

Well, that doesn't sound like the sequence of events that would lead to the coinage of the phrase "witch hunt."

Still, quite interesting.

Re:This is insane

[arkane1234]

At least in the 1600's they got the witches right. Somewhat.

Nah.. not unless they pronounced the W back then with a B sound we use today.

Most of the time, the accusations were made by women, or people looking to clear their "good name" by accusing others of "hexing" them into doing evil deeds. (such as sleeping with them, or something of that sort)

Re:This is insane

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I wish I could hex bitches into sleeping with me...

Re:This is insane

[cybercuzco]

Most of the time, the accusations were made by women, or people looking to clear their "good name" by accusing others of "hexing" them into doing evil deeds.

H3x0rs?

Re:This is insane

[Cro Magnon]

Actually, every witch had her day in court. Well, she DID have to be gagged so she couldn't cast spells. I suppose that MIGHT make it hard for her to tell her side of the story. But she would have lied anyway, and that man was a Christian (tm) and never would have slept with her if she hadn't cast a spell!

Re:This is insane

[HiThere]

Depends on the time and place. Frequently they just went after people who had land or money. (Many inquisitors were paid by confiscating half(?) of all the property of the accused. The other half went to the local govt.)

Re:This is insane

[taernim]

The RIAA/MPAA are using the wrong tests.

If a pirate floats then.... ... he must be made of wood.

And thus, a witch!!!!! ;)

Re:This is insane

[Dirtside]

At least in the 1600's they got the witches right. Somewhat.

Yeah! I mean... except for the part where there's no such thing as witches. But aside from that, right on!

Re:This is insane

[_|()|\|]

If your bot is unreliable .. DO NOT USE IT.

Three words: terms of service. You've seen (or, more likely, ignored) them in the fine print of corporate web sites. I propose that mirror sites include in their login banners and robots.txt file a bit about fees for "consulting" and bandwidth costs due to unauthorized use of the site and any correspondence arising from such use.

If the lawyer refuses to pay the bill for the research he requested, inform the ethics committee of the local branch of the ABA about his "good faith" claim.

There are some legal procedures, like rule 11, that are never invoked, because no one would ever be that stupid. There has to be a rule somewhere to stop these DMCA letters, because they are that stupid.

Re:This is insane

[MegaFur]

I feel your sig blurs the distinction between mean and median.

Re:This is insane

[DavidTC]

All of witches were guilty, or at least found guilty, of the crimes they were convicted of, that's the meaning of the word 'convicted'.

It's really sad the word 'witchhunt' has come to mean 'wrongly looking for problems that do no exist'. A much better lesson to take away from the witchhunts is that everything was done exactly correct and proper, and people were found guilt under the law of being witches.

McCarthyism, to explain farther, wasn't really a witchhunt, as quite a bit of it didn't happen under the law. And think what you will about boycotting suspected communists on random hearsay, it's a lot worse when they can convict you on random hearsay of it.

Like, oh, under the DMCA, where the ISP is legally required to take down your website on random hearsay.

excellent!

[lance_link]

i strongly support this kind of idiocy: there's no better way to discredit the DMCA than to let it do the work for you. in fact, developers should start naming their software after their favorite songs, movies, books -- the sky's the limit! any suggestions? :)

Re:excellent!

[gallen1234]

Isn't there an old military saying that goes: "Never interrupt your opponent while he's making a mistake." I think this is the situation in which we find ourselves.

Re:excellent!

[ChefInnocent]

My current project at work is called Ipanema, and its sequel is called Kalamazoo. Other projects I have worked on are SMAUG and ONERING.

Re:excellent!

[iabervon]

Somebody ought to organize a day on which every interested copyright holder claims that various DMCA-using companies are violating their copyrights on their websites, and see if the public can get them thrown off the net. My guess is that http://www.theESA.com/piracy.html is a copy of somebody's short story about pirates, and http://www.theESA.com/contact.html might be a collection of my personal correspondence.

Re:excellent!

[Salgak1]

Well, there's an "anonymous" form used to report "piracy" on the web.

Let's point them to: Let's see . . . Disney World "Pirates of the Carribean"

"The old "Pirates!" game

Tropico 2 "Pirate's Cove"

I'm sure you get the idea. . .

Re:excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

source it god. that took 2 secs on google

"Never interrupt an enemy while he's making a mistake."

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

link

Re:excellent!

[Lost Race]

If my opponent's mistake hurts me more than it hurts him, then I'd be a fool not to interrupt him, old military saying or no.

Re:excellent!

[Channard]

To the Arrrr Eye Aye Aye, presumably.

Re:excellent!

[gallen1234]

If what you're opponent is doing, on the whole, hurts you more than him then I'd say he wasn't making a mistake.

Re:excellent!

[Lost Race]

Suppose my opponent would gain little by killing me, but would suffer greatly as a result. Then if he decides to go ahead and kill me, that would be his mistake. But I'm bloody well going to interrupt him, because I'd rather live than see him make that particular mistake.

I'd prefer not to be sued by mistake.

RPM users beware

[DeathPenguin]

Does this mean that the Redhat Package Manager violates the DMCA? If so, I'm glad I use Portage :)

I kid because I love...

Re:RPM users beware

[I start fires]

Dear Gentoo User

We have a good faith beleif that your Portage file is infringing on copyright for our member Rage Against the Machine.
We ask that you immediately delete all copies of Portage or you will be assumed guilty without a trial and sentenced to a term of no less than 5 years in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

Have a nice day! :-) :-) :-)
RIAA

Re:RPM users beware

[DeathPenguin]

Dear Slashdot,

We believe that one or more of your users is violating Microsoft(C) copyright by using the word "start" in his name. This is obviously an IP infringement on the Microsoft(C) Windows(C) Start Menu(C). We ask that you remove the word "start(C)" from all user accounts, webpages, and files hosted on any domain owned by the Open Source Developers Network. Failure to comply will result in fines of up to $75,000 per infraction and possible jailtime and / or vaporization.

--Microsoft(C) DMCANazi(C) Deptartment(C)

Re:RPM users beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, they're really going to hate Pacman then.

Hell, those guys didn't even try to hide the name.

Automated law?

[Control-Z]

You know, if they want to use computers to help search for copyrighted material, I guess that's fine. But a *person* should actually *look* at the material before they start sending violation notices. What's next, computer lawyers, computer judges? It's the end of the world, I tells ya.

This reminds me of the Simpsons. Homer's car has been impounded by the city of NYC (at the World Trade Center actually), and he's on a pay phone with an automated system:

Pleasant Female Voice: Thank you for calling the Parking Violations Bureau. To plead 'Not Guilty' press one now.
(Homer presses one)
Pleasant Female Voice: Thank You. Your call has been...
Gruff Male Voice: Rejected.
Pleasant Female Voice: You will be assessed the full fine, plus a small...
Gruff Male Voice: Large lateness penalty.
Pleasant Female Voice: Please wait by your vehicle between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M. for Parking Officer Steve...
Gruff Male Voice: Grabowski.

Re:Automated law?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, that one was on last night. Great episode.

Re:Automated law?

[RobertB-DC]

That wasn't the Simpson family's only encounter with automated law enforcement, as I recall:

Bart of Darkness

Bart: [watching Flanders] An ax. He's got an ax! I'll save you, Lisa!
[tries to walk on his leg, falls back] Uh, I'll save you by
calling the police. [dials 911]
Voice: Hello, and welcome to the Springfield Police Department Resc-u-
Fone[tm]. If you know the name of the felony being committed,
press one. To choose from a list of felonies, press two. If you
are being murdered or calling from a rotary phone, please stay on
the line.
Bart: [growls, punches some numbers]
Voice: You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or
queen being murdered, press one.
-- Shockingly ineffective answering services, "Bart of Darkness"

Re:Automated law?

[orkysoft]

Or the old Macintosh computer on the robot planet in Futurama, who froze up during judgement, prompting the jury to issue various tips, such as power cycling :-)

Re:Automated law?

[RickHunter]

Actually, what's next is the Lawbot 0.92. Beta version. With new, improved subpoena launcher.

Re:Automated law?

[Anonymous Coward]

For all things in life, there is at least one relivant Simpsons reference...another that comes to mind.

"Thank you for calling the Springfield Police. If you'd like to report a crime, press one."

<Bart presses one>

"If you know the code for the crime you're reporting, press one."

<Bart presses one>

"Please enter the code for crime being committed."

<Bart mashes keypad>

"You have selected, Regicide. If you know the name of the monarch in question, press one."

Re:Automated law?

[Wylfing]

What's next, computer lawyers, computer judges? ...This reminds me of the Simpsons.

How about Futurama? The episode where Fry and Leela go to rescue Bender from the planet of robots (who hate all humans). They end up getting caught and tried in a robot court for the crime of being humans. The judge is a Macintosh SE and when the prosecution's case is presented, there's a little Mac bleep and a progress bar appears on the screen that says "Judging...".

Re:Automated law?

[vidarlo]

Maybe we should use this? If we make out a few million files with infringing name, we can maybe flood their bot, and if everyone replies to the mails, we can make hell for'em!

Fighting back?

[jdreed1024]

Has anyone successfully fought back against a DMCA notice where they claimed they were distributing a work that wasn't actually being distributed? Like, in this case, for example?

I believe, in issuing the cease and desist letter, they have to say something like "we affirm under penalty of perjury that ...." I've certainly seen some letters that look like that. Why hasn't anyone tried to take them to court for wrongful prosecution, or whatever violation they're committing?

Re:Fighting back?

[antis0c]

wrongful prosecution

Only applies to criminal charges. No criminal charges have been filed at this point. The DCMA Bot seems to simply be scouring the internet regex'ing for various names in a large copyright database. Which is assinine to begin with. You compile a large enough list everything is going to match.

I'm curious to see how the ISP handles this and what kind of response they get back from the ESA. For all we know it's rather simple, they provide a written signed letter stating the filename in question isn't PacMan. At one point or another the file would need to be downloaded and shown it was PacMan, if they can't do that they can't win any case, or even win a motion on behalf of the defendent to dismiss.

Re:Fighting back?

[Xerithane]

Why hasn't anyone tried to take them to court for wrongful prosecution, or whatever violation they're committing?


It could be construed as harassment. The ESA has deep pockets, and they could get out of it fairly well. I still think that filing small claims for $5K would get their attention if everybody started doing it. You can represent yourself, and say that it caused emotional damage as well as technical time to validate their claim. On top of wasted bandwidth and time, at your contracted rate, you can get a decent damage claim.

"They said this file was infringing, I had to verify no files were actually part of what they were saying. It was unreasonable to assume they made the claim based purely on a filename. I spent 60 hours verifying no intellectual property violations where there, and expect to be compensated."

It would be funny, anyway.

Re:Fighting back?

[flibuste]

Thinking the same thing...

Re:Fighting back?

[Poeir]

What about defamation of character? Libel?

I'm not sure if the former applies to corporations, but it strkes me as rather defamatory to claim an entity is doing something they're not, especially with specious evidence.

Re:Fighting back?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't sue for emotional damage in small claims, only for financial distress.

Re:Fighting back?

[antis0c]

It would but defamation requires proof that the value of someones character actually actually dropped.

Seeing as the letter was sent from EPA to the corporation (they decided to publicize it), then there was nothing defaming about it.

Libel however is also probably not the case since the letter says in "Good Faith." Same thing though, Libel only applies if something was actually damaged in said libel.

Re:Fighting back?

[Xerithane]

You can't sue for emotional damage in small claims, only for financial distress.

You can for Tort, which covers that though. I would just assume most people here think Torts are something you put in a toaster with frosted sprinkles and strawberry filling, though.

Re:Fighting back?

[daknapp]

How about this idea for fighting back: copyright the file names in your directory, specifically preventing transmission of those names to a third party without permission. Grant permission to everyone except agents of the MPAA, RIAA, and ESA. Then, when the bot sends the names of the offending file, the company has violated your copyright!

I think that the idea of nailing these people for copyright violations is poetic justice.

Re:Fighting back?

[jswitte]

You can't sue for emotional damage in small claims, only for financial distress.

Care to site some caselaw on this? I'm not a lawyer, but a came up with asummary of an PDF Iowa case filed in U.S. Bankrupct Court in the Southern District of Iowa.

In this case, the Plantiff (Peggy Tucker) had brought a small claims action against two Defendants because of an allegation made that she has fraudulently rented videotapes using one Defendant's name. The Plantiff was interrogated by police and later cleared of the allegations of fraud. However, she alleged that the allegations constituted intertional influction of emotional distress under Iowa law (paragraph 7).

In the judgement, the court found that:

9. The court found the report made to the police was made with reckless disregard for the probability that the aftermath of making the report would cause emotional distress.

10. The court found the emotional distress sustained by the Plaintiff appeared to have been a "desired by-product" of Defendant George Bauswell's conduct.

11. The court awarded the Plaintiff $177.00 for uninsured medical expenses incurred as a result of the Defendant's conduct. The court also assessed $500.00 in exemplary damages against Mr. Bauswell [one of the Defendants] for subjecting his exspouse to a criminal investigation "knowing that there [was] no basis in fact for such action."
Note: Added Bold emphasis mine.

As I am neither a lawyer nor a law student, I don't have the energy to wade through the rest of the court summary. But at the end, it does state that the judgement in favor of the Plaintiff was made persuant to 11 U.S.C. section 523(a)6. This indicates that the judgement was made not under Iowa law, but under U.S. Federal law. As such, perhaps a similar argument could be made against ESA, although the Federal definition of "emtional distress" may be different from those of Iowa.

As a larger comment on the Slashdot community as a whole: as I said, I am not a law student (actually a computer science student), but I took about 2 minutes of my time to look up a piece of relavent caselaw, and then another 20 minutes of my time to wade through it (this is why I'm not a law student..) I did not simply type some one-off, unfounded comment which, while intended in humor, is an indication a type of general apathy apparently seemingly prevalent among a portion of the Slashdot readership (or commentator-ship, at least).

In an earlier post in this "discussion" (although it isn't really a discussion, because it does nothing to encourage the persuasion of personal opinions or the formation of plans of action), "Rifter" states that "Since the Attorneys General [..] refuse to prosecute any of these entities for their numerous perjories [..] [the entities] see no need for due diligence [..] [resulting] in scenarios like this"

This comment was rated a 5, but since "Rifter" does not show his email publicly, there is no way that like-minds can talk to him about what he said. Given his comment (which is true), an obvious course of action is for each of the apparently hundreds of people who have taken the time to comment on this article (including myself) to organize and write letters - even form letters - to various Attorneys General urging them to vigourously investigate and prosecute allegations of purjury in cases such as this. Yet I saw no suggestions of such nature made (perhaps I missed it though..)

I find it very hard to believe that this C&D letter is an isolated incident - after all, who would particularly have an axe to grind with Gentoo? Furthermore, there have bee

Re:Fighting back?

[Cro Magnon]

Well, they ARE delicious, but I wouldn't actually SUE for one!

Re:Fighting back?

[91degrees]

I spent 60 hours verifying no intellectual property violations where there, and expect to be compensated.

It would make more sense to claim something that seemed reasonable. Time taken calling people sorting things out, inconvenience to customers who were unable to to download products, Call it aboput an hour's work charged at $50 per hour, and another $150 for loss of standing with your customers, or something like that. It's not a huge amount, but it could embarass them, and compensate you for the time taken. Don't try to use the legal system for grandstanding. Judges don;t like it.

It happened with OpenOffice too

[BRSloth]

I remember seeing a similar post on /. about DMCA bots sending messages to FTPs all around the globe about illegal office distribution. It turned out to be OpenOffice and some really fscked up bots.

DMCA in the news

[Liselle]

Obviously erroneous letters such as the one linked to here are ammunition for getting the DMCA changed. If Joe Average gets legal stormtroopers banging on his door because nobody took a few seconds to scan a canned letter for believablity, it's going to make ripples that are felt in government.

I can imagine the scenarios now. I smell a Dateline Special Edition.

Action Plan

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

When spammers go really bad, a lot of us started generating fake email addresses so their bots would find them and get jammed up with crap.

I think its time the same thing happened with DMCA bots. If they are going to be snooping around everything, lets make A LOT of stuff for them to find! Imagine if all of us created web pages that appeared to hold copywrighted material, but don't. Even just a php or cgi page that generated links with *suspicious words* but nothing of interest. No actual person would use them, but the DMCA bots would see a jackpot. Then, when actual people followed up, they'd find absolutely nothing wrong. That would gum them up pretty badly.

So who wants to spearhead this?

Re:Action Plan

[pestilence4hr]

So who wants to spearhead this?

I nominate Al Gore. He's the one who invented this whole intrenat thingy anyways.

Re:Action Plan

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

I think what you want is "WebPoison" ... but seed it with the names of games, songs, artists and proprietary software.

Re:Action Plan

[EMH_Mark3]

They'd probably get you by saying that the songs' titles are copyrighted and that the programs' titles are trademarked.

Re:Action Plan

[DukeyToo]

Thats a bad plan, simply because the bots will find so much "pirated" stuff, they will use the stats to support even more draconian laws. They don't care if thay are real or not, if they can use it to further their needs.

I don't have a better plan, but it does remind me of the browser stats that say IE is 90% of the browser market...the stats have an undetermined margin of error because some non-MS browsers pretend to be IE just so that they get served the same web page.

Re:Action Plan

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

lets make A LOT of stuff for them to find! Imagine if all of us created web pages that appeared to hold copywrighted material, but don't. Even just a php or cgi page that generated links with *suspicious words* but nothing of interest

Just be careful of trademark infringement.

Use combinations of words that they are likely to look for such as pac man. Or use the words in ways that are allowed, such as: "My boyfriend drives a Volkswagon while playing pacman." Avoid charged words such as "hates" or "sucks" which might be part of their search pattern. "My friend has less interest in playing pacman than in playing with himself, because the latter is more amusing." No trademark infringement in this last sentence. Just a statement of fact or opinion. (Also don't libel anyone, such as saying "Jane sleeps around".)

Re:Action Plan

[RobertB-DC]

Even just a php or cgi page that generated links with *suspicious words* but nothing of interest. No actual person would use them, but the DMCA bots would see a jackpot

We would need more than just links. Plenty of web pages have links to, say Pac-Man fan pages.

What we'd need are links to valid .exe or .zip files containing just enough code to trip up the bots. I don't know enough about the ROMs, but surely there are non-copyrightabble headers or text strings contained within any game ROM. Juciciously placed, you could have a .exe that appears to the bot to be the real thing, as far as its limited intelligence can determine.

Just think... a honeytoken for the rest of us!

Re:Action Plan

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

But their bots are searching past literal terms, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten Pac-Man out of INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip. So even piecing together stuff that looks suspicous is enough.

Not to mention, actually printing or speaking a copywrighted term is ok depending on circumstances. I'll explain:
"My sister's boyfriend is terrible. See what a cold hearted snake he is by downloading this text file."

See what I mean? That's an 80's song, OR a common phrase. They can't prosecute on that.

"Yesterday's news had a story about a robber who got away from cops 7 times. He is such a smooth criminal that he was gone before the cops even..."

And the Bots' pattern matching is so lose, you wouldn't even have to write the actual title, just the filename Metallicalluminum would throw the red ight on these bots.

We can screw them over, because we're smarter, AND we USE that intelligence.

Re:Action Plan

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

I nominate Al Gore. He's the one who invented this whole intrenat thingy anyways.

That's *just* what we need -- a loser who wins, but loses anyway, and then lays down to acknowledge the dubious supremacy of the person who just lost to him, but won anyway.

I'm in =).

Re:Action Plan

[Scudsucker]

He's the one who invented this whole intrenat thingy anyways.

Ah ha, ah ha, ha. Ahem. You do know the whole "invented the internet" is a lie, right? And its not Gore's.

Re:Action Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

No, jackass, in a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Invented...created...a distinction without a difference. Gore somehow seems to think he was, in a large part, responsible for the internet that we all enjoy today. And, guess what...he wasn't!! He lied! You're wrong! Now please re-close your mind, protest the completed war in Iraq, recount the Florida ballots for the umpteen thousandth time, and keep an eye out for any other long dead unwinnable wars you can fight!

Re:Action Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes sweety, in good Slashdot tradition, we don't check whether or not he actually said this or if it was taken out of context. Also, again in good Slashdot tradition, no "joke" ever gets old, even if posted over and over again a thousand times.

Re:Action Plan

[Archangel Michael]

"We can screw them over, because we're smarter, AND we USE that intelligence.'

Speak for yourself.

Re:Action Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant!

He's on Apple's board of directors now. He could surely get one of the guys on the iLife team to bang out a quick app to do this.

Some possible names:
iBotTheFarm
iDidIt
iDiots
iNfringe

Re:Action Plan

[cbiltcliffe]

No actual person would use them, but the DMCA bots would see a jackpot. Then, when actual people followed up, they'd find absolutely nothing wrong. That would gum them up pretty badly.

So who wants to spearhead this?

Whoohoo!!

Count me in! I'm already in the process of making a totally self-contained PHP script that will generate a bunch of random crap for the bots to find.

http://cbservices.dyndns.org/Anti-DMCA/anti-dmca.h tml

Right now this page is just a placeholder, but I hope within a couple of days I can have this program finished in my spare time.
I'm hoping to get it so that every couple of days it automatically connects to my server to get the latest list of *ahem* questionable filenames, so that people can submit new ideas regularly, but people don't have to keep downloading new versions of the script.

I guess that'll require some funky stuff in my database, too. :)

Re:Action Plan

[Arandir]

Um, you might want to check out your facts to see if their factual. Not everything your masters tell you is the truth.

Re:Action Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

> We can screw them over, because we're smarter, AND we USE that intelligence.

I would change that to:

We can screw them over, because they're more dumb (dumbier? no... Sorry, I'm french), AND they USE that stupidity.

Honestly, these kinds of tactics don't show us to be smarter. There's no merit to be smarter than a bot.

Re:Action Plan

[moncyb]

Grumble. Grumble. Doesn't anyone on /. have an imagination? The file names could be things like "man_packs_fudge.zip" or "man_on_the_pacific.exe" or "pack_them_rabbits_man.rpm". You don't have to use "warezPacMan.zip" as a filename to set off these bots.

Oh, and saying "Pac Man sucks!!" is an opinion and free speech. Those who abuse the court system may try to sue a person over it and cost them lawyer fees, but it is their right to say if they hate Pac Man or not!

Re:Action Plan

[Obfuscant]

Ah ha, ah ha, ha. Ahem. You do know the whole "invented the internet" is a lie, right?

That's the point of the joke.

And its not Gore's.

Yes, dear, it is. The debate where he said it was televised live, and I was watching it. I heard the words come out of his mouth. Along with the crap about his discovery of Love Canal and how Love Story was based on him and Tipsy.

Al neither "took the initiative" nor was he in a position to take any initiative when the Internet was being created. He wasn't elected to anything until after the people who really did take the initiative had already beat him to creating it.

He MAY have coined the term "information superhighway", but putting a cute name on something is hardly creating it.

Re:Action Plan

[sootman]

"intrenat"?!? Idiot--it's "intarweb". :-)

Re:Action Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Riiight. I suppose you're one of those Captain Dumbfucks who can't tell the difference between copyright infringment and theft, either. Well I'm not going to waste my time explaining the difference to you. Just go back into your room and practice cock gobbling, it'll make a nice carreer for you.

Re:Action Plan

[Scudsucker]

Yes, dear, it is.

No, its not.

The debate where he said it was televised live, and I was watching it. I heard the words come out of his mouth. Along with the crap about his discovery of Love Canal and how Love Story was based on him and Tipsy.

Getting a little senile? Maybe you should consider checking into a home. The Internet thing came from an interview. Or if you're talking about the part where he did his stupid "I may have made some inaccurate statments", that was the fib, since all those statments in question were factual. But hey, I'm glad you brought up Gore Urban Legends #2 and #3 so I didn't have to. But while we're on the subject, since you're memory is so good, remember the debate when Bush took credit for legislation he VETOED?

Love Story: he was talking to reporters about a claim made by another reporter. And in fact he was part of the inspiration for the male charachter; the other part being Gore's college roomate Tommy Lee Jones.

Love canal: I'll just quote this page It also covers most of the other urban legends, like the Union Label song. Or do do a search for "gore" and "myth" on google.

1. 
   Fact: Gore was misquoted by both Katherine Q. Seelye of the New York Times and Cici Connolly of the Washington Post. Their misquote was widely disseminated by Jim Nicholson of the Republican National Committee.
   
   Fact: Gore was speaking to a school group in New Hampshire about the importance of political participation. He mentioned a schoolgirl in Toone, TN who brought a toxic waste problem there to his attention. When he decided to hold Congressional hearings on the matter, he looked for other places with similar problems and found Love Canal. He never claimed to have found the toxic waste there.
   
   The school group he was talking to demanded that the Washington Post retract its misquote of the Vice President. The Washington Monthly reported:
   
   "'I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing,' Gore told the students. 'I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee---that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all.'
   
   "After the hearings, Gore said, 'We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved.'"
   
   The context of Gore's comment was clear. What sparked his interest in the toxic waste issue was the situation in Toone - "that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

So even if you try to nitpick your way into saying Gore was taking credit for Toone, Toone is not the Love Canal.

Re:Action Plan

[Obfuscant]

The Internet thing came from an interview.

His "Internet thing", which is a poor euphemism for "lie", came during an on-camera appearance, live. I saw it. Words from the horses mouth. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, and you didn't have a defense for, he neither took the initiative nor was in a position to take any initiative concerning the creation of the Internet. Other people beat him to it.

...he looked for other places with similar problems and found Love Canal.

The problem with claiming credit for this is that other people found Love Canal before he did.

Please stop trying to hand-wave away the truth. There are too many people who heard him say these things to be successful in denying it, at least until we're all dead and all that's left are the historical revisionists.

Re:Action Plan

[thisgooroo]

No, jackass, in a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

and this claim was correct. he started in congress with legislation to create a "national information infrastructure" with the intent to make arpanet acessible for civilians who were not involved in military research. it is thoroughly documented. just get the "Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery" of the second half of the 1970s and browse through the the "Report from Washington" columns. gore's name is mentioned there quite frequently as one of the few legislators who had developed an understanding of computers and communications. his activities in "creating the internet" were mentioned wuite frequently

Invented...created...a distinction without a difference.

there had to be several activities that had to come together to create the internet. he started one of them.

Gore somehow seems to think he was, in a large part, responsible for the internet that we all enjoy today. And, guess what...he wasn't!! He lied!

no, but you are

Re:Action Plan

[Scudsucker]

To paraphrase Truman, "You're wrong, I'm right and I'll prove it to you".

His "Internet thing", which is a poor euphemism for "lie", came during an on-camera appearance, live. I saw it. Words from the horses mouth.

And what were those words, exactly? It was probably similar to his anecdote about a girl who had to stand in class because she didn't have a desk. The GOP was ecstatic when they checked and found out that the girl did in fact have a desk! Another notch in the list of Gore's fibs. Except...the only reason the girl had a desk is a different student had to stand that day. I'm betting Gore said something like "well, I should have mentioned that the Internet got started with DARPA in the 60's". But regardless of what he said later, his origional statment in the interview is still true.

Unfortunately, as I pointed out, and you didn't have a defense for, he neither took the initiative nor was in a position to take any initiative concerning the creation of the Internet. Other people beat him to it.

Wrong, and I'll prove it to you. You might be making the ignorant assumption that creation and invention are one in the same, when they are not. No one person 'invented' the technologies that make up the net, as all an internet is is two or more networks that are connected to eachother. The process of creating the Internet as it is today, with many many hundereds of thousands of servers and terabytes of data was the work of many researchers, commercial interests and the US goverment. Gore was talking about taking the initiative in that creative process as a government official. What part of "during my service in the United States Congress..." is so hard to understand? But don't take my word for it, take it from Vint Cerf. As another poster pointed out:

1. Vint Cerf, the actual inventor of IP (as in TCP/IP), has gone on record saying:
2. 
   
   "He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be"

Or if thats not good enough for you, how about this excerpt from Microsoft's Bookshelf '96:

1. In 1991, Vice President Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, proposed widening the architecture of NSFNET to include more K-12 schools, community colleges, and 2-year colleges. The resulting legislation expanded NSFNET and renamed it NREN (National Research and Educational Network). This bill also allowed businesses to purchase part of the network for commercial uses. The mass commercialization of today's Internet is the direct result of this legislation.

The problem with claiming credit for this is that other people found Love Canal before he did.

Ah, more ignoring of context and splitting hairs over the meaning of words. He was talking about looking for other places that have similar problems to Toone Tennessee and came across Love Canal, not that he was the one who discovered there was pollution there in the first place. It would be like me saying I was looking around in an encyclopedia for the tallest mountain in North America and found Mt McKinley. Am I saying that I was the first person to find McKinley? Of course not. Niether was Gore taking credit for first discovering the pollution in Love Canal. Or did you miss the part where he said it wouldn't have happened if a high school student hadn't gotten involved?

Please stop trying to hand-wave away the truth. There are too many people who heard him say these things to be successful in denying it

They say that if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. The Love Canal and Internet stories about Gore are lies, and you are helping to make them the truth. Hell, maybe even Gore himself is starting to belive them as he'll make 'inventing the notecard' jokes on The Tonight Show.

historical revisionists.

The only 'revising' I'm trying to do is get people to know what actually happened and wh

DMCA needs to go now!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the utter bullshit that defines this law.

It needs to be challenged on purely constitutional grounds.

Fucking companies issuing their own warrants! This is a sign of the police state that is coming.

I'll sign my own death warrant if one of these fuckers signs their own search warrant.

Re:DMCA needs to go now!

[Esion Modnar]

companies issuing their own warrants!

Yeah, its not good enough to buy a senator or two these days. Companies want a more hands-on and direct approach to government.

Next, they'll have their own courts, judges, etc. Of course, they already do, but the big companies will have their logo at the front door.

Nice part is, they get to throw anybody in jail who refuses to buy their stuff.

Hence Freenet

[sterno]

This is exactly the sort of thing that is nicely dealt with through the existence of Freenet. Nobody can take down freenet, so if such things are hosted through Freenet, then the DMCA becomes totally irrelevant. They can't send the threatening letter to anybody because there's no source to send it too, just an anonymous network of servers happily sending the data where needed.

Re:Hence Freenet

[Urkki]

I wouldn't be too surprised if there'll be initiatives to make participating in things like Freenet illegal...

Computers automatically sending C&D letters?

[pclminion]

How can the human element be totally removed from this? There's a computer somewhere deciding whether or not it sees "infringing" material and sends out legal harrassment letters without any human intervention whatsoever? And people are not absolutely outraged by this?

What's next, automatic indictment by computer? "Sorry sir, the computer has ascertained that there is a 94% probability that you murdered your wife. The trial begins Wednesday."

Missing Poll Option

[jazman]

DMCA Zealots

Whoa! That is a lot of Pac Man!

[moldar]

Wow! I guess the MAME rom that I saw must not have been the real Pac Man! This 160 MB file seems to be the full version! Maybe they added another couple mazes beyond the originals . . .

Sounds like a script.

[MongooseCN]

It sounds like someone has a script checking filenames for certain words. How else would someone think that file contains Pac Man the game? What is the world coming to? Automated lawsuits?

Good Morning. Law Bot has found 2431 possible lawsuits today. Would you like to proceed with 2431 litigations? (Y/N)

Y

Thank you. Law Bot will now attempt to find an open relay to distribute litigations by email.

Re:Sounds like a script.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so Bruce Almighty ^_^

You got lawsuits! (counts to 2431)
Yes, YES TO ALL! *g*

Greets...

Re:Sounds like a script.

[NeuroManson]

I thought the legal notices being sent out WERE law bot scripts.

Well, okay, rubber stamp lawsuits then.

Good faith?

[GreenCrackBaby]

ESA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at {IPAddress} continues to infringe the rights of one or more ESA members by offering for download one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game products protected by copyright

"Sanctions: A form of financial 'punishment' where a Judge can order a party or attorney to pay for not following Court orders or not acting in good faith in a Court proceeding."

While it's all fun and games to laugh at this, what if AT&T had cut off his connection? What if that connection was vital to business?

I don't know how you go and get sanctions levied at organizations like this, but the ESA clearly violated good faith in this circumstance.

Why would anyone take this seriously?

[ShatteredDream]

You have not committed any violation of the law by hosting such a package. Their shitty software's regex on the package name misidentified it. Any judge not wanting to be impeached for incompetence would take one look at this and see how there's no case at all.

Re:Why would anyone take this seriously?

[Hatta]

The problem is that the DMCA gives copyright holders executive powers. They can demand that the upstream provider cancel service without a warrent. Try it against someone you don't like.

Re:Why would anyone take this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...because there IS no judge with regards to the DMCA. Perhaps you should read the DMCA and determine what exactly can happen without any law enforcement involvement whatsoever before you go "ho hum".

The presumption of innocence only applies in the OLD United States where you were arrested by police officers and tried by a judge based on evidence.

Now it's much more efficient.

Re:Why would anyone take this seriously?

[Misch]

Yes, but then you would be $cientology.

Re:Why would anyone take this seriously?

[Hatta]

I'm not actually advocating that people abuse the law. I'm just pointing out that this is the internet equivalent of sending 50 pizzas to someones house.

In other news...

[Eberlin]

An intro to programming tutorial has been slapped with a lawsuit by a certain company because their initials were seen in the section that taught "variable scope."

ESPNNews is also under litigation for reporting MLB Box scores.

The Roman Empire is also being sued because apparently scourging prisoners isn't considered fair-use of those initials.

disgusting

[rokzy]

this shouldn't be allowed.

IANAL, but imo this should be considered libel and whoever's bot it is should be sued.

the DMCA is terrible, but if it IS going to be enforced, it should be done so in a responsible way. if you want to send out violation warnings, then have them verified by a person.

Intellectual Property Garbage

[thoolihan]

This is a good reminder of why people should be supporting the EFF and FSF. This stuff is getting out of control. Copyright law was intended to prevent companies from taking advantage of one another. Not to prevent common and fair use, including sharing. And patent law was meant to encourage innovation, but it no longer does that. People invent stuff, and some company that owns the patents makes money. And people who want to use the idea but not charge for it should not be messed with.

Wake up...
-t

Re:Intellectual Property Garbage

[dodell]

I'm sorry, I can't agree with you here. The bots are getting out of control, but that's where it ends. When I write and sell software, I don't want people "sharing" that software. They can damn well pay me for it. When I invent and patent something, somebody can damn well pay me what I will lose for them distributing my idea for free. This is NOT what the copyright/patent laws intend to do. How they are attempting to enforce these laws, however, is a completely different beast.

Wake up...

Re:Intellectual Property Garbage

[thoolihan]

Original copyright lasted 14 years. It now lasts many years past the life of the author.

Read up, then post.
-t

Re:Intellectual Property Garbage

[Golthar]

He said nothing of the kind.
You wake up.

If somebody gives away what they create for free, they should indeed be allowed to.
Just as long as it doesn't infringe on somebody else's copyright.

If I make some program that does compression and I sell it for free (and I made my own compression algorithm) I shouldn't get slapped by a company like IBM because it cuts into their market.
Too bad, they should come up with something better in this case

Re:Intellectual Property Garbage

[dissy]

> When I invent and patent something, somebody can damn well pay me what I will
> lose for them distributing my idea for free.

If that is your opinion, then copyright is not the law you want to use to protect your works. You need to look into some other option.

If you copyright a work, you have made an agreement with the government that your work is garenteed to be given to the public domain after a short time, no matter if you like it or not.

So if you really dont want it to get out ever, dont use copyright, thats the wrong law for you.

Re:FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

How could this be modded as flamebait? Do you all like that group, CLIT? This is a bunch of bullshit.

Take counter action

[dnoyeb]

First you should sue them for hacking into your server and reading your files. Were they given explicit permisison to use your server?

They should pay for wasting your bandwidth.

This is a form of attack. They logged into your file server with no intention of obtaining a file.
I don't know, but a lawyer should be able to find something to pound these fools with. Tell them to pay a real person and quit using a stupid ass bot to do the work that requires a minimally intelligent human.

It really iritates me.

Re:Take counter action

[Jason_says]

Its a gentoo package everyone has access to it.

Damnit, pacman has become BIG all the sudden

[Eudial]

>Filesize: 161,212k
Last time i checked pacman was like 50k.

Re:Damnit, pacman has become BIG all the sudden

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, naturally the evil pirates were bundling an emulator ;)

Re:Damnit, pacman has become BIG all the sudden

[Hatta]

They must have over 3000 copies of pacman! Damn, are they in trouble.

Re:Damnit, pacman has become BIG all the sudden

[Eudial]

161 Mb?
That's some emulator.

Re:Damnit, pacman has become BIG all the sudden

[Tosta Dojen]

It's worse than you think: given the short download time, that's the equivalent of over 27 cd-burners of Pac-Man!

Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[pjones]

We, at ibiblio and UNC, just got a Cease
and Desist letter citing the DMCA because we have a couple of large files
with the word "Junior" in their names. Junior-2.2-CD1.iso and
Junior-2.2-CD1.iso are in a directory called /pub/linux/distributions/altlinux/ISO
which pretty much says that they are
Linux distributions in CD image to anyone vaguely clued.
But Vevendi (or
their funky infringement-seeking robot) thinks they might be the 1994
Arnold S bomb, Junior,
To respond to their completely bogus complaint, we have to grab the files
and install 'em and then report back. At our time and expense. I am not
full of love over this. It's their job to find a infringements -- not just
make a few guesses and then demand that we do the rest of the work for
them for free. Makes me wanna see a movie for free! (not Junior however).

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[Anonymous Coward]

Invoice them for your time and effort. If they refuse to pay, send the invoice and their original "work order" to a collections agency.

There is nothing in the law indicating that you have to obey their orders for free. You just have to obey them to avoid a lawsuit.

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[SheepHead]

I agree with the AC - invoice them.

Also, UNC probably has a lawyer, right? And the C&D letter probably used magic words like "in good faith" and "under penalty of perjury," right? They are not acting in good faith and there is that penalty they talk about right there.

Although I understand if you can't afford to fight back, at least invoice them for your time, or ignore them.

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[Drakonian]

That's among the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Any file with the name Junior in it? Good lord. If anyone has Junior in their name, they should send these guys a C&D. If computers are allowed to send them for no good reason, why can't humans?

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[Anonymous Coward]

And the C&D letter probably used magic words like "in good faith"

It probably does. You could probably find out for sure by checking the link that's probably at the top of your page, but you probably wont.

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[pointwood]

If they want you to do something, send them a bill! They are the ones that should pay for it!

It's actually a relatively hot subject in Denmark right now, where the "Anti Pirate Group" wants to get a lot of peoples names based on IP's they've found on P2P networks. The ISP's in Denmark demand a court order (or whatever it is called) and to be paid to do it. Of course, the APG didn't like that much, but as the ISP's said - they are a customer, just like everyone else.

The APG is of course going to put that on the bills for the people they catch, so in the end, they'll be the ones that pay, which IMHO is the way it should be done.

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[suwain_2]

If you're a big college and not a private individual, I'd say you ought to completely blow it off. The worst that can happen is they'll take you to court over it, where they'll look like complete idiots.

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[BandwidthHog]

A surefire 5 words to get a +5 post: You're new here aren't you?

I use that all the time in meatspace to great effect (usually) but have used it a half dozen times here (too lazy to check) and gotten no Funny mods at all.

I want my money back!!!

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[Drakonian]

Hmmm. Usually the person has to make some comment that makes a great deal of sense, but not on Slashdot. Something like "You didn't read the article did you?" Keep trying, it'll work. ;)

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[Drakonian]

Oh, I found a good example.

Re:Similar situation at ibiblio with Junior

[goldfndr]

I'm sure they're elated that you have shown great restraint: you might've had a third or fourth copy of Junior-2.2-CD1.iso in that directory.

;)

Sue for time-wasted?

[cmehta1]

Not usually into dragging people into court at the first sign of trouble, but since the RIAA/DMCA people sue at the drop of a hat, why not us?

First off, I am sure there is a spamming charge somewhere in there, since it was unsolicited communications, a commercial messgage, etc, etc.

Secondly, they are sending legal threats WITHOUT even looking at it for more than 5 secs, they are wasting your time, AND you could argue that you had to discuss it with your lawyer the next time you were talking to him.

Fairly minor individual damages, AGREED, but with the right kind of class action lawyer (who'd say cap his fees at X dollars and give the rest to one of the free/open software foundations), we can make some real money for FOSS.

Re:Sue for time-wasted?

[Hatta]

Indeed, what they need to do is call their bluff. Ignore the letter, let them take you to court. Then laugh when they get their ass handed to them by the judge. If they terminate your internet connection under the DMCA, sue. It's about time this BS saw a judge. It can't be overruled until it's challenged.

Re:Sue for time-wasted?

[UrQUan3]

Many of us are in a tough position here. While I don't share any copyrighted material and haven't downloaded any in years, I have in the past. Many who recieve these may have something in the past that the lawyers would find. It would be rough to end up in court and have to admit to things I did two or four years ago as a student, even though what I was currently accused of was false.

Re:Sue for time-wasted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you would not have to admit to past deeds... the Fifth Ammendment and all...

Sounds very similar to what the BSA did.

[Alpha27]

The BSA did a such of open ftp servers, and sent letters to the admins hosting files with the name 'office' in it, accusing them of pirating MS software.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/28/ 13 17244&mode=nested&tid=109

This is a very good example of groups not doing a good job. Assumption is the mother of all fudges. If you're going to try and automate a process like this, make sure you remove false-positives from the equation, or else you will piss people off.

Happend before..

[dimmu]

This same thing happened a while back regarding OpenOffice mirrors. Mirror hosters where receiving similair mails regarding there hosting of pirated MS Office applications.

As I work for an ISP in The Netherlands we usually ignore these e-mails, however they often are amusing.

Oh great..

[1nihilist1]

So now I have to start being careful when choosing names for my files?

Long live America!

Oh THATS a sophisticated Spider

[SatanicPuppy]

Ooooo, it checks FILE NAMES. And poorly too. That's a very simple text search if all it does is pattern match on that level...Like the profanity filters that will catch "Wish it" or "Cockpit". There is no WAY they are getting anything that even resembles useful information. If PAC and MAN are in the search criteria, I'm surprised they bothered to send out any letters at all.

First of all, that fricking PAC MAN is worthy of that kind of vigilant enforcement is mind boggling. And second that they're willing to poin the finger on so little evidence... I've played that infiltration mod for unreal. Even the most cursory check would show that it violated no copyrights and no IP laws, and, especially that it wasn't fricking PACMAN!

This kind of thing is good, because it shows very clearly the flaws and the flawed minds behind the DMCA.

Now, I'm off to put a bunch of files with misleading filenames up on my site.

Got me on this one

[Bazman]

I run a web site for substance hardness testing. We make kit that does standard dent and scratch tests for a variety of materials. One of our directories is called:

MetallicAlloysDentersAndManuals

Baz

PS no i dont really

Re:Got me on this one

[stwrtpj]

Dear Bazman:

The RIAA wishes to inform you that you are violating our copyrights. Our patented DMCAbots(tm) have seen through your thin attempt at obfuscation. You would like us to think you have fake copies of Metallic in this directory, but we know you were far more clever than this:

MetallicAlloysDentersAndManuals

We will now proceed to sue you on behalf of Madonna for amounts of money so vast, modern mathematics has no way to depict them.

Signed, the RIAA.

DMCA

[Catskul]

Can we get them with the DMCA since they are circumventing that guys SPAM protection?

Maybe we can go after all spammers that way.

Re:DMCA

[fussman]

tip 'o the iceberg my man. There are people already ahead of you and getting spammers.

The best way to beat the DMCA robots

[rabbar]

Similar to the way people have salted web pages with phony email addresses to poison robots that scrape web pages for email addresses an effective way to poison the DMCA robots is to salt your web site with nonsense files with names the robots will pick up. There is a procedure for contesting DMCA take down notices. http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~benjamin-chapman/c le/dmca_summary.htm

Re:The best way to beat the DMCA robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar to the way people have salted web pages with phony email addresses to poison robots that scrape web pages for email addresses an effective way to poison the DMCA robots is to salt your web site with nonsense files with names the robots will pick up. There is a procedure for contesting DMCA take down notices. http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~benjamin-chapman/c le/dmca_summary.htm

No it isn't! The best way to defeat flagrantly useless C&D letters is to burn 'em! Seriously.

You [on the phone with a RIAA brown-nosing-^H^H^H^Hlawyer]: "No, sir. I did not at any time receive a cease & desist letter from your organization. [Sound of massive amounts of paper burning in the background] You'll have to speak up, sir. I have all this burning paper to get rid of right now and it's really noisy in this server room. ... What? ... WHAT?! ... You can't prosecute me without notifying me I've been warned? Well, the USPS must be really bad at delivering those letters to my house. Guess you'll have to hand deliver those letters to me then... if you can catch me! See ya later, asshole! WUHAHAHAHAHHhahahah!!! ...."

Similar thing happened to me....

[jhughes]

My brother and I run a online game called TFOS Mux (www.tfosmux.org). It's based on a roleplaying game by R Talasorian Games and we have permission.

Our game is set in the fictional city of Pebble Beach, in an undetermined state. We state on our web site that it is not affiliated with the original Pebble Beach Golf Course (which we learned about five years after we'd started playing), but jokingly make a comment about a mini golf course for wayward visitors.

In January we received a C&D letter from the lawyers of Pebble Beach Company, stating that our online site was causing confusion in the marketplace and that we must immediatly change our name.

TFOS stands for Teenagers From Outer Space. It's a roleplaying game based in anime, where aliens come to Earth, go to high school and such.
-Aliens
-High School
-Anime
-Statement that we aren't the REAL Pebble Beach

Pebble Beach Company
-Golf
-Florida (or is it CA?)
-Real

These corporations/DMCABots are sending out C&Ds without even looking at what they're sending it out. Five seconds on our web page would have saved them and us a lot of trouble.

Fortunatly, my brother contacted the EFF, and a lawyer wrote to them....and we haven't heard from PBC since.

Re:Similar thing happened to me....

[CaptainZapp]

California; it's in the surroundings of Carmel to be more precise.

Re:Similar thing happened to me....

[MightyTribble]

Heh. That's funny. I guess the EFF lawyer told them there are four other (real) towns in the US called Pebble Beach, and that his clients will gladly change the name of their (fictional) town just as soon as the PBC forces those four towns to change their names.

Re:Similar thing happened to me....

[Anonymous Coward]

well, sort of -- it's Monterey. Where today it's FOGGY and only 56 degrees! Where did the summer go?!

Re:Similar thing happened to me....

[some guy I know]

... as soon as the PBC forces those four towns to change their names.

That might sound funny, but several years ago, someone, on behalf of Hollywood, California brought suit against Hollywood, Florida, to try to get it to change its name.

Re:I'll take ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the penis mightier

Please, PLEASE tell me that was intentional.

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

When Arnold is President, this won't be an issue.

The bot claims privacy rights, and more!

[rdmiller3]

Did anyone else make it to the bottom of the included note, where the letter claimed that it is intended only for the recipient and prohibits copying and/or use by anyone else?

Those are privacy-related restrictions which can only be invoked between real people, not by crude filename-grepping scripts dumping output to automatically-selected e-mail addresses.

And where does whoever wrote that varbage get off, saying that no one other than the intended recipient is allowed to act upon the information? What law backs that up?

sounds like they do what you are saying

[ProfBooty]

I think they do exactly what you wrote above, yet when someone calls them on it (like with professor usher) they blame it on a "temporary employee" and then fire them.

I run a hosting company

[zeromentat]

We get about 3-4 of these a day, roughly 1 per thousand accounts. It has gotten to the point were you have to review them, to live up to your end of the law. However out of the 90-120 I get per month usually 1 will have any merit at all and this is usually cleared up with all due haste when the webmaster is notified. The funniest one (or saddest depending on how you look at) was when someone tried to register techcomputerbay.com and was notified within 24 hours by ebay that this was copyright infringement because it had e and bay in the domain name. We of course notified the registrant, and told him that this was between him and ebay and we were going to stay out of the way unless ordered by a court to perform an action. Point being this is happening way more than most people realize, and it takes a lot of time to sort through the BS ones.

Re:I run a hosting company

[powerlord]

Considering the tremendous amount of your time that these are taking up, has your employer considered charging the company making them (for those "rediculous" ones perhaps)?

If the item has been well researched (and is truly "in good faith") then it should be a relatively trivial matter for you to follow up, but if not then the filing company is basically asking YOUR company to perform the investigative phase for them ... they should therefore be billed accordingly.

Re:I run a hosting company

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be trademark infringement, not copyright infringement. (Not that it would likely actually be found infringing, as there's about zero chance of seeing "techcomputerbay" and thinking it refers to "ebay".)

Re:I run a hosting company

[jodo]

So what happened?
I just ran a whois on techcomputerbay.com and got no response.
Poof!
Now for my rant...
How can a domain name have a copyright? It's an open question if it's even property of any kind. And generally speaking, titles are not copyrightable.
Ebay is a trademark. So using the DMCA, in this case, is clearly an abuse. The DMCA is for copyrights not trademarks.
Bad laws make good people lose respect for the law.

Re:I run a hosting company

[martyros]

That's interesting -- these letters basically are spam. It's exactly the same: each one says, "Well, if it doesn't apply, throw it out"; but just as with e-mail, you're transferring the cost to your recipient. Rather than this company paying a human being to review stuff before they send out the e-mail, they're off-loading the expensive processing to the ISPs who really don't have any choice but to pay a human to read and investigate every one.

Seriously, you should find some other ISPs and either do a class-action suit for the lost wages ($100/item consulting fees? At least one hour at the appropriate wage level...) or a lobby to pass a law punishing false C&D letters. If some random private individual gets a C&D, it's just funny; but you're talking some serious stuff going on here.

I think I'll open a can of worms...

[eaddict]

I host photos on my site. I think I will rename to the 10 ten pop tune names and see what happens. Maybe I should patent 'Baiting for the [insert EVIL corp name here]'.

I really, really wish they would stop this piracy crap and put all the money and effort into putting out some good tunes. Too many corporations and people are so short sighted for $$$.

Re:SUPPOSEDLY

[Anonymous Coward]

"Supposively" isn't a word. SUPPOSEDLY is the word you are looking for.

Well I suppose s/he should of used a dictionary. :)

Re:SUPPOSEDLY

[Red Rocket]

No, It's Supposably . Don't you watch "Friends?"

Come on now...

[CompWerks]

We all know that SCO owns the rights to Pac-Man

Idea on avoidance

[BetaJim]

This letter shows a way to make it slightly harder for DMCA bots to find real enfringement: don't put the contents of the file in the filename. Put the file's contents in a README file or something. That would atleast avoid the simple bot that found this non-enfringing file.

Now portage has everything!

[Blaze74]

emerge dmca

This might actually be a Good Thing

[dschuetz]

The more ridiculously-researched "good faith" letters like this go out, the better defense people will have when they simply throw them in the trash.

I don't recall the specifics about how the DMCA requires ISPs to investigate / respond to this kind of crap, but I think any sane judge would agree that it wasn't Congress' intent to force ISPs to spend all sorts of manpower (and, thus, $$) investigating every stupid letter that comes forth.

So bring it on! We need MORE lawyers sending out MORE useless crap so that ISPs can be justified in ignoring all of them, even the ones that actually are well-researched.

(or something like that)

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you make catchy one-liners making Bush look bad, then you hate democracy.

Try some reasonable arguments instead of gay slogans, and maybe Bush won't win the next election. Maybe.

Seems like a lack of due diligence

[HangingChad]

On the part of the company sending that letter out. The DMCA may allow them to do that, but I wonder if it shields them from liability for doing so improperly? Seems like you could sue them for defamation, all the pieces are there. They've accused you of being a software pirate, someone else has seen the accusation and you had to spend time (and money) answering the complaint. I'll admit my knowledge on defamation suits is lacking, maybe someone with more legal background could comment. The real meat is punitive damages and I'm not sure what a court would see in this. Reputations are fragile things and to have yours slandered by someone not exercising a reasonable and appropriate level of care (ie looking at the file name before sending the notice) seems pretty serious. I'd probably at least have my lawyer call them. That gets their attention.

Re:Seems like a lack of due diligence

[maroberts]

No, but each time one of these requests comes through, billing the sender $100 or so for your time and effort in investigating the claim may stop them.

Old news..

[Anonymous Coward]

I found out even my ass is violating the DMCA

Automated law?

[Anonymous Coward]

RoboCop, need I say more? Guilty!

dont build any rockets please

[DrSkwid]

I'll multiply it out for you :

Any review of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

Re:dont build any rockets please

[umrgregg]

And again, I direct you to read the whole statement in its entirety, without taking sentences out of context. You wouldn't happen to be a Fundamentalist would you? ;) It regards original transmission only, once the intended party has made the information public, the statement is meaningless.

Re:dont build any rockets please

[Jonny Royale]

Ok, then if they can't review it, how do they KNOW they can't review it? You're not allowed to read a message, when the instructions telling you not to read it are in the message?
I get the feeling Joe Heller is in heaven laughing at us right now....

Re:dont build any rockets please

[DrSkwid]

It is badly worded and toothless but I'll multiply it out in full this time.

Note:

The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed.

The information transmitted in this Notice may contain confidential material.
The information transmitted in this Notice may contain privileged material.
The information transmitted in this Notice may contain confidential and privileged material.

Any review of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any reproduction of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any retransmission of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any dissemination of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any other use of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
---------------

Re:dont build any rockets please

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing how adding bold to one line and not to another works huh, just watch. Any review of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any reproduction of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any retransmission of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any dissemination of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any other use of this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
Any taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[Anonymous Coward]

A PHB suggested it would increase efficiency. That is how the human element got removed.

ESA?

[Drathos]

My first thoughts on seeing this was "ESA? Why would the European Space Agency care about this? And wouldn't they be smart enought to check the file at least?"

But it seems to be the "Entertainment Software Association".. Never heard of them.

Re:SUPPOSEDLY

[tds67]

"Supposively" isn't a word. SUPPOSEDLY is the word you are looking for.

I think he meant SUPPOSITORY. If you had bothered to read carefully, you would have surmised this. Here, let me show you what he was referring to:

Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or medicinal material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, up to and including but not excluding use as a laxatory device, or taking of any action, up to and including but not excluding bowel movements, in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited and really nasty in general.

I hope I've cleared the matter up to your satisfaction.

Don't they have to claim ownership for a DMCA?

[AtariDatacenter]

I thought part of the DMCA process is that the company making the claim has to swear (not the right word... what is it?) that they are the proper owner of the item, and they have the full right to ask for it to be taken down.

At which point, the hosting provider can take it down with immunity.

But if the initial claim is bogus, doesn't that open the door to damages to the person making the false DMCA claim? Obviously, they're at least demonstrating negligence and reckless disregard if they're going on the output of a bot.

Re:Don't they have to claim ownership for a DMCA?

[coldmist]

If I remember correctly, isn't it a federal crime to misrepresent the copyright status of a work?

Maybe we could get the authors of that code to go after them for trying to claim ownership of the copyright for that specific code.

Re:Don't they have to claim ownership for a DMCA?

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

swear (not the right word... what is it?)

I believe the word you're looking for is "certify" -- just a guess. Cheers

Re:Don't they have to claim ownership for a DMCA?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they *swear* they are the owner -- and they are not -- they open the door do disbarrment and even criminal prosecution.

Perjury by an ordinary person is frowned on, but perjury by an *attorney* is considered one of the most serious crimes.

Judges do not appreciate being lied to by lawyers.

Re:FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard about chicken ?

Fat PacMan

[in7ane]

>Filesize: 161,212k

That's got to be the first time I hear of a 160MB version of PacMan - does it include detailed 3D schematics of the arcade machine as well?

Seriously though, don't they have some filters on identifying infringing files? Like say the latest game is >100MB, an arcade ROM/old game quite a bit less. Otherwise I'd imagine they are getting far too many false positives (they seem to be searching for SEGMENTS of a name - how many files out there do you think include pac and man or sim and city?).

Re:Fat PacMan

[twifkak]

Bets are the bot is *only* C&Ding on files over 100MB.

Re:Fat PacMan

[Jaysyn]

Detailed 3d schematics w/ a text dump of the games source code still wouldn't be that big.

Jaysyn

Re:Fat PacMan

[Mysticode]

The bot wasn't necessarily thinking that this was the old arcade style PacMan game. There are newer PacMan games out there. I'm not sure how much space they take up but they come on CD so it isn't unreasonable to think that a 160 MB file could be a copy of the game. Regardless of this though it is really quite stupid that the bot would return this as a match.

Re:Fat PacMan

[in7ane]

Now I see why usenet posts are split up into smaller parts. It must be a requirement by the isp's/others who host the usergroups to keep them below the radar.

Just fire the temp..

[nolife]

They will simply fire the guy that sent out the mesage. It is probably the "same" temp employee the RIAA fired for the same thing. Damn, he's a real fuckup. Maybe he can pull a Kenneth Lay "I do not recall" when asked if he sent them.

Re:Just fire the temp..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and he's employed here as an editor -- his name is Michael.

Lawsuit honeypot

[CausticWindow]

Somebody with a clueless ISP, host an ftp site sporting empty files with names like pacman.zip, archon.zip, loderunner.zip, etc.

When the ISP gets the DMCA notice and shuts you down, you sue the sender for disrupting your business. Of course you'll need some kind of front business on the same server.

Re:Lawsuit honeypot

[flibuste]

I have a clueless ISP. Anybody has a stupid business?

Re:Lawsuit honeypot

[radja]

try SCO. lawsuits is what they do best.

Chuckle... Parent Poster ^ is a subscriber

[blunte]

I always wondered who, if anyone, was actually a /. subscriber.

Two first posts today from parent poster, and both with real content in the post are a givaway ;)

Re:Chuckle... Parent Poster ^ is a subscriber

[damiangerous]

Also a dead giveaway, the asterisk next to their name.

Re: Trial Wednesday?

[Veldcath]

But I'm not married!

Sir, the computer states that there is an 89% probability that you are married and lying about it.

I've never been engaged or gone through the ceremony or even met the woman! How could I be married?!?

Computers do not lie, sir.

... ... let's hope not.

Let's Have Some Fun!

[blunte]

I think we should make sure as many package names as possible contain words that will get picked up by their bot.

That would generate vast amounts of noise for them (and for us, yes), and it would really highlight the madness.

Re:Let's Have Some Fun!

[mickwd]

Yeah, because we all know Linux needs more PACkage MANagement ;)

Re:Let's Have Some Fun!

[CyberKnet]

I may be wrong, but I dont think it would get picked up unless it was PACkage-MANagement ... and a link on it probably wouldn't hurt your case either =P"

Re:Let's Have Some Fun!

[quantum bit]

and it should have a "Reasonably Ostensible Manual" for documentation purposes. It can be distributed in a file called "PACkage-MANagement-ROM.zip"

Re:Let's Have Some Fun!

[Pharmboy]

Actually, I like the idea you are presenting, but its not enough. I won't put a list here, but we can figure out what names they are looking for based on just the pacman incident. what we need is to flood our own ftp servers with small text files with names that would imply a violation. In other words, create so much noise that their scanning becomes useless. I am sure someone here can add to this concept and come up with a better simple plan to impliment this. A list of potential infringing names, or better yet a link to it, would be a good start.

We dont need to pretend that they are not really "pacman" by hiding the name in another. Just calling them "pacman-rom", "matrix-divx" or "galaga-rom" is fine, or similar. its not illegal to name a file any damn name you want. Its your text file, call it what you want. Now someone go make us a list so that we can can create a text file and cp it to death (or ln -s it) :D

Re:Dental Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Wanna play some stick ball?

supposively?

[mapmaker]

I was unaware there was now a cromulent alternative to the word 'supposedly'.

Re:supposively?

[Mike Markley]

If *I'd* submitted this story, I would of done it correctly.

(I swear, this shit's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me...)

Openoffice Mirrors

[nurb432]

Sometime ago a story was posted about the same thing, searching FTP sites for files, and keyed off the word 'office'.. so the letters went a-flying..

Good thing it wasnt 'auto suits'.. Innocent people would have to pay to defend themselves for doing NOTHING... ( remember its civil court, its on your to prove innocence.. )

Morons.

Wanna search the machine? Ha!

[dacarr]

Just deny the host in ones' access tables. Can't find the file. Problem solved, eh?

Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[cobyrne]

May I suggest that someone put together a DMCAbot honeypot with loads of .zip filenames which contain words that appear in many popular games and other copyrighted materials.

If you could go to a court with, say, 100 of these ridiculous claims from a particular firm of lawyers for files in your honeypot, then maybe the courts would listen and do something about these claims?

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[MindStalker]

No, I'm pretty sure they have it automated to only send one notice for sites that have many infringments, as there are already many many sites out there that have thousands of infringments.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[jabber01]

It's a sane and sensible suggestion, which is why it is verboten.

IIRC, honeypots and intentionally misrepresenting yourself as something you're not in the digisphere, is illegal under either the DMCA or one of the Patriot Laws.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

use iso files of endlessly looped mp3's:
the RIAA sucks.
the DMCA sucks.
SCO sucks (I had to throw this in)
I would not let Hilary R. suck

Make sure all files are multi-part encrypted zipped iso files of at least 650 to 700 meg.
limit the download speed of these files to 2.8 kbps! ....

do not allow restarts on the file downloads!

name the files:
MetalLicka
Madumbass
decss
Unicwarez 11.0

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[mopslik]

...intentionally misrepresenting yourself as something you're not in the digisphere...

People do that? Who'd have thought? Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my chat with this hot, 18-year-old blonde and her two girlfriends...

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[cornice]

I like this idea but it should be a distributed program that anyone can run. It should be designed to attract only the brain dead bots that result in this kind of unwarrented threat Companies that become notorious for sending brain dead threats can be identified and the software can focus file names more specifically on these violators.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Simon Brooke]

May I suggest that someone put together a DMCAbot honeypot with loads of .zip filenames which contain words that appear in many popular games and other copyrighted materials.

This raises a question. Do these serial DMCA perjurers use search engines, or do they have their own web-crawlers? If they have their own web-crawlers, what user-agent strings do they report to the http daemon? It would be interesting to know whether (say) the ESA had been trawling through my sites.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[RetsamYthgimla]

Could you please elaborate on how the DMCA makes a DMCAbot honeypot illegal? I'm not trying to be a troll, I honestly want to know what other evil clauses are in the DMCA (either I haven't heard of this clause yet, or it's a new twist on the DMCA I hadn't heard yet).

Also, define "misrepresenting yourself". If I am a commercial (or non-commercial) site, and I have a bunch of files available for download that have legitimate purposes, but happen to be named in ways that would fool a braindead DMCAbot, how is that misrepresentation?

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that? Let's say the actual site contains information as to exactly what it is and what is contained therein. Let's say that the stupid automagic violation hunter software doesn't actual read the site, but only looks for file names. Are you the honeypot owner liable for the fact that the pot lickers don't read? There is no mis-representation here. The only possible mis-representation is in naming a file after a Mutttallica song IF the file DOES NOT contain a stolen version of the song. Even then I would guess that fair use would let you get away with naming your file containing a review of song "ASDF" as "ASDF". And in the spirit of avoiding that tack on a "review" somewhere so it's ASDF_rv or similar Most of the idiot ware will probably still trip on it.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[bobdinkel]

This brings something interesting to mind:
According to jabber01 in this comment

IIRC, honeypots and intentionally misrepresenting yourself as something you're not in the digisphere, is illegal under either the DMCA or one of the Patriot Laws.

Assuming that these serial DMCA perjurers use their own web-crawlers, what are the user-agent strings? What if they're claiming to be something that they're not? Wouldn't they then be in violation of the DMCA? Just thinking out loud, er, typing, um, whatever...

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

>I have a bunch of files available for download that have legitimate purposes, but happen to be named in ways that would fool a braindead DMCAbot, how is that misrepresentation

Simple. You have a file called "x" (title or name indicating some copryrighted work) but it really just contains "y" (some uncopyrighted content). Someone who sees a listing of your files assumes "x" means that the file contains "x" when it does not. By definition, this is *misrepresenting* what the file contains.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[red floyd]

It would be interesting to know whether (say) the ESA had been trawling through my sites.

Why are you worried abou the European Space Agency? Do you have bootleg blueprints of the Ariane 5?

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[91degrees]

You'd probably be quite safe. Any lawyer that attacked you would look pretty stupid arguing that harm was done by you not sharing an illegal file. They might still prosecute of course. This is, after all, public disobedience, and prosecution is always a possiblity.

However, a honeypot would be specifically designed to demonstrate that the legal system is being abused. Generally speaking, I understand that the courts look dimly on that sort of thing. Then again, they might think you did this simply to waste the court's time. They don't like that a lot either. Essentially, the point is that if you have a honeypot, make sure that you have a response to their nastygram worked out, that you know what your aim is (e.g. force them to actually check the files are what they think, charge them with harrasment or whatever) and that you have decent legal representation lined up, and already willing to defend you.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[moncyb]

You are on crack. Did you even read the fucking letter? Did you even read what cshields2 (the user who submitted the story) wrote? They both say the filename was INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip and the shitheads at ESA claimed it was Pac Man!!!!!!! If I have a file at my site named my_friend_christina_stripped_down_on_new_years.jpg or jason_arrested_for_grand_theft_auto.zip or christina_binaries_stripped.tgz, I am not misrepresenting what my file contains, nor am I violating the copyrights of the people who own the video game "Grand Theft Auto" or Christina Auglera's song "Stripped".

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Natty P]

Easy fix...

Just call your files ThisIsNotPAC-MAN.zip, ThisIsNotHALF-LIFE.zip, ThisIsNotQUAKE.zip, etc.

If you RTFA the filters would easily pick up these files as "copyrighted work" and send you a DMCA infringement e-mail, while the files are obviously not mis-representing what they are (or rather are not).

(Though I really doubt that there is this broad a specification of a "misrepresentation" in the DMCA or anything else... I'm assuming someone is blowing out of proportion some clause covering "man-in-the-middle" attacks or something along the same lines to apply to everything on the 'Net. Or just trolling...)

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[bheerssen]

The difference here is that you are not masquerading as something you are not, it's just your content doing that. Remember, we're talking websites and ftp sites here, not peer-to-peer networks. If you offer for download junk files that masquerade as copyrighted media, and say right up front that you are doing that, I fail to see any misrepresention.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually a good idea. Before all the DMCA problems started coming up, but right after the major issues with MP3 trading started to come up. I had my IP blocked. The reason I was provided by my ISP was there logs showed I had transfered a file through the border router with the words Metillica and the extension of .mp3.

At this point all my fellow sysadmins started renaming all there tarballs and rpms to have the extension of .mp3 along with the name of popular songs.

This of course caused major problems and eventually caused them to rethink there policy on blocking machines because of file transfers. This also caused me to start using SSH tunnels for most transfers.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[moncyb]

Yeah, but the honeypot doesn't have to have filenames like "warez-PacMan.zip", it could have names like "man_packs_fudge.zip" and "christinas_binary_utilities_stripped.tgz" all with legitimate data in them. If done right, the honeypot wouldn't even look like a honeypot.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[clarkcox3]

Simple. You have a file called "x" (title or name indicating some copryrighted work) but it really just contains "y" (some uncopyrighted content). Someone who sees a listing of your files assumes "x" means that the file contains "x" when it does not. By definition, this is *misrepresenting* what the file contains.

OK, on my hard drive, I have a file called "Unreal.zip". It contains a short story called "Unreal". If someone wants to accuse me of having an illegal copy of the game "Unreal", then they'd have to unzip the file and look at it's contents, otherwise, they have no evidence what so ever. They have no more evidence than if they found a teddy bear in my house, with a label that said gun, and accused me of trying to distribute guns to children.

Labels (which are all filenames are) given to my files have no more or less meaning than I ascribe to them, they are merely mnemonic devices intended to make them easy for me to find. If, for some reason, naming a file "Michael Jackson" helps me find it, then so be it, but there is no "misrepresenting" going on.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[HiThere]

Be sure you encrypt it rot-26 before mailing it to yourself (so you can be sure that you have a copy). That way they can't look at it without violating the DMCA.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[k12linux]

Labels (which are all filenames are) given to my files have no more or less meaning than I ascribe to them

Thank you! I was trying to think of a clean way to say just that... now I don't have to.

While a friend and I were working on programming for a MUD, we used to save our update files with bizzar names. The main reason was to help remember which patch was which without actually disclosing what was in the patch. (Names like 0001, 0002, 0003 do not really lend themselves to easy differentiation.) Anyhow, they quickly degenerated into a listing of rock group and porn star names.

I'm going to have to find those suckers and put them in a "Old patches to circle-mud" web page. Wonder how many RIAA and movie industry types would send me warnings.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[thisgooroo]

just have a look at the DMCA threat letter that started this. the file name is legitimate, has no relation whatsoever to Pac-man, and still got picked up by the bot. given how all encompassing their searches are, it should be no problem to set up a site with quite a lot of filenames that get the bots busy without suggesting misrepresentation

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[thisgooroo]

Generally speaking, I understand that the courts look dimly on that sort of thing. Then again, they might think you did this simply to waste the court's time. They don't like that a lot either.

true, but who would be wasting the court's time? surely the one who goes to court with a bogus claim

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[91degrees]

The one with the poorest legal argument.

While it seems fairly obvious who's at fault here, the opposition will employ a professional confidence trickster (I think they're called lawyers) to convince the court that you wasted their time by parforming actions that forced them to prosecute. Legal experts are very convincing at claiming black is white.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[AndyFewt]

I was bored, so... the honeypot is now up..

It works exactly like the email address generator.. It generates random file names which contain the various "copyrighted" titles. Some are mixed around like the package manager. Any clicked link will take you to a file which just has some information for any human that it is the honeypot etc etc. I won't post the url as it logs all the lovely IPs, user agents, dates, times and whether it accessed the files to check. Plus I dont think I could survive the slashdotting.

Gimme my C&D letter!

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway, if these are automated engines, you could just put the word "not" in front of every file. Then, no one could accuse you of such.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

How about shoving that honeypot up your ass ? You are teh ghey, enjoy yoself.

Re:Suggestion - DMCAbot honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

If I have a file at my site named my_friend_christina_stripped_down_on_new_years.jpg or jason_arrested_for_grand_theft_auto.zip or christina_binaries_stripped.tgz

Could you send me the christina ones please?

Re:Whoa! That is a lot of Pac Man!

[EMH_Mark3]

Yeah, an other couple hundred thousands.

Bot V Bot?

[idlethought]

Set up a Spam-catcher that spots one of these claims, and bounces it back with the message:

You email has been rejected by an automated system, due to previous unjustified DMCA claims in the past all future claims are subject to a $150 an hour surcharge (minimum 10 hours) should there prove to be no infringement.
Please review your claim, and if you are still sufficently convinced that your claim is valid please resubmit your email with the text "I accept the terms and conditions for investigation of my DMCA claim"
Terms and conditions are subject to change without notice.

Would this be legal? It's certainly reasonable: the fee is only charged payable if there is no infringement. If the claimant is sufficiently convinced that they are being ripped off they should be happy to agree- they won't have to pay.

Re:Dental Plan

[Interesting Username]

Certainly!

You can thank...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyveillance for a lot of this. I find them visiting my servers VERY often (work and home) looking for infringments. Cyveillance is very easy to ban from your servers. STFW for "blocking cyveillance".

Cyveillance is also very sneaky, and they abuse the USER_AGENT string.
see this for more info.

Boycotting the RIAA? Why not the ESA?

[Decius6i5]

If we're going to boycott music industry organizations that use these tactics, why not also boycott computer industry companies.

Do you REALLY want to give money to an organization that would have your internet access shut down because you have a file on an FTP site which contains the letters "pac" and "man" in the file name?

If you don't want to see these kinds of aggressive tactics you have to show those who engage in them that its not in their best interest to do so.

Members of the ESA:

Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.
Activision, Inc.
Atari
Buena Vista Games
Capcom USA, Inc.
Crave Entertainment
Eidos Interactive
Electronic Arts
id Software
Konami of America, Inc.
LucasArts
Microsoft Corporation
Midway Games, Inc.
Namco Hometek, Inc.
Nintendo of America Inc.
NovaLogic, Inc.
SEGA of America, Inc.
Sony Computer Entertainment America
Square Enix USA, Inc.
Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.
THQ, Inc.
Ubi Soft Entertainment
Vivendi Universal Games
Wild Tangent

Re:Boycotting the RIAA? Why not the ESA?

[RichardX]

Good post. My guess is that these individual members aren't so much responsible for this madness, but they are members of the ESA who in turn have 'subscribed' to the DMCA, which is resulting in this insanity. At the end of the day though, it's the ESA members holding it all together. If they fear this is bad for business they're going to drop out pretty quick, or at least get the ESA to review it's policy.
I'd suggest firing off an email to each of the above stating that until such time as they either disassociate themselves from the ESA, or the ESA changes it's policy regarding these cases, you will no longer be purchasing any product made by or associated with their company.

Re:Dental Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! So I says to Mabel, I says...

Am I missing something?

[InfiniteWisdom]

A lot of people are taking this chance to lash out at the DMCA. While I do agree that the DMCA is a Bat Thing, I don't see how this has anything to do with it.

All this relates to is a bunch of stupid people relying on poorly designed automated bots to send legal threats without even looking at it first.

Infiltration...

[Jermsy]

Ok, this is slightly off topic, but I am the webmaster for Infiltration, the game that this mappack is for.

Quite a sunrise to find us mentioned on slashdot! Not exactly the context that I would have preferred, but cool nonetheless.

Jeremy

Webmaster
i n f i l t r a t i o n
http://infiltration.sentrystudios.net

Re:Infiltration...

[Freon115]

hehe you'd expect them to tell how great or revolutionary Inf is (or just bash us because we're late or something), but not that ;)

Re:Infiltration...

[Jermsy]

would have thought I could spell 'surprise'... oh well.

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[Chuck Bucket]

It won't happen, he wasn't born in the USA, so he can't hold the office.

CB

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[Anonymous Coward]

how about getting a ticket for running a red light, they mail those out from a picture taken by automated camera at the light. not too much different, and its all over now.

I Too have seen this

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an ISP and we get these all the time. The really funny part is that most of these can plainly be seen as wrong with just the bots own log info in the complaint itself. I had a case where the BSA sent me notice that one of my customers was infringing on "Diablo" (the game) when the bot's own log at the bottom of the complaint clearly showed the file name as XXXX-XX-Diablo-XX.AVI! It was a work print of a film with diablo in the title. I sent them back the notice asking them how the game diablo was supposed to be distributed as an AVI and never heard from them again! :)

"IP Port"?!

[Pheersome]

>Infringement Detail:
...
>IP Port: 21
>Network: FTP
>Protocol: FTP

These ESA folks show a stunning lack of basic network knowledge. You'd think that if they were trying to apply a technical solution (net robot) they might have some clue, but this makes you wonder...

Can they take this to the Supreme Court

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they can say, we've been damaged by this law. Is it enough to go to the Supreme Court, and get the DMCA repealed?

Confidentiality Agreement

[Anonymous Coward]

For an agreement to be binding, both sides (sender and reciever) must agree. As in a contract, the main portions of which are 1. Offer 2. Acceptance 3. Consideration.

Otherwise, I could send you an email saying that by recieving this email you owe me $5000.

and that's why Palladium/TCPA is evil

[ezzzD55J]

If they wanted to stop the intended recipient from spreading the message around... they couldn't, but they'd be much more threatening.

That's a good reason that TCPA and similar data-(or call it content-)control mechanisms are evil.

Re:and that's why Palladium/TCPA is evil

[Elwood P Dowd]

No, not really.

The contents of a letter can *always* be copied by its intended recipient. No amount of content control methods will change that.

Re:and that's why Palladium/TCPA is evil

[Igmuth]

What if I send you portions of a book I wrote?, Or heck, what if I just mail you the entire thing?

Re:and that's why Palladium/TCPA is evil

[JeffTL]

Indeed, there is always the "analog hole." As long as there is line out, digital audio can be copied, and as long as there are monitors, the written word can be copied almost as easily as from a book.

Re:and that's why Palladium/TCPA is evil

[tdgoodman]

I thought that Palladiam/TCPA included the ability to restrict copying of material by anyone other than the creator of the data. If so, then the only way to copy the data would be through some analog hole. A simple cut and past would not work.

Sounds like Palladium/TCPA would make it very difficult to copy and distribute restricted emails. Did I miss something?

Re:and that's why Palladium/TCPA is evil

[Elwood P Dowd]

No, you didn't miss anything.

I just disagree that the analog hole counts as "very difficult".

If it's a really really long email, and retyping it doesn't make sense, then my digital camera makes sense. It's just returned us to wherever we were before computers. That's fine for stuff like political speech/whistleblowing/leaks/etc.

I have all kinds of problems with TCPA, but this isn't one of them.

Must be bot with a name like Rober Hunter IV

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like aura elitism by signing you name Robert Hunger the Fourth as if you heir to some empire or royalty

Original Pac-Man ROMs

[swb]

8k, 16k or 32k?

Re:Original Pac-Man ROMs

[default luser]

Either 4k or 8k, like all normal Atari ROMS.

Re:Original Pac-Man ROMs

[AtariKee]

The original Pac-Man was NOT created by Atari. Being the classic coin-op nazi and elitist that I am, I feel I must point out that the original Pac-Man (or PUCK-Man, as it is known in Japan, and its TRUE original name) was created by Toru Iwatani in 1979-80 for Namco and released as a coin-op first. It was later released in crappy console form by Atari.

Coin-ops ALWAYS get neglected by people who seems to forget that most early arcade classics started out in this form. Consoles, although fun in their own right, generally sucked in comparison.

I just get sick of seeing people referring to classic coin-ops manufactured by other companies as ATARI games, and seeing consoles get all the credit for them. If you had your choice, what would you rather take home, the coinop or the "Atari" cart?

hehe Perjury, I copied your mistake

[DrSkwid]

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: You can type more than that for your comment.

Fix

[silas_moeckel]

OK this seems like a simple fix add some verbage to the login page headers etc (and robots.txt possibly) stating that if you are any of the following you are not autorized to view any contant on this site.

Work for, with or at the behest of:

BSA
RIAA
MPAA
etc
etc
etc

By continuing to utilize this site you agree to hold harmless this site of any infringments of copyright, pattents or other inteletual property. Failure to abide by these restrictions constitues Copyrigth infrinement, eletronic tresspass and acceptance to the above terms.

OK so when there bot visits your site you now have proof they at least infringed on your copyright.

Granted this is very rough and would need to be updated etc. But you could have something to sue upon after insiting that there is no infringing material. And computer tresspass is rather easy to prove.

Re:Fix

[Jaysyn]

This didn't work for BBS' either.

Jaysyn

Re:Fix

[silas_moeckel]

Actualy it will never stop the police they are allowed to lie as part of undercover work. Private citizens can bring any evidence they want to law enforcment no matter how they got it as well. But You can use the DMCA against them as every time you get a C&D letter you can obtain proof they illigialy scanned you. Law enforment can but private citizens cant this isn't going to stop you from getting nailed for infingement but if all the legal sites out there do it it will make it not worth the effort.

poop

[Anonymous Coward]

coming out of my ass

Eh heheheheh.

[sharph]

>Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the
>person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential
>and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission,
>dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon,
>this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient
>is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender
>and delete the material from all computers.

So much for that...

Send them a bill

[HermanAB]

for your investigation of their complaint. Then if they do not pay up, you sue for non-payment in small claims (Provincial) court.

The next step would be to create a honeypot of files with Linux howto guides for instance, but with names of well known movies in the archive names.

Profit...

Re:Dental Plan

[Interesting Username]

You won't feel a thing... 'til I jam this down your throat!

Good Faith or Bad Faith?

[billstewart]

It looks to me like they're waving around the term "good faith" because it's the magic words from the DMCA, but sending out a letter with a human's signature on it when it's very clear that none of that human's neurons have fired during the writing process strikes me as (IANAL) much closer to bad faith than good faith, especially when they seem to have an established pattern of doing this.

It's an accusation to an ISP that the ISP's customer is committing a violation of a law and should be whacked, and under the DMCA it's much safer for the ISP to whack them first and apologize later if there's a mistake. There are various legal terms for doing this sort of thing - I'm not sure which of them are torts, which might become torts if the carrier acts on them, which might be crimes (they did say "under penalty of perjury"), and which are just insults.

Re:Good Faith or Bad Faith?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The law is being openly abused. The ONLY appropriate response would be to sue the fuckers and make them taste some of their own medicine.

But, in practice, almost every victim has chosen the same response: give in, bend over, take it up the ass. Don't talk back to the bully in case he gets angry and hurts you again.

This from a people who imagine themselves to be brave, resilient, strong spirited etc.

It's called appeasement, and it just doesn't work in the long term. As we've all been told again and again recently enough.

This Just In

[asscroft]

SCO is selling a DMCA compliant license for the Red Hat Package Manager. Get yours and be legal!!!!

Call Bob!

[Detritus]

Everybody who has a friend or acquaintance named Robert should call 202-223-2400 (Robert L. Hunter IV at the Entertainment Software Association) and ask for Bob. Tell them that you grepped the phone book for your friend's name and their phone number was a hit.

In other news

[ianjk]

SCO files a infringement suit against gentoo claiming both 'Pac' and 'Man' are their intellectual property. All Unreal users must purchase a license or face prosecution under the DMCA. Licenses are availible at their website www.extortion.sco.com

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a reliable source (the back of an M&M's package), the letter 'M' is a trademark of the Mars Corporation.
The D'M'CA is in danger.

Re:Dental Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Now whar's me toothpick?

Next you'll be saying that patent examiners...

[dpbsmith]

...should "actually *look* at the material before they" issue that patent. Good heavens, that would be like the Boston Strangler to the multibillion dollar sideways swinging industry.

Actually, we have....

[LittleGuy]

"Has anyone else ran into this with good (or even bad) outcomes?"

Here's one example from earlier this month:

RIAA's scare tactics bound to backfire

We already saw this happen earlier this year, when the RIAA was forced to apologize to a Pennsylvania State University professor for sending him and dozens of other people legal warning saying that they were violating federal copyright law. The RIAA's automated program apparently confused two separate pieces of information--a legal MP3 file and a directory named "usher"--and concluded there was an illegal copy of a song by the musician Usher.

Also, from the /. Interview withMichael O'Leary, Deputy Chief for Intellectual Property at the DoJ:

9) "... under penalty of perjury ..." - by OWJones
In copyright law, 17 USC Section 512(c)(3)(vi) states that all notifications of copyright violations sent to ISPs must contain

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(emphasis mine).
Do you know of any cases in which the sender of an invalid takedown notice -- such as the RIAA claiming Penn State University Emeritus Professor Peter Usher's lecture on radio-selected quasars was, in fact, an mp3 from the musician Usher -- has been successfully charged with perjury? Or do you allow copyright holders some "fudge factor" with the perjury aspect, since

1. It was an mp3.
2. It did have the name of an RIAA-represented artist in the title, and
3. It was at a university.
If copyright holders are allowed leeway, can we expect to see similarly loose definitions of perjury creep into the legal system? If the police are looking for a "Caucasian male, age 50-60, bald, 200-225 pounds," can I testify in a court of law that the 18 year-old caucasian male with a ponytail, weighing 140-150 pounds, is in fact the suspect since he is, after all, a caucasian male?
I realize that's more than one question and that they're slightly loaded, but I'd appreciate any comments on how seriously the DoJ takes the perjury clause of the takedown notices.

O'Leary:
Your question raises an important point. We feel strongly that everyone should comply with the requirements of all laws. Legal process under the DMCA or any other provision of law should be undertaken with the utmost care and good faith. Failure to do so undermines the credibility and effectiveness of our legal system.

Having said that, it appears your interpretation of the language in 512 (c)(3)(vi) is in error. The phrase "under penalty of perjury," applies to the representation that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. It does not apply to the accuracy of the information about the alleged infringement. Quoting federal district Judge Bates in Verizon v. RIAA, The DMCA also requires a person seeking a subpoena to state, under penalty of perjury, that he is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner, 257 F. Supp.2d 244, at 262. In other words, the perjury clause may be violated if you seek a DMCA subpoena without the authorization of the copyright owner.

We are unaware of any prosecutions for violating this provision of the DMCA at this time.

Better yet

[Skapare]

Better yet, make sure these downloadable files (which should mostly have .zip extensions and be in PKZIP format, which the bots probably focus on) contain stuff that tells people that "downloading/sharing copyrighted material is wrong". Then if someone acuses you of poisoning their bots, you can counter "but, I'm one of the good guys who is trying to get the downloaders to stop stealing".

Re:Better yet

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

Heh heh, that's perfect.

Then you could even name the file dont-download-pacman.zip and get away with it!

The BSA

[Cyno]

did the same thing in Europe, accusing some Linux distrobution of pirating Micrsoft Office, because it had office in the name somewhere. They even stated in their letter that Microsoft was aware of the piracy had authority over the software in question. The letter even stately quick clearly the name of the file was some openoffice rpm, but that didn't stop it from being sent.

They don't read these legal letters and I think we should be able to sue them for fraudulent claims of copyright ownership. They are clearly abusing their power and should be punished, very harshly, IMO.

I haven't heard of this idea before

[cmburns69]

The following is definately not a fully thought-out idea, but maybe you guys can help me refine it.. Can't any of us send similar DMCA notices back at them? Can't we make a similar robot program that tracks through the various MPAA/RIA/etc sites looking for possible name violations?

My understanding was that it doesn't cost anything to send a DMCA warning letter (IANAL), but it might be enough annoyance for them to reply to each request that they'd stop using their automated programs...

Just maybe..

Clarification

[powerlord]

Actually, from what I understand, the "under penalty of purjory" bit in the DMCA is that the lawyers submitting the notice are swearing that they are authorized by the Copyright holder to be doing it, NOT that they are swearing a given complaint is correct.

Personally I think the law should be changed to the later so we can prosecute these bone-heads as apropriate for using scripted code without real checks as to what they found.

Penn State Astronomy, the House of Usher

[mph]

Yes, things like this have happened before. A few weeks ago, it was widely reported that the RIAA complained to the Penn State astronomy department about what they thought were mp3's of young, black R&B star Usher.

In fact, they were mp3's of original a capella music about astronomy. On the same web page, there were references to Prof. Emeritus Peter Usher, an elderly, white, generally unhip astronomer whose recent contributions to the field include an analysis of the astronomical context of Hamlet .

The good folks of the department were kind enough to issue widely-distributed press releases mocking the RIAA, who later apologized for the error.

Libel?

[macemoneta]

If they didn't even have a person verify (and they obviously didn't), isn't this libelous? They are indicating that an individual or group are involved in illegal activity. This is obviously "A malicious publication expressed either in print or in writing, or by pictures, effigies, or other signs, tending to expose another to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule."

Oh well...

[te amo]

I guess I'll have to find a new name for my latest project: BritneySpearsAVIMP3WarezSuperMarioBrosWindowsXPEpi sodeIII. (It turns Caps Lock on when you sneeze)

Re:Oh well...

[DChristensen]

I guess I'll have to find a new name for my latest project: BritneySpearsAVIMP3WarezSuperMarioBrosWindowsXPEpi sodeIII. (It turns Caps Lock on when you sneeze)

Aha! I knew you were trying to violate FSF's copyright! I'm siccing RMS on you!

OMFG! Panic!

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I'm just wondering if any other dist mirrors have received any threats similar to this.

I read the letter and didn't see any threat. It said, to paraphrase, "we believe file x to be infringing. Please remove it or contact us." Geez, the tone of the letter isn't even threatening.

But hey, that's ok, let's get mad at the agency trying to enforce copyrights for the artists that make the software instead of the people illegally distributing the software, thus making such checks necessary.

Small World

[fo0bar]

I check Slashdot today and see my name in a linked article. (I am Ryan, the person who posted to the gentoo mirrors list.)

As I mentioned in the list post, yes, this is silly and amusing, but it still has to be treated seriously. I met with our company lawyer yesterday (who is pretty well-versed in the DMCA, and hence has slightly less than glowing praise about it). The basic response of course is to reply, explaining that they are in error and to consider the matter closed.

While I would like nothing better than to go after these people for gross abuse of the legal system, my company, like many other companies, cannot justify the costs associated with going to court over something like this. This is why you should donate to an organization like the EFF, and tell them you are concerned about the DMCA and its effects.

(Standard IANAL disclaimer for the following:) Also, check out this form if you are a mirror provider. It deals specifically with the DMCA, but does not necessarily provide protection against, but it may help. It is intended for transit providers/datacenters (which we are), but from reading its defintion of a "service provider", mirror sites MAY (again, IANAL) qualify in the same respect.

Re:Small World

[pe1chl]

>While I would like nothing better than to go after these people for gross abuse of the legal system, my company, like many other companies, cannot justify the costs associated with going to court over something like this.

What? I assume that if you go to court, you win.
And then you can ask for compensation of your costs for doing so.
Would that not be granted in your country?

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't support a man who has destroyed my freedom. He constantly increases the freedoms that fake entities (corporations) have every passing day and takes away from someone like me who just wants to live life free from oppression or involvement in the capitalist system.

He forces people into religion by encouraging "faith based" intiatives. Just because I might not believe in your favorite imaginary god doesn't mean that I am not entitle d to have a good life.

He has put people into further financial bondage by giving "tax cuts". When someone like me who only makes $24,000 a year will see no benefit. On the other hand folks that make upwards of $100,000 + will benefit greatly. Unfair. Tax cuts are supposed to make life easier for the poor and harder on the rich.

It is no longer possible to speak out against the president in a large venue (televsion for instance) without either having your job taken away from you, your reputation ruined or perhaps even being hauled off to a tribunal for being a "terrorist". Remember when Dana Carvey could get away with making fun of George Bush Sr? How come we don't see that kind of thing anymore? Not everyone loves Bush no matter what you fucking freepers might think.

George W. Bush is not about freedom. He is about opression with a smile. His administration plays nice while they do evil at every turn. His administration encourages stupidity instead of intelligence. It's good to be dumb these days. Just look at all the flag waving morons on the roads.

This is a big fuck you to George W. Bush and the Bush administration. May they rot in hell.

This is so silly...

[mbourgon]

everyone knows that the Pac Man rom is called puckman. http://www.mame.dk/gameinfo/puckman/

Oops...

Cease and Desist to the extreme

[Punk Walrus]

Many years ago at a well-known ISP, we had a pretty funny and cool guy who worked with us who had the e-mail godzilla@[our_ISPcompany_email.com]. He got a cease and desist order in 1998 from Toho Co., Ltd, stating Godzilla was a copyright of Toho Co., Ltd, and that if he did not give up his e-mail account name, Toho Co., Ltd would sue him and our company for international copyright infringment of Toho Co., Ltd. Then they wanted to take over the e-mail account for the upcoming Godzilla 2000 movie.

This letter was hysterical because apart from being in slightly broken English, it mentioned the name "Toho Co., Ltd" about every sentence, and was full of self-praise about how great and honorable Toho Co., Ltd was.

At first, he ignored it. Then the company came down on him because they got a letter from Toho Co., Ltd's lawyers. There was some debate, and the company decided that it wasn't worth their time to try and deal with this, so they dropped the issue.

The coworker *was* a Godzilla fan, so he wrote back to Toho Co., Ltd that "Godzilla" was not a trademark, but "Gojirra," the proper kanakata spelling was a trademark, and he did not have an account with that name, nor did he have the ability to open an account with that name unless they paid or company for the e-mail address.

They never replied. He had the letter posted on his door for a while, with a photoshop of Godzilla attacking our building. Then Godzilla 2000 ("Ferris Beuller vs. Godzilla") came out, and I think Toho Co., Ltd probably never wanted to deal with Americans again.

__________________________________________________ _
www.punkwalrus.com - As seen on "The Gong Show"

Re:Cease and Desist to the extreme

[noldrin]

Ferris Beuller vs. Godzilla was the Sony Godzilla movie.

Toho Co's Godzilla 2000 did not include Ferris Beuller.

This is the opposite problem

[billstewart]

If you're trying to share files anonymously or surreptitiously, either for privacy reasons or because you're intentionally posting Metallica songs for download, then networks like Freenet are obviously the kind of thing you want.

This is different - this is sharing perfectly legal material using normal web hosting and having some lawyer-bot threaten you because they aren't having an intelligent human look at the threat and only send out letters for real matches, not bad regexp hits.

privacy act signed by bill clinton

[cyberwave]

Didn't Bill Clinton sign an internet privacy act in 1995 that allows people to say before people connect "if you are government, get out" and therefor make any information obtained without explicit permission to access the server invalid?

Morally corrupt attitude

[JCCyC]

There's no limit to the collateral damage some people are willing to cause in order to get compensation for a percieved offense against oneself. The value of ME is infinite; the value of ANYTHING ELSE is zero. If someone steals $10 from me and the only way to get it back is spray Ebola over downtown Budapest, then by golly I will spray Ebola over downtown Budapest!

Re:Morally corrupt attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Best description of US foreign policy I have ever seen. Mod parent up.

is to have links that work

[dstutz]

Proper link for above... http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~benjamin-chapman/c le/dmca_summary.htm

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[Razor Blades are Not]

Lets assume you're not trolling,
When you run a red light, there is direct evidence that you have done so.
Even after that, you then have the opportunity to go to court and fight that evidence, either with mitigating circumstances (the truck barrelling down on you from behind that pushed you into the intersection) or conflicting evidence (your car was being driven by a different person, because it was stolen or simply because you lent it to your fiance).

So while the evidence is gathered by camera and processed by computer, the decision is still in the hands of a human.

In this case, the DMCA allows a company to order you to Cease and Desist, and moreover, require your ISP to shut you down, without a human review. The only humans involved are the victims (you) and the ISP, who probably won't make trouble for themselves by resisting the C&D.

The Computer is Your Friend!
Trust the Computer.

OpenOffice.org

[gral]

We had the same thing happen to us. One of our mirrors recieved a nasty gram about the OpenOffice file that was on their system. A little bit of digging found that their script was assuming ANYTHING with OFFICE in the name was a pirate copy of MS Office. It was rather entertaining.

beatallica.org...

[sczimme]

offers mp3 files of their own songs, described on their site as "Beatles tunes, done Metallica style".

The interesting piece is that some of the filenames have names that could be confusing to the bots/droids/goons at RIAA - e.g. letitbe.mp3. Hmmm.

PS I heard about Beatallica right here on dear ol' /. a month or so ago. Their songs are pretty funny and very well done.

One Phrase - Minority Report

[Anonymous Coward]

The RIAA MP3cogs along with MP(3)Precrimes have determined sometime in the future that you or one of your descendants have a 99.99% probability of having an infringing file somewhere within a physical access distance. If you do not settle or grab your ankles now enforces will be sent for your arrest. . . .AlL yOur BaS3 Ar3 Be10nG 2 u5

I don't know...

[lone_marauder]

INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip

Gosh. The letters in question are indeed there, and completely identical to the work in question. I mean, I guess we could change the filename and preserve the integrity of the work as free software, but what about the installed base using the old name?

I'm afraid they may have something there. I only hope they offer a sweet licensing deal so I can diligently steer clear of any future IP troubles. I wouldn't want anyone thinking I'm a software pirate.

Got a few of these, told them to go to hell.

[jarboy]

I am an admin at Speakeasy, Inc. We got a few of these since they found 'packman' on our rpmfind mirror (speakeasy.rpmfind.net)

It was most enjoyable to write them a rude reply. All those things that you usually afraid to say, I just let it fly. Morons!

Re:Got a few of these, told them to go to hell.

[vegetablespork]

As a Speakeasy customer, please allow me to tell you that you are the wind beneath my wings.

Re:Got a few of these, told them to go to hell.

[ender-]

"As a Speakeasy customer, please allow me to tell you that you are the wind beneath my wings."

As another Speakeasy Customer, let me second this motion! You guys rock! :)

stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

I had somthing similar happen, except it was my ISP that just reacted with no thought.
We were paying for a domain to be hosted by www.win-hosting.com and one day they cut off our paid for service; email, webservers, everything and with no notice or even an email after they had done it.
After a day or two of trying to find out what was wrong we found out they became suspcious after I placed a large amount of data on one of their servers. It was an encrypted 400mb set of rars, inside was a disk image of work which was to be burnt by a college in a differnt country. It was in a non public folder, encrypted and called image.rar
The reason they shut us off was it looked like warez. It LOOKED like something that maybe illegal!! No notice of termination was given and no reason. It took 2 weeks to get email working again which is a looooooong time for anyone who needs their email. And another week after that to get our site backup. Needless to say we moved hosts 2 weeks later.
the world seems full of stupidity

Re:SUPPOSEDLY

[fussman]

how are you going to add "-our" to that and start a flamewar on a linux mailing list?

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[EvanED]

You example is a good one because the pictuers are almost always reviewed by a human before letters are sent out.

We have a mystic in the house!

[siskbc]

What are the factors that decide if a file is really in violation of the DMCA? I can see lots of lameness coming from this type of system.

Need a crystal ball for that insight, did we?

but what if...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if it was really a PacMan ROM? Are we really sure that Gentoo isn't a conspiracy to deprive the developers of PacMan out of $$?

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[CoyoteGuy]

Quote:

You example is a good one because the pictuers are almost always reviewed by a human before letters are sent out.

I would hate to be one out of the "almost always" barrel, wouldn't you?

CHARGE FOR COSTS!!!

[swordgeek]

Come on folks, a few people have mentioned it already.

EVERY time that someone gets a completely frivolous complaint like this, they should:

1) research it (proving it's stupidity)
2) Bill for it, at consultant rates. Say $250/hr, 2hr minimum. Make sure you send a formal invoice, (explanation of services done, rates, etc.) and include a payment due date.
3) If they don't pay by that date, then either (a) call a collection agency, or (b) sue.

Doing a little bit of extra work now will hurt them enough to make them stop.

Re:CHARGE FOR COSTS!!!

[Jaysyn]

An ISP could setup a pretty lucritive source of cash like this if they set it up right.

Jaysyn

Re:CHARGE FOR COSTS!!!

[DeepRedux]

This notice was sent to their ISP (ATT WorldNet) because ATT WorldNet registered with the government to receive such notices. There is no requirement that an ISP register. Even after they register, an ISP can ignore these DMCA notices. The only penalty is that the ISP would lose the Safe harbor rights granted them under the DMCA.

Of course, few ISP would want to give up their DMCA rights. Even Slashdot has paid their fee and registered to accept notifications, so as to preserve their DMCA rights.

Re:CHARGE FOR COSTS!!!

[NeuroManson]

Don't forget charging for a forensics fee, for searching each HD and partition on your system (which, if you're looking for any/all zip files, can take up to an hour with any substantial disk space). Charge them what an IT and what a PC forensics expert would charge for that.

Also, charge them for the network usage that they used to dig up the alleged offending file.

Even if it's $1 here, $1 there, everything adds up. Charge them for the Mountain Dew/Coffee/pizza/ETC, consumed while doing the research.

The more they're forced to pay, the less likely they'll be willing to carry out such intimidation tactics in the future.

Are the files in question downloaded?

[JiffyPop]

It would seem that the robot doing the searching would also want to download a copy of the "offending work" for evidence/verification. (Although they pretty obviously are skipping the verification step...) If this is true, then create links to a bunch of fake files in a directory named along the lines of "my_prirated_files". Then have the web server automatically redirect all 404s from that directory to a script that pipes from /dev/random indefinitely.

While this won't be very useful for those that pay for bandwidth, university students could have some fun with this

Funny funny.

[Upright Joe]

I wish I would get one of these. I think everybody should pick their favorite arcade game, zip up some random binary data, name the zip file after their favorite game, then put it up on their website with a hidden link such as a 1 pixel transparent gif or such.

Can the recip sue them for electronic harassment?

[Anonymous Custard]

Can the recipient sue them for electronic harassment? They've obviously set up a computer program to search FTP servers and harass people automatically. I thought you needed to have some valid proof before you officially threaten legal action with a letter from a lawyer.

If someone names a file ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQSTUVWXYZ.exe, then can any company complain that you're storing their IP in that file, simply because it contains some letters that can be arranged to spell out their copyrihted term? Is there even a copyright on PacMan.exe?

Also notice

[akaina]

... in the name INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip is the word FULL. Now although this name was filtered with an expression like /pac.*man/i ,I would venture to say it failed because the Bayesian filter saw the word "FULL" and noticed it is a common term used when pirating full versions of software. When using Bayesian filters scenarios like this are thankfuly the exception and not the rule.

Re:OMFG! Panic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Siskel: Ebert, I find this troll pretty weak.

Ebert: Yeah, and he has a 600000+ user ID. As if we didn't see that coming.

TWO THUMBS DOWN

~~~

robots.txt

[AwesomeJT]

User-agent: DMCAbot
Disallow: *

Of course, they'll probably sue for use of DMCAbot in my robots.txt file and sharing it with the Slashdot community.

Too bad there's not a:
User-Agent: DMCAbot
Action: kill -s 9
in the robots.txt spec., could be helpful.

point:

[HyperColor Underware]

Godzilla 2000 is in fact a traditional Godzilla Movie - Gojira ni-sen mireniamu. Godzilla without any numbers is, in fact, the Ferris Beuller vs. Godzilla movie. It was made in 1998.

Easily enough dealt with...Litigation is Spam!

[jordandeamattson]

This one is easily enough dealt with by a slight amendment to the DCMA.

What we have to due, is to introduce a requirement that any "violation notices" be based on a reasonable belief that IP is being infringed and then make the complaining party responsible for any legal expenses on the part of the accused party for an unreasonable violation notice.

It would be a bit like the British, loser pays system, that forces a party realy consider the strength of their case prior to bringing it or defending it at all costs. It helps prevent the kind of "litigation extorition" that we see all the times in the states.

A great example of "litigation extorition" happened to me and my wife shortly after we got married. We decided to install a gas stove (you need that for good Chinese cooking) and needed a gas line to do so. To install the gas line we needed access to the easement inside our neighbors yard (zero lot line). We requested it in writing heard nothing. Assuming that silence implies consent - an old Common Law Legal concept - we went forward with accessing the easement. The day of the installation in the evening a police officer shows up on our doorstep, after getting my wife's version of events he stated, "there is nothing here!" A week later we got a letter from an attorney from our neighbor asking for $1,000 or the name of our insurance company to "resolve this matter".

Well, my wife is a supervising paralegal and I am someone who has read a lot of law. We knew a shake down when we say it. So, we put together a little package (12 exhibits in total) informing them that we were willing to drop this matter at this point, but if they pursued it further that we would be counter-suing. We also dropped a line on the State Bar Association Office of Professional Conduct about this attorney. A few days later we got a note that the attorney in question was no longer representing this client and to forward any and all communications to our neighbor (a breach of Legal ethics, which we sent onto the Office of Professional Conduct).

The bottom line, needless litigation is like Spam: if we increase the cost just a little, it will dramatically reduce it. The problem is that in the US Legal system is doesn't (if you are in the right financial situation) cost you anything but your time and energy to force people to spend money responding to you. If we make people pay some of the cost of litigation.

Re:Easily enough dealt with...Litigation is Spam!

[paiute]

To install the gas line we needed access to the easement inside our neighbors yard (zero lot line). We requested it in writing heard nothing.

You know, maybe if you had gone over and rang the doorbell and explained what you wanted, you could have saved all this effort. Instead, you come off looking like the sue-happy scum lawyers that you are deriding.

Re:Easily enough dealt with...Litigation is Spam!

[pe1chl]

This sounds like good advice to ESA as well.

Re:Easily enough dealt with...Litigation is Spam!

[jordandeamattson]

Actually, we tried that. We went over a 1/2 dozen times (in the morning and early evening) to no avail prior to giving them something in writing. And the note we gave them was handwritten with a nice ps inviting them to join us for a nice Chinese dinner after things were completed. We tried to be highly civil and interact with them. They are the folks that called the police and tried to cite us with trespassing (at which the police officer essentially laughed at). They were the folks that didn't respond to our attempt to follow-up on the call to the police and then dropped an extoration letter in our lap.

Re:Easily enough dealt with...Litigation is Spam!

[jordandeamattson]

Another note, in case you don't know, an easement means that we and they both have legal access to the property at any time for any reason (that is how zero-lot lines work in California). Letting them know what we were doing was a courtesy.

What is interesting to me, is that the attorney should have known this and should have advised them that they didn't have a leg to stand upon. What they wanted us to do, was give them the name of our insurance company, with the hope that the insurance company would settle rather than go for the cost of litigation. I bet you that they carefully calculated the amount ($1,500) to find a saddle-point on settlement vs. litigation.

Of course, they didn't count on us increasing the cost of their "spam". The second we did, they backed down. The lesson here, for both litigation and spam control, is to increase the cost of asocial behavior. The courts and the Internet are a commons. The costs of abusing them are borne by all of us, with those doing the abusing getting a free ride.

Re:Easily enough dealt with...Litigation is Spam!

[paiute]

Actually, we tried that. We went over a 1/2 dozen times (in the morning and early evening) to no avail prior to giving them something in writing.
And the note we gave them was handwritten with a nice ps inviting them to join us for a nice Chinese dinner after things were completed. We tried to be highly civil and interact with them. They are the folks that called the police and tried to cite us with trespassing (at which the police officer essentially laughed at). They were the folks that didn't respond to our attempt to follow-up on the call to the police and then dropped an extoration letter in our lap.

In that case, I apologize. You did more than was necessary to access the easement. I hope you still try to patch things up, though. It's not nice or easy to live next to people like that if they are giving you the evil eye every time you are in the yard.

My Response

[spiritraveller]

I had some free time, so I wrote Mr. Hunter a letter regarding this matter.

The subject I used was "Re: Notice of Claimed Infringement"

I designed it to look like a legitimate response to one of these notices. If they receive enough of these protest letters, Mr. Hunter and others at ESA will get a taste of their own medicine

The text follows:

Dear Mr. Hunter,

I have read your notice of claimed infringement.

In your letter, you state "ESA hereby requests AT&T Worldnet Service to immediately remove or disable access to the Infringing Material at the URL address identified above."

The negligence of others is a foreseeable consequence in tort law. Should AT&T have granted your request, you might have been liable for any damages caused by that immediate removal of what you claim to be infringing material.

The file named "INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip" obviously has nothing to do with Pac Man.

You would do well to review the threatening letters that you send out, rather than cavalierly trampling on the rights of others.

Regards,
INSERT-NAME-HERE
concerned citizen

Re:My Response

[goldfndr]

Did you CC the relevant Attorneys General? IANAL, but I thought that that was what one normally did under such circumstances.

Junior For Govey-Poo!

[jefu]

So, why not write a quick script that cuts the files up into small chunks with some code to reassemble them when all the chunks are there. (I'd be seriously tempted to write the reassembly code in something fun - say intercal, or some nice language that only runs on one system...) Then mail all the chunks to them with a brief explanation on how they should reassemble them and verify that they're not Arnie.

Better still, get the email for their legal counsel and send them there.

Re:Junior For Govey-Poo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Write a script??? Isn't this what 'split' and 'cat' are for?

A Match by a BOT does NOT QUALIFY as "Good Faith".

[linuxtelephony]

If a human reviewed the file and genuinely thought it was infringing, THEN it would be good-faith. An automated tool that is allowed to generate a list that someone uses to mail "infringement" letters WITHOUT EVER REVIEWING THE FILES IN QUESTION qualifies as IRRESPONSIBLE, and harrassing. Are there provisions in the DMCA to sue for such irresponsible accusations? At the very least, submit an invoice for the cost of dealing with a BAD-FAITH accusation.

Someone should contact the ESA and tell them actions taken like this only serve to make people LESS likely to believe or even care about accusations of infringement since no effort appears to be made for accuracy.

Minority Report

[bmalia]

The movie Minority Report is all about that delima, except it predicts future crimes. By convicting people of crimes before they are committed you can drop the crime rate to 0%.

Police Officer: You're under arrest for murder you havn't commited yet, but our machine says you were going to do it in about 3 hours!
You: "WTF? Did it also predict I was gonna do this?"
**You kick the Police Officer in the NUTZ**
**Police Officer laughs**
Police Officer:Yes! Thats why I wore a cup!

Slow Down DMCAbot!

[isa-kuruption]

Everyone who runs a box on a cable modem or on a network should consider getting the LaBrea tarpit. For those who don't know, this software is used to slow down worm activity, however it can be used to hang DMCAbot as well.

Have this listen to port 21 on your networks and watch DMCAbot hang indefinately (your mileage may very).

Also, just to cause lots of fun, try doing the following: dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=142 | gzip -c > (MSOffice|PacMan|Zelda|Matrix|.gz) and let DMCAbot spam ISPs with worthless crap until they add an SMTP deny rule.

Anyway, just some ideas. :)

Re:Slow Down DMCAbot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, if enough people generate PacMan.gz with /dev/urandom, do you think at some point we will actually end up with a proper gzip file of PacMan?

Re:Slow Down DMCAbot!

[micq]

It would take a million boxen a million years to rewrite pac-man...

suggestion

[pigscanfly.ca]

Note : IANAL
What about some people send DMCA violation notices to the RIAA saying that you beleive that based on the high volume of encrypted (ASCII encrypted :-) data traffic on there site they are dissementing packe XYZ to witch you represent the copyright . You then get there site pulled (or there connection pulled) and they get to see just how fun it is to be on the receiving end.

This suggests...

[hak hak]

... a more systematic approach.

What if there were more open-source packages that seemingly contain commercial material, so that they give up trying to keep track of these DMCA violations? Same principle as with an Emacs package (I believe it's called spooky) that inserts words like terrorist', 'bomb', and 'secret' in e-mail headers to 'slashdot' a reported NSA server checking all e-mails for illegal activities.

Re:This suggests...

[hiaips]

Law forbids the NSA from monitoring activities of US citizens or US corporations. In other words, this "reported NSA server" of which you speak does not exist.

Re:This suggests...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't actually believe the NSA pays attention to
the law, do you ?

What's next, believing that the candidate with the most votes wins ?

Re:This suggests...

[hplasm]

You don't believe that the NSA exists...surely..?

Re:This suggests...

[vegetablespork]

You're right! That's why GCHQ monitors the U.S., and NSA monitors the Brits, and they trade intelligence, making the state of affairs the same as if each were allowed to monitor without limitation in its own country. q.v. Echelon.

Serves you right

[Anonymous Coward]

Your game also begins with "t" and ends in "ux".

That's gotta be a GPL/trademark/copyright violation, or something.

Sue the Bastiges

[gbulmash]

Forget criminal prosecution. Sue them.

IANAL (although I did score 163 on the LSAT's and turned down a partial scholarship to law school), but this appears to me to be a case of Defamation, Tortious Interference, and Abuse of Process.

Note they claim a good faith belief. Based on what? It's based on insufficient investigation to found a "good faith belief", and is therefore negligent. Their reckless act has caused you, among other ills: personal distress, time lost in correcting the matter, and harm to your reputation.

You should definitely consult a lawyer about your rights to sue this law firm for their reckless and defamatory acts against you!

- Greg

Re:Sue the Bastiges

[Anonymous Coward]

YANAL

Scoring a 163 on the LSAT, getting accepted to a law school does not a lawyer make.

Re:Sue the Bastiges

[gbulmash]

< YANAL >

And this is why I suggested he consult a lawyer. My mention of my "credentials" (so to speak) was just a way of pointing out that I'm forming my opinion from an interest in the law (as opposed to watching "Judging Amy" religiously).

It doesn't make it a "legal opinion", but it may be a bit more educated than some others.

As for him letting it go (respond that it's not Pac Man and then otherwise ignore it). That is the easiest way to deal with this occurrence. The easiest way to deal with spam used to be to delete it.

Do you see the flow of spam decreasing?

So long as everyone lets these lawyers play it fast and loose, without fear of consequences, why should they ever exert the effort to ensure their claims have even a semblance of merit? They can just scattershot the net, being right 1 in 50 times, because just like spam, the expense of dealing with their 49 false claims falls upon the recipients.

These kinds of DMCA letters are getting more frequent, rather than less. So are the subpoenas. If you want to gradually get more and more of these, based on flimsier and flimsier evidence, go ahead and take the path of least resistance.

Otherwise, I believe that every time they're wrong, and they've brought their accusations to a third party (i.e. your ISP), they should be sued for defamation and any other charge you can throw in.

The best way to combat spam is to make it expensive for the spammers to send it.

- Greg

Re:OMFG! Panic!

[flibuste]

Please remove it or contact us

or said differently

"We the RIAA take advantage of the DMCA to notify you that you maybe infringing copyrights, and you will likely get sued for this. Please remove this or contact us

This is NOT threatening???

The letter says "either you delete your file, or you grab the phone"

So what do you consider NOT threatening?

** You are asked to delete your files or get sued

OR

** You are asked to call RIAA or get sued

What if I have no intention to grab the phone and delete my files? I have to live under the threat of being sued.

Let's face it - the whole thing is abnoxious, can scare the unwary people, and against any form of democracy. Something has to be done.

Anyone asked Namco?

[Canis]

Look, this is Pac-Man... for many of us, the emblem of our spiritual heritage... has anyone contacted Namco and asked them what they think? After all, they own Pac-Man, but didn't send the letter -- this "Entertainment Software Association" did. How do Namco feel about this American organisation generating bad-will amongst their core market? It's no use us complaining to ESA about their abysmal behaviour, but if Namco were to exert pressure downwards from the top, maybe we could at least get them to insert a human between webspider and spambot. I doubt they want to alienate us...

pot or no pot

[panxerox]

Real Spears song or just a text file named for a spears song it will still get you sued. The RIAA would lose but that's not the point is it?

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[YrWrstNtmr]

What's next, automatic indictment by computer? "Sorry sir, the computer has ascertained that there is a 94% probability that you murdered your wife. The trial begins Wednesday."

What's next is automatic conviction.

"Sorry sir. The computer has decided, based up certain file names found on your webserver, that you are guilty as charged. Please report to the Processing Center immediately."

Has anyone else ran into...

[Anonymous Coward]

bad grammar?

not perjury

[7-Vodka]

For those who missread, they attested under punishment of perjury that they represented said game publishers, not that the information in the entire letter was correct.

SOLUTION!

[cyberwave]

Code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 means that if a sysop states that certain users must leave (i.e. MPAA, government, law enforcement), those users can NOT threaten the sysop's ISP or any person(s) or company, cannot prosecute any person(s) affiliated with the sysop which includes family, friends or individuals who run or enter this web site or else face procsecution by the U.S. legal team to the fullest extent possible under law.

Re:SOLUTION!

[cyberwave]

So basically it needs to be in the motd (not limited to web sites) And I am now aware that I spelled "prosecution" incorrectly. I probably did it again didn't I. Damn.

You can't prove a negative...

[TWX]

"...it would be pretty hard to prove it wasn't there."

and that's the problem with the DMCA and other laws like this. With a complex situation or structure you can't prove a negative. This is one of the fundamentals of science, in terms of hyoptheses becoming theories. If there is no way to test a hypothesis in such a way as to get a confirmed pass/fail test, then it's not a very good theory.

As for the 'encoding', read "Radio Free Ablemuth" by Philip K. Dick. It specifically addressed this kind of freakishness with coded messages. Or go see "A Beautiful Mind". Another example of why it's not feasible to go around accusing someone who can't prove a negative result. I feel that it should be criminal to accuse someone without having a verifiable positive first showing that they've actually done something wrong. Yeah, this puts the burden of proof on the accuser. Isn't that what the constitution says, with "Innocent until proven guilty"?

Not to give the media conglomerates any more work or anything...

Re:You can't prove a negative...

[Blue Stone]

Well, there is something that stops people being able to go around making rash accusations about people, they're called the libel and slander laws.

I have no idea if they could be applied in such DMCA takedown notices, however.

Re:You can't prove a negative...

[Suidae]

you can't prove a negative. This is one of the fundamentals of science

Isn't that more of an epistemological fundamental?

(I don't care really, I just like to say 'epistemological' )

Re:You can't prove a negative...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...it would be pretty hard to prove it wasn't there."

and that's the problem with the DMCA and other laws like this. With a complex situation or structure you can't prove a negative. This is one of the fundamentals of science, in terms of hyoptheses becoming theories. If there is no way to test a hypothesis in such a way as to get a confirmed pass/fail test, then it's not a very good theory.

This is a confusion. The reason that you can't prove the file wasn't there is a technical reason, not a logical one. If the file has previously been deleted and is now overwritten, then it is physically impossible reliably (e.g., to the standards of legal proof) to establish that it had been on there - the magnetic fields are destroyed, or whatever.

Logically, you can prove a negative "The file X is not on the hard drive": for every file on the hard drive, prove that it is not X, and it follows that the file is not on the hard drive. People who say "You can't prove a negative" I find often are not clear about what that is supposed to mean.

Re:You can't prove a negative...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what the constitution says, with "Innocent until proven guilty"?

Those words are not in the constitution. However the constitution implies this in the Bill of Rights.

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[El]

As I understand, there IS a human component; usually a temporary employee who clicks "Ok" for every hit the automated system kicks out. Then if someone complains, they fire the temporary employee and have plausible deniability.

Napster gets shutdown...

[Safrax]

...because it cant filter out certain songs with a 100% success rate. Shouldn't this apply to the DMCA in reverse? It would stop so much of this automated crap that's never effective...

Re:Napster gets shutdown...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, DOWN WITH HTTP!

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[payne]

Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend. :-)

That's how they do it, you know...

[poptones]

Look at the RIAA. What do they do to shut down campuses? They flood them with DMCA violations and make them spend thousands running around looking beneath every little rock. Then they come in with "but send us thius much money and we'll give you a "license" to share our low quality versions of this stuff and we'll leave you alone..."

I hate to be a karma whore, but this idea really does need some widespread exploitation. The more files there are for them to bitch about the more it's going to piss off ISPs and the sooner we can get some of this nonsense lobbied away.

hey, i sent that letter

[Heisenbug]

Well, OK, not really. But that was my assumption when I saw the article -- that some anti-DMCA hacker was trying to draw attention to the silliness of it all. I mean, Pac Man? Come on ...

So I've seen suggestions on this board that we make honeypots to draw the bots into a world of false positives. Let's do them one better -- let's make our own bots to send cease and desist letters at random, and really discredit the whole concept. Send a letter for every file that contains the word 'Men' or 'Day' or 'Part 2'. Lots of copyrighted material with names like that ...

Pac-Man Piracy? The yellow guy with an eye patch!

[DoorFrame]

Is there a lot of Pac-Man piracy going on that I'm unaware of? Isn't the game like twenty years old at this point?

Maybe they're talking about the horrible Saturday morning cartoon... maybe someone's taken the time to digitize that and put it online.

(I really just like the idea of Pac-Man piracy... Yellow face, circular, eye-patch! What can go wrong?)

Human Justice for Human Beings!

[Jerf]

Support Human Justice for Human Beings!

'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[TWX]

Something to remember about systems is that they have limitations. Something can only store or process so much information at any given point. If people determine the functional bounds of the system, they know how to break it or render it less useful.

Case in point: the idea of a national database on everyone alive

If one, hypothetically, saw the creation of a national database on people, it wouldn't be hard to 'fake' information on a decent scale that is patently false information. It would require some creativity, but it could probably be done in a way that isn't even illegal. It's called fiction. Create stories with names in them, create stories with numbers in them. Make up numbers. We all know that social security numbers are XXX-XX-XXXX format, so it wouldn't be hard to say that "Ol' Jim Houston" has 234-11-5532 for a social security number. So, the national database spidering software might pick up that number and note that the true owner of that number has an alias of "Ol' Jim Houston". Write a story about this character where he uses his 'number', so it comes up. Movies do it all of the time, if you've ever seen "FX", they used SSNs in determining information about bad guys. Create "likes" pages. Say someone likes guns, or rabbits, or construction, or water parks, or anything. Email it around. If there's something out there that we don't like, it'll collect the information. Email "bad" words around without context, in such a way that they trip Carnivore or similar systems but do such in a way to make it obvious that they're complete and utter bullshit.

Make the system have so much information to process, categorize, and store that it either has to ignore information entirely or that it fails in the middle of doing its job. Or, make it so that if it manages to process everything that it gets that it stores so much bad information that the 'record' for any given individual is useless. I'd love to see it store that I go dowhill skiing every Northern Hemisphere summer down in Australia, or that I frequent BDSM clubs, or that I helped design the rocket car "The Spirit of America", just so that there is no credibility to any of the information at all in the system, since nothing can be easily verified as being correct. This breaks the system at a use level.

If a million geeks decide to do this, the ability for any given system to work is very low. I'm sure that people will complain that we're endangering national security, but remember, terrorists that we've seen, Timothy McVeigh, the DC area snipers, the Abortion Clinic bombers, and the WTC/Pentagon attackers, didn't do what they did in a way that was detectable through the methods that they want to start using. They did it with a rental truck and farming fertilizer, or boxcutters, or a rifle and a sheetmetal-modified car. Does any of this revolve around computers? ANY of it?

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[WNight]

Data poisoning. It's a good way of making data useless. If you can't count on it 5% of the time, it's not good for basing important decisions off of.

I remember some people were doing this when CueCat was threatening to sue people for repurposing their barcode scanners. The idea was that CueCat would build a database of users and things that they scanned, then sell the data. The poisoners wrote perl scripts to submit thousands of fake scans, using ISBN numbers (or whatever is on a barcode) spidered from Amazon, from fake user IDs. Then let potential customers know that the data was worthless. (Seemed like good payback for threatening lawsuits against people decoding their rot13 encryption.)

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[Anonymous Coward]

Does any of this revolve around computers? ANY of it?

I believe the 9/11 hijackers used hotmail and/or yahoo accounts to coordinate. Of course, that doesn't mean having the FBI monitoring hotmail and yahoo would be at all effective.

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[AnnaBlack]

A "national" database on "everyone alive"? I'll give you a moment... Now consider how many people are alive outside the boundaries of the United States. Ever heard of a lil' place called China? Jeez...

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[TWX]

It's about five billion people. My point was that it wouldn't be practical to try to get everything on everyone alive. It wouldn't even be practical to get everything on every US citizen, every foreign national living legally or illegally in the US, and every foreign national to visit the US. But, if they attempted to build such a system, it would be worth our while to break it.

I'm VERY against the idea of Carivore. If they want to wiretap someone on my ISP, they need to get a court order to "wiretap" that individual exclusively, without touching me. They should not be allowed to collect so much as stray pings unless they're communication with the target of the electronic tapping. If they aren't accusing me of a specific crime, they should leave me alone.

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[Joey Vegetables]

terrorists that we've seen, Timothy McVeigh, the DC area snipers, the Abortion Clinic bombers

The abortion mills are today's equivalent of the Auschwitz death camps. I would have a very hard time equating their destruction with "terrorism," provided that innocent people are not harmed in the process.

And you cheapen the term "terrorist" when you use it inappropriately. McVeigh was part of a terrorist group (two actually, the U.S. Army, and a small group of conspirators most of whom were never charged). The DC snipers were terrorists by any reasonable definition. But people who try to save unborn babies from being cruelly murdered are not. You may not agree with them. But they are not terrorists.

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[rifter]

And you cheapen the term "terrorist" when you use it inappropriately. McVeigh was part of a terrorist group (two actually, the U.S. Army, and a small group of conspirators most of whom were never charged). The DC snipers were terrorists by any reasonable definition. But people who try to save unborn babies from being cruelly murdered are not. You may not agree with them. But they are not terrorists.

Yes, lets stop the babies from being cruelly murdered by cruelly murdering doctors, nurses, and innocent bystanders. Then say we are pro-life and God is on our side. Strike the fear of God into all those unwed mothers and dirty doctors... but we are not terrorists.

Right. Did you take your medication this morning?

I happen to disagree with both the ideology and methods of the abortion clinic bombers. You seem to agree with both. But the definition of a terrorist has zero to do with whether we agree with the ideology or even the methods of the terrorist. A terrorist is someone who uses violent methods to strike fear in the hearts of the populace to support their agenda. m-w.com defines terrorism as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" and dates that definition to 1795.

The abortion clinic bombers are by any definition terrorists and have admitted that terror is their chosen method. It is absolutely a proper application of the term.

Re:'Noise' as a method of civil disobedience

[LordLucless]

I'm an Aussie, not an American, and I haven't heard of any particular group called The Abortion Clinic Bombers, if any exists. But the name is fairly descriptive, and I get the idea of what they're about. I'd hazard a guess that the grandparent is in the same category; he's commenting on generalities, not specifics.

You say:
Yes, lets stop the babies from being cruelly murdered by cruelly murdering doctors, nurses, and innocent bystanders

Whereas he was in no way supporting the murder of these people: provided that innocent people are not harmed in the process.

I personally agree with the grandparent in that abortion clinics are immoral. But I don't think that destruction of property (or by killing more people) are appropriate ways of voicing disfavour. Throwing all pro-choicers into the category of hypocritical, condemning, violent zealots is just plain simplistic.

Heh heh

[blunte]

Ok, I'm the fool. I didn't know about that, and since I don't go snooping around /., I never saw those details.

OT: Analog hole

[i_am_nitrogen]

We probably have the technology now with cochlear implants and high precision DSPs/DACs to develop an all-digital ear that simply has a coaxial digital input; I bet all the audiophiles would love to find out that they can hear Beethoven's 5th symphony in all its original glory wherever they are without having to lug around their $80000/pr speakers or $1200 headphones and $800 headphone amp, when they're walking past a TV in a store window and suddenly their ears turn off because their bionic audio licensing software malfunctioned and mistook MTV for a pirate song.

Good Faith?

[RichardX]

IANALawyer, but it seems to me the whole "good faith" thing is pivotal to these cases..

Now.. this is not the first time that an obviously erroneous letter of this type has been sent out. There was the whole OpenOffice/MsOffice cockup for a start.

My point is the senders of these letters (the ESA) are obviously aware that their system fires off erroneous letters from time to time.. therefore how can they claim to know IN GOOD FAITH that any given letter sent out by their system is accurate and valid?

Perhaps I could see them claiming good faith if the percentage of bad letters was really, really small, though even that is a moot point (given that you can only have good faith if you believe in the reliability of the system), but it seems this system is getting almost as many misses as hits. Does this give us any way to contest the good faith claim, and then use that to open the door to counterclaims, etc?

Bot wanted shareware doom removed

[jasonhamilton]

They don't care about anything -- even if the very software they are protecting is WANTED by the authors/company to be given away freely. Shareware is just one example of this

Re:OMFG! Panic!

[Fly]

agency trying to enforce copyrights for the artists that make the software instead

Are you saying it's okay for them to send annoying, harrassing letters to innocent people because they're doing for the chil^H^H^H^H poor copyright holders? Hogwash. They're wasting the money of those they claim to be protecting if this is their idea of protection.

Garbage site up!

[Strenoth]

Ok, I have a DMCa bot trap set, it's primitive and basic, just .zip file names and nothing else, but I want to see if my ISP gets sent a letter for it. seehwo diligent these bots really are. it's an obscure site with nothing linking to it, so the bots will have to be searching overtime to find it. now those of you who know websites better should do somethign liek this too! your ISP gives you free webspace, use it!

What about File Names?

[UPSBrian]

...are listed and/or identified thereon by their titles, variations thereof, or depictions of associated artwork (any such game titles, copies, listings and/or other depictions of, or references to, any contents of such game product, are hereinafter referred to as "Infringing Material"...

From the paragraph above, it seems to imply that even naming your files in a way that is a variation of a copyrighted title is also forbidden. That would imply that having a file like 'FinalFantasyDiscussionArchive.zip' would be in violation of the DMCA. Am I interpreting this correctly?

My infringed files....

[scovetta]

I always name my files with the prefix 'NotPirated_' so everyone knows. It's the file-system equivalent of setting the Evil bit off. So now I just have
NotPirated_MetallicaEnterSandman.mp3
NotPir ated_SpaceQuestV.zip

I suggest you all do the same.

"Hey dude, where do you go to college?"

[kfg]

"I go to a Pac-10, man."

There. Slashdot ought to be getting their copy of the letter tomorrow.

Bad bot. Stupid bot. Sit bot. Staaaaaaaay! Now roll over and play dead.

KFG

Countersuit?

[Todd Knarr]

Can the owner of the package file a suit against the ESA? Under the DMCA their complaint must include an assertion that they are the owners of the package, and making such a false assertion in order to get the package removed sounds to me like fraudulent interference with the real owner's IP rights.

Better

[garyok]

Keep your laser handy.

Can those emails be submitted as spam?

[dacarr]

No, really, think of it. They send you a letter saying that you must remove the file or settle, and it's not a legitimate claim. Can you have their provider remove them from the 'net for sending you an unsolicited threat of suit?

An idea

[soft_guy]

Since you get so many of these and the vast majority are without merit, here's an idea. Create a bot that responds to C&D letters by stating that the claims are without merit. Then CYA by stating that if they have actual evidence, they should call you.

Re:An idea

[91degrees]

Or simply autorespond to all emails from the IP or email address with a message to the effect that emails have been rejected due to complaints of abuse.

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[CowboyMeal]

If you get filmed going through a red light, they don't automatically disable your car.

Why is this important????

[lobsterGun]

Perjury is a criminal offence. Libel is a civil offence.

If someone falsely accuses you in writing of infringing on 'their' IP you can sue for libel. They won't be doing any jail time (like they would, had they comited perjury).

Idiots out there

[Stonent1]

I was forced by the forum admin to change the name of the link to my website Stonent's Dell Laptop Hack and FAQ on the DellTalk forums. A user complained that hacking is illegal and the forum admin said I needed to change the name in the link. Apparently the user had never even visited my website as it has info on how to upgrade Dell laptops.

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry citzen, but you are a commie mutant trader, ...next clone please

Dualling Notices

[NibbleAbit]

Just create a script that auto-replies to bot created messages.

This is an automated reply to you automated violation message. You will get a real response from a real person when you have a real person verify the claim and send a real note.

Re:Dualling Notices

[MntlChaos]

great. now we not only have spam flying around, but bots talking to eachother "I want to speak to a real person." "You can speak to a real person if you are a real person" "Hey! I told you! you better let me speak to a real person" " You can speak to a real person if you are a real person" ad infinutum

Re:Dualling Notices

[clarkcox3]

Then we just need a bot that is smart enough to say: "I am a real person." :)

Re:Dualling Notices

[MntlChaos]

But then you have bots that reply to msgs containing "I am a real person" with "Prove it!"

Re:Dualling Notices

[Anonymous Coward]

And then you should have a contextual bot that knows that it is duelling, not dualling...

Re:Dualling Notices

[MntlChaos]

by the way the bot would also ignore grammar nazis

Re:Dualling Notices

[lyceum]

perhaps it could also explain the difference between spelling and grammar...

Published Fees

[Anonymous Coward]

Could ISPs start publishing a reasonable fee to investigate a DMCA complaint?

Can't you just charge them?

[PYK]

We get about 3-4 of these a day, roughly 1 per thousand accounts. It has gotten to the point were you have to review them, to live up to your end of the law.

Doesn't the law provide for remuneration ? Something similar has started to happen in Denmark. But the large ISP's have said "Sure we'll, find the information for you - if you have a warrant. We charge x amounts pr hour to do this" - of course "the other side" are annoyed and think the ISPs should help them for free. But the ISP's say they can't they would loose money on doing work for free. And the law backs them on this.

Suggestion:

[Kjella]

Sue them for trying to stifle the competition with groundless C&Ds. A more timid (or less intelligent) sysadmin could have ended up removing a competing product from their systen based on that allegation.

Kjella

quick, destroy the evidence!

[micq]

Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the
person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential
and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission,
dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon,
this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient
is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender
and delete the material from all computers.

Are they (the recipients) trying to create more trouble for themselves? lol..

It's the ESA saying 'if we're wrong, destroy the evidence, don't tell anyone!'

lol

dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you did so well on it, you probably noticed that the LSAT is an aptitude test; it acts as a predictor of your performance should you enroll in law school, and in no way measures legal knowledge.

I am also not a lawyer, and in my opinion, a defamation suit would have essentially zero chance of succeeding. A more sensible response (and probably what the poster did) would be to email back and point out that the file in question is not Pac-Man and then forget about the whole thing.

The question posed is not how to respond, but how often this sort of false accusation by a bot occurs and how others respond to it. Judging by most responses, the answers seem to be "every now and again" and "ignore it," respectively.

Huh?

[milesbparty]

Supposively their bot saw the words "Pac" and "Man" in the filename

What does Supposively mean?

Re:A Match by a BOT does NOT QUALIFY as "Good Fait

[Anonymous Coward]

If I would receive such a letter I would not contact ESA to tell them something, but I would get a lawyer and sue them for damages.

To whom it may concern,

[heikkile]

I have received mail from someone at your company that included this "disclaimer". I wish to point out that I have no reason (nor intention) to follow your one-sided disclaimers.

If you wish to know what the mail said, and/or purchase a non-disclosure agreement, please let me know. I charge a modest fee of USD 1000,- for opening the negotiations.

Yours sincerely

...

infiltration

[atari2600]

Unreal Tournament Infiltration was kickass (when i say was, i mean prev 2.8 versions ) - the later ones tried to mimick Tactical Ops - might as well play TO (a game similar to CounterStrike but better)

Re:infiltration

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't played Infiltration in way too long. Inf is in no way similar to TO (and as ever been close to it).
It is much better.

Re:infiltration

[Lightzout]

Infiltration is still a great mod and in no way resembles TO or CS. Anyone who still has a copy of UT around and hasnt tried it should.

The real source of braindead disclaimers

[87C751]

Now every corporate drone has it in his sig file, without thought.

Careful with that axe, Eugene. Some of us corporate drones get the boilerplate appended by the company mail mangler when an item is routed outside the confines of Domino.

This doesn't excuse my drone-ism, but at least I can duck the blame for the lame legalese.

Our lovely Junior letter

[pjones]

Re: Unauthorized Use of Universal Motion Pictures
Notice ID: 926003
9 Aug 2003 22:53:51 GMT

Dear Sir or Madam:

Universal City Studios Productions LLLP and its affiliated companies
(collectively, "Universal") are the exclusive owners of copyrights in
many motion pictures, including the motion pictures listed below.

It has come to our attention that University of North Carolina is the
service provider for the IP address listed below, from which
unauthorized copying and distribution (downloading, uploading, file
serving, file "swapping" or other similar activities) of Universal^?s
motion picture(s) listed below is taking place. We believe that the
Internet access of the user engaging in this infringement is provided by
University of North Carolina or a downstream service provider who
purchases this connectivity from University of North Carolina.

This unauthorized copying and distribution constitutes copyright
infringement under Section 106 of the U.S. Copyright Act . Depending
upon the type of service University of North Carolina is providing to
this IP address, it may have legal and/or equitable liability if it does
not expeditiously remove or disable access to the motion picture(s)
listed below, or if it fails to implement a policy that provides for
termination of subscribers who are repeat infringers (see, 17 U.S.C. ?512).

Despite the above, Universal believes that the entire Internet community
benefits when these matters are resolved cooperatively. We urge you to
take immediate action to stop this infringing activity and inform us of
the results of your actions. We appreciate your efforts toward this
common goal.

The undersigned has a good faith belief that use of the motion pictures
in the manner described herein is not authorized by Universal, its agent
or the law. The information contained in this notification is accurate.
Under penalty of perjury, the undersigned is authorized to act on
behalf of Universal with respect to this matter.

Please be advised that this letter is not and is not intended to be a
complete statement of the facts or law as they may pertain to this
matter or of Universal^?s positions, rights or remedies, legal or
equitable, all of which are specifically reserved.

Very truly yours,

Aaron Markham
Manager of Internet Anti-Piracy,
Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations
VIVENDI UNIVERSAL ENTERTAINMENT.
100 Universal City Plaza
Universal City, CA 91608
tel. (818) 777-3111
fax (818) 866-6339
antipiracy@unistudios.com

DMCA

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

This shows the major problems with capitolism. In almost any other country nobody would even care about this. where as i believe that capitolism is of the best ways to manage a country, it still needs work.

MORE: Our lovely Junior letter

[pjones]

Left out the delightful techie part. Sorry. You need this too (PJ).

*pgp public key is available on the key server at ldap://keyserver.pgp.com
** For any correspondence regarding this case, please send your emails
to antipiracy1@unistudios.com and refer to Notice ID: 926003. If you
need immediate assistance or if you have general questions please email
antipiracy@unistudios.com.

Title: Junior
Infringement Source: FTP
Initial Infringement Timestamp: 5 Aug 2003 00:50:05 GMT
Recent Infringment Timestamp: 5 Aug 2003 00:50:05 GMT
Infringer Username: None
Infringing Filename: Junior-2.2-CD2.iso
Infringing Filesize: 608600064
Infringers IP Address: 152.2.210.81
Infringers DNS Name: metalab.unc.edu
Infringing URL:
ftp://152.2.210.81:21/pub/linux/distribution s/altl inux/ISO/Junior-2.2-CD2.iso

Title: Junior
Infringement Source: FTP
Initial Infringement Timestamp: 5 Aug 2003 00:50:05 GMT
Recent Infringment Timestamp: 5 Aug 2003 00:50:05 GMT
Infringer Username: None
Infringing Filename: Junior-2.2-CD1.iso
Infringing Filesize: 732135424
Infringers IP Address: 152.2.210.81
Infringers DNS Name: metalab.unc.edu
Infringing URL:
ftp://152.2.210.81:21/pub/linux/distribution s/altl inux/ISO/Junior-2.2-CD1.iso

Ban anonymous ftp password 'guest@nowhere.com'

[fo0bar]

I've had a couple people email me, asking what IPs these connects came from so people could firewall off ESA. From what I've seen, each scan is from a different network, most likely random dialup ISPs (though somehow that could be a violation of the ISPs' AUPs).

However, for FTP traffic, I noticed a pattern: all used an anonymous FTP password of guest@nowhere.com. Almost all (relevant) google hits for that address were people talking about these automated mails, so it looks like this is what you should look out for. Also, I can't seem to find a legit FTP client that sends that password, so false positives shouldn't be a problem.

If you run vsftpd, you can put this in your vsftpd.conf:

deny_email_enable=YES
banned_email_file=/etc/vs ftpd.banned_emails

and putting guest@nowhere.com in vsftpd.banned_emails.

Please patent this bot

[artwells]

Wouldn't it be great if you had a patent on the process of trolling the internet for possibly infringing filenames?

You could create a honeypot of warezy names, create a boilerplate Cease and Desist email and wait for the fun to start.

Ah, if only I had thought of that earlier...

(OT) Gore and the Internet... debunk, debunk

[zipwow]

The facts in the case:

Gore said in an interview with CNN (and published by Wired), in response to a question about what makes his experiences as a legislator unique:

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

He never said the word "invented". The question he responds to is about his leadership in congress, so its equally obvious that he's not claiming to have created it technically. Also, he's referring to the public 'Internet', not hoary old Arpanet back in the 60's.

His specific actions begin with the NSF and the NSFNet in the late 1980s. Many of the speeches he made from that time (when Apple II's were big) use "data highway", and argue for additional research into computer networking. Particularly interesting is this quote in 1986:

"But I genuinely believe that the creation of this nationwide network and the broader installation of lower capacity fiber optic cables to all parts of this country, will create an environment where work stations are common in homes and even small businesses with access to supercomputing capability being very, very widespread. [...] Once that network for supercomputing is in place, you're going to have a lot more people gaining access to the capability, developing an interest in it."

During that time, he argued for more research into networking technologies, and was a member of the committe that oversaw the National Science Foundation when they created the NSFNet. He brought this early involvement into legislative action in 1991 with the High Performance Computing Act.

But don't take my word for it. Vint Cerf, the actual inventor of IP (as in TCP/IP), has gone on record saying:

"He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be"

Most of this information comes from this website:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_ 10/wiggins /

How many times does this hoax have to be debunked?
-Zipwow

Re:(OT) Gore and the Internet... debunk, debunk

[Arandir]

"Created" versus "invented". There's not much difference. If you're going to get that nit-picky, then NO ONE invented the internet, because it was never patented. Geez.

No one is claiming that Gore said he literally invented the internet from scratch from the ground up, including the technical foundations of it. But it sure as heck sounded like he meant that he was the impetus behind it.

His quote, if not a lie, is still a disembling of the truth. He's making the general public, who are ignorant of technical matters, think that he created/invented/funded/proposed the internet. He certainly rallied behind it, he certainly diverted tax monies towards certain segments of it, and he definitely promoted the term "Information Superhighway", but he was in no way involved in its creation and birth. The modern public internet *IS* the old ARPAnet, just grown up. Running internet connections to schools is not the same thing as creating the internet.

"He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be"

No one is denying that. Gore did a lot of good things (and a few bad) in his promotion of the internet. But realizing the power of an ubiquitous global network is hardly the same thing as creating it. He was not involved in the creation of TCP/IP, Usenet, http, or any RFCs.

Re:(OT) Gore and the Internet... debunk, debunk

[Scudsucker]

"Created" versus "invented". There's not much difference.

There most certainally is a difference, and a rather huge one in this context. As you said, no one person or group "invented" the internet, since all an internet is is two networks connected together. However, the process of going from a network of a few universities and research stations into the Internet, with its hundreds of thousands of hosts and terabytes of data always was a work in progress. It was a product of government, research and business, and Gore falls in the "government" category. He said just that in the interview, "During my service in the United States Congress...." So what he said was absolutely factual.

The *only* people who are splitting hairs are the ones who ignore the context and say that Gore was taking credit for something he was not.

Bounty Hunters

[inKubus]

What's scary about this is it represents the rise of copyright bounty hunters. Empowering off-duty rednecks and their wives with automatic scanning software/robots which then provide them with a list of possibilities. They then notify the recipient and probably the affected software company. If the threat is real, the software company pays the bounty hunter a reward for his/her efforts.

You'll see these places staffed with the same dicks who run collection agencies. And naturally the mob ties will fall into place also. Horray for the USA, we're all doomed. Again.

Re:Bounty Hunters

[IthnkImParanoid]

Horray for the USA, we're all doomed. Again.

We seem to be going the way of BSD.

You owe me ..

[QQ2]

A coke,

God damn that stuff hurts when it comes out of your nose.

<offtopic>
O and if you could make it a Jolt coke I would be mucht obliged (apperantly it is illegal to sell them here but it's oke to import them
</offtopic-xml header 1.0.0>

Re:OMFG! Panic!

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Oh, look, someone without the balls to post under a real user name. As if we didn't see that coming.

Pr0n checking at college...

[sunbane]

I went to a religious university and they were watching for those tempted by the sins of the flesh... problem was, one of the keywords they were looking for was "gay". Well the college of engineering secretary happened to be named Gaye. Needless to say, there were several students surprised to learn of their pornography addiction before the mistake was realized!

Re:Pr0n checking at college...

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to BYU, leave your Free Agency at the Wendys just off campus. We have replaced it with an automated script.

-Brother Big

Re:OMFG! Panic!

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Think about it.

You are asked to delete your files or get sued

Yes, that seems a likely scenario. The ESA (RIAA is not involved here) will just go out and file suit without even having a person check the file out. "Sorry your honor, we never bothered to look at the evidence." A more likely scenario is, upon receiving no response, the ESA will look at the file and the story ends right there.

In addition to calling or ignoring, the recipient also has the option of hitting the "reply" button and send an e-mail back. I'm not sure how this all relates to "any form of democracy", though.

Oh no!!!

[frode]

>Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon,
>this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

Oh no, Now he's gonna get it.

INF is a great game!

[Lightzout]

Its may be dated but theres nothing else like it really: http://infiltration.sentrystudios.net/

How to get the DMCA overturned

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a step by step process to get rid of the DMCA

1. Setup organization to overturn DMCA.
2. Collect donations and line up legal council for the lawsuits (step 8).
3. Create honeypot of legal content for material likely to be served DMCA cease-and-desist toilet paper. For example, create ISO image called Microsoft_XP_review_copy which contains nothing but reviews of Microsoft XP generated by organization outlined in step 1. For extra points, make the ISO match byte size and CRC (if possible) of real Microsoft install disk. Make additional honeypots describing IP of BSA, RIAA and MPAA companies,
4. Register honeypot IP with Copyright office. This will increase leverage in court.
5. Put up webpages describing honeypot information.
6. Anonymously tip copyright holder of the IP the honeypot simulates.
7. Wait for DMCA cease-and-desist letter.
8. Dig in heels about Honeypot IP as much as legally possible. File civil suits. Lobby State and Federal AG's for criminal charges -- barratry, fraud and extortion come to mind. Pettition government for redress of grievances. Get your case tried in the court of public opinion as well as the State and Federal Judiciaries.
9. Repeat until DMCA is rule unconstitutional as it violates the following amendments:

1st (free speech, expression and press)
5th (due process)
6th (right to speedy and public trial by jury for criminal offenses)
7th (right to trial by jury for civil violations)
14th (due process AGAIN!)

Any suggestions on this? Improvements?

Re:How to get the DMCA overturned

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a refinement:

5a. Advertise your Honeypot IP using multiple, non-spamming/junkmail/junkfax channels as possible.

similar case in germany: ms office / openoffice

[christoph_s]

the same happened in germany in february. the BSA accused the university of munster, because their bot only searched for "office" on public ftp servers. full story (german only) at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/hps-28.02.03-0 00/

Excellent idea

[tacokill]

This is an excellent idea. In fact, you can do it on a personal level as well. Remember that.

Here's my little solution.

[JessLeah]

A honeypot-generating script, with instructions, and the first honeypot made by said script:

http://www.twu.net/projects/Warez.php

Enjoy!

Re:Here's my little solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there no -1, Contains a link with

Re:Here's my little solution.

[JessLeah]

I got rid of the BLINK.

There are...

[TekProphet]

...WAY too many lawyers in the world today. We might need to expand hell into California.

grammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Taco... go back and take remedial English..
"Has anyone else into this with good (or even bad) outcomes?"
And would all youse who don't know the difference betwixt your and you're please go with him....
mod me at -1 I'm just a tired and cranky (anonymous::always )greybeard

Pre-existing NDA

[phorm]

They told me it depends on whether there is a pre-existing NDA between me (or the company I work for) and the sender (or the company they work for). If there is, then I must abide by the terms and conditions of that NDA

If there was a pre-existing NDA, though, then you probably wouldn't be able to post this to a public area without running the risk of getting in trouble anyways (at least by the way many NDA's work). Having the "privacy" addendum to the email wouldn't change it either way.

Re:Action Plan - AKA Leave it to someone else?

[dystopianO]

So who wants to spearhead this?

I can't stand this pervading /. mentality which essentially communicates, "I have an interesting idea but my time and energy is more valuable than yours so would you please put my idea into action for me? Thank you.".

It's your idea, you spearhead it. If you think we should start putting your idea into action, then you must lead by example before anyone will follow you. You won't get anything done by suggesting others do your work for you. I'm not raining on you personally, just that mind set that seems to abound on this site.

In that case

[phorm]

May if we're lucky the ISP's will take this as an action against the RIAA/MPAA. Sorting out that crap could soon get to be just as much a chore as spam, except it might be harder to figure out which lawsuitbot hits are really going to be pursued.

Re:This is stupid - I am Spartacus!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not find the actual files they are looking for, like pac-man.zip, and make fake files with that name and file length using a VB program to write out a file of zeros.

Then put these files on every server. Thousands of them. Do the same with mp3s - make fake versions of them.

Make up a web page with a listing of the files so the spiders can find them, but put text on the page that says these are not real files, just a freedom of information protest.

So you end up with a page with listings of hundreds or thousands of files, and each is one your server, but as a blank/zero data file of the proper length.

This is the "I am Spartacus" solution.

Brad Jensen, Tulsa OK

I was almost arrested once....

[Prince Cyph0r]

I had a file on my server named 13_decYear01_Old-susSexCountymapNJ-partThree.someP artsMissing.vidspluspics.tar.gz and almost got locked up for child pornography

I'm quite surprised

[phorm]

That the have Pacman on their hitlist, if only due to the fact that it is extemely old and many many clones have since been made (whether legit or not nonwithstanding).

I've just been thinking, that if they've decided to include 20-year-old+ video games in their hitlists, how many screwed up keywords will they have in there. I mean, 20+ years of movie/game/etc title keywords is a whole lot of stuff that could be incorrectly tagged as a false positive.

Hell, are there any common words not used in the last X years of cheesy movie/game titles?

DMCA myths

[gaj70]

I'm always amazed at the amount of people who misunderstand the DMCA. In this case, the ESA was not asking that the site be taken down because of a "DMCA violation." It was asking that it be taken down because of a copyright violation. The only reason the DMCA comes into play is because it provides the ISP with a safe harbor if they promply remove the potentially-infringing material. In other words, the DMCA actually helps free speach on the internet by providing ISP's with a defense against contributory copyright infringement. Without the DMCA, every ISP with a clue would require everyone post a large bond before providing web space.

Re:DMCA myths

[cranos]

The only reason the DMCA comes into play is because it provides the ISP with a safe harbor if they promply remove the potentially-infringing material. In other words, the DMCA actually helps free speach on the internet

How the hell does it help free speech on the Internet if ISPs are forced to remove material or face penalties. That would be pretty much the opposite of free speech wouldn't it?

Re:Action Plan - AKA Leave it to someone else?

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

It's your idea, you spearhead it. If you think we should start putting your idea into action, then you must lead by example before anyone will follow you. You won't get anything done by suggesting others do your work for you.

There are people who have ideas about this and want to act on them. I honestly don't have the time now. And some people do have time, and want ideas for projects. The following two posts show that there is some interest and feedback regarding this issue.
example 1
example 2

I guess what I'm trying to say is, when I have more time, I wouldn't mind working on ideas I got from other people, so I don't see why I shouldn't give out ideas while I'm too busy to work on them.

Also, just mentioning the idea can give someone else a better idea... an improvement on the original.

So I don't see any harm.

What we really need....

[Anonymous Coward]

is to slashdot the reply email addresses attached to these insane cease-and-desist letters. Everyone in the world can email them and tell them what *#$%ing morons they are, and how unethical it is to send threats when a human being has not verified the copyright infringement.

I'm not suggesting "mail bombing." I am suggesting that these companies learn that their irresponsible actions have consequences. If they have to pour through thousands of legitimate, human-generated emails (one per human) every time they screw up, they will start to learn that it is not in their best interests to be so irresponsible.

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Clinton signed the DMCA, not Bush.

Don't get me wrong... I detest Bush just as much as every other intelligent person does, but let's lay blame where it belongs...

The major DMCA problem

[crucini]

The major problem here is that while the DMCA requires the complainant to swear under penalty of perjury that he is an authorized representative of the copyright holder, it deliberately does not require the complainant to swear that an infringement has occurred. That loophole enabled the automated abuse we are now seeing.

A possible solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: although I'm an IP lawyer, I practice in Canada where we don't have the DMCA (yet), and have not researched this issue. This is off the top of my head, and does not constitute legal advice.

Since no court action has technically been commenced, the sanctions definition cited above is probably not applicable.

A possible course of action, where the warning is obviously not justified, is to write back to the person alleging that copyright infringement is happening, explaining the situation, and asking the party to retract the allegation. Also say that if a retraction is not received, the accused party will move for declaratory judgement and costs of the proceeding.

If one does not hear back from the person making the allegation, commence a lawsuit in the appropriate court asking for declaratory judgement that no copyright infringement is happening. If enough people do this, this would be a huge inconvenience to any person sending out mass warnings or allegations based on bot results which are not reviewed by a person. In the end, you may be able to get costs, though damages may be a harder issue to prove.

My personal opinion: relying just on bot results to send out these warnings does not meet the test of good faith, though if the person could show that they did have human review and it was just one out of many that slipped through the cracks, they would probably just be slapped on the wrist.

so....

[kaseyH]

i never thought my old friend pac man could cause so much trouble

Re:sideways swinging

[Xolotl]

I _can't_ believe this was granted. If it wasn't on the USPO page I'd assume it was a hoax. Surely, surely there must be prior art?

Oh dear ....

Urban legend

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Bill Clinton sign an internet privacy act in 1995 that allows people to say before people connect "if you are government, get out" and therefor make any information obtained without explicit permission to access the server invalid?

No, he didn't.

Not perjury, unfortunately

[crucini]

No, the letter clearly states on whose behalf they are acting. This part is true, and it's the only part sworn under penalty of perjury. The DMCA is carefully written to protect the complainant in a case like this.

'Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA' article

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone thought to forward this to Sen. Norm Coleman (R.-Minn)?

First paragraph of article from http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2243531

Concerned over potential legal abuses, Sen. Norm Coleman (R.-Minn.) wants to see all copies of the more than 900 subpoenas issued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its ongoing war against online file swapping. Coleman said the music industry trade group may be inadvertently targeting thousands of Americans.

Certainly some use web-crawlers

[Chuck Chunder]

For example I noticed something in my logs for a bot (NPBot) from the people at NameProtect.

I have nothing to hide but seeing as the server in question is running over my ADSL link I have nothing to gain and no particular desire to have them crawling the site either so I plonked them in the robots.txt file and the crawler obeys it.

I do wonder if this raises some sort of red flag though as the bot seems to check the robots.txt file every day now as if it's gagging to be let in (of course if they really wanted to they could crawl it anyway).

What about my bandwidth used for their search?

[Anonymous Coward]

If 10,000 companies are always looking all over for their "owned" files, then my server will be a slug, SUE SUE SUE!

The ESA are infringing on your copyright!

[shiftyphil]

I'm sure we all have some copyrightable work called index.html (or could make some)....

From: You
Subject: Notice of Claimed Infringement

I am an authorized representative of BS Inc., which represents the intellectual property interests of my own ass.

I am providing this letter of notification pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and 17 USC Sec. 512 (c) to make Heller Information Services, Inc. aware of material on its network or system that infringes the exclusive copyright rights of my ass. This notice is addressed to you as the agent designated by Heller Information Services, Inc. to receive notifications of claimed infringement, as so reflected in the current records of the U.S. Copyright Office. Under penalty of perjury, we hereby affirm that BS Inc. is authorized to act on behalf of the BS Inc. members whose exclusive copyright rights we believe to be infringed as described herein.

ESA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at 216.194.201.198 continues to infringe the rights of one or more BS Inc. members by offering for download one or more unauthorized copies of one or more web pages protected by copyright, including, but not limited to:

Copy this out yourself

We thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is appreciated.

Infringement Detail:
Infringing Work: anything you like
Filepath: /
Filename: index.html
First Found: xxxx
Last Found: xxxx
Filesize: 10,072k
IP Address: 216.194.201.198
IP Port: 80
Network: HTTP
Protocol: HTTP

Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers.

Learn your rights . . .

[werdna]

By negating the need for a court order to be allowed to send these orders . . .

Say what? Learn the rules for notice and takedown. All you have to do is respond, and the ISP is obliged to bring it back up until the putative plaintiff sues.

At least they should be held liable for any damages if an ISP removes contents that they claim are infringing.

The DMCA provides for penalties and fees in the case of DMCA notice-and-takedown abuse.

Re:sideways swinging

[canajin56]

They don't read them. Your pay is determined by how good a patent clerk you are. And how good a patent clerk is determined by how many applications you process. You can't process a rejected application.

Re:OMFG! Panic!

[EzInKy]

Yes, that seems a likely scenario. The ESA (RIAA is not involved here) will just go out and file suit without even having a person check the file out. "Sorry your honor, we never bothered to look at the evidence." A more likely scenario is, upon receiving no response, the ESA will look at the file and the story ends right there.

The point is that they should look at the file before they send out a letter saying they believe it is infringing instead of making others do their work for them.

In addition to calling or ignoring, the recipient also has the option of hitting the "reply" button and send an e-mail back.

Replying to unsolicited email usually leads to getting more unsolicited email.

No such thing as Copyright on names

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression that names (titles to songs, books, etc.) were not subject to copyright.

If I write a book called 'Murder In The Dark', it doesn't matter that someone else has written a book with the same title.
The same applies to song titles.
The same applies to movie titles.

It is illegal to pass off your work as someone else's.

In most cases however, it just does not make sense to use the same name.

Still, I think I will write that software I've been meaning to write that manages furniture removals. Its called PacMan.

So there!

BTW: I've changed my name to Anonymous Coward. A c&d letter will be forwarded to /. as soon as I get my head out of my ass.

Gentoo?

[PAPPP]

When i started reading the post i assumed it was going to be about Arch's package manager, Pacman (personally, i tried arch, and it seems like it should be nice...when its finished, sort of gentoo lite). The first time i saw that on their site, i thought it was a lawsuit waiting to happen. just a random thought.

Re:Let's Have Some Fun! (this_is_not_pacman.zip)

[vonFinkelstien]

All you need to do is make a text file containing "This text file does not contain the PacMac game." Then zip it as This_is_not_PacMan.zip.

That should be a hoot!

tssfulk

Not quite..

[Anonymous Coward]

I could also legally act on that information as well (e.g. buy/sell stocks based on the quarterly financial reports I received before they go public).

That's not entirely true. While you can act on the information in many different ways legally, buying and selling stock is not one of them. The act of trading of securities based upon information that is not public is illegal. It is insider trading and the SEC tries to enforce this vigorously.

Re:Computers automatically sending C&D letters

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, such irony in a sig.

. . .all three of 'em!

[Anonymous Coward]

Number 1:

You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a CRIME!
Unless it was done by a
Policeman or aristocrat

Know your rights

Re:This is stupid -- WRONGGGG

[Pepebuho]

According to DMCA, all you have to claim under penalty of perjury is that you have legal authority to act on behalf of whoever holds the copyright on whatever you're complaining about.

There is nothing in the law that says that you cannot lie about the existance of the infringing material. Why do you thing they are trigger-happy about it?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So how much for a license?

[zooblethorpe]

I wanna swing sideways! How many weeks of allowance is it gonna take? :P

Now my other question is what other inane ideas I can <DrEvil> "patent" </DrEvil> and make billions .. erm, millions .. erm, billions from!

Likely already done, but obligatory nonetheless:

1. Patent everything imaginable.
2. (Optional) Laugh insanely.
3. License your "intellectual property".
4. ???
5. Profit!

--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...

Unfortunately, no

[Quila]

Did you really think Congress would put something in the DMCA that so well protected the consumer from abuse? I don't think so.

The perjury provisions in the DMCA only say that you must represent the company or copyright owner you say you're representing. In other words, I can't write a warez site and say I represent Microsoft and please remove that copy of Windows.

The DMCA does not require the copyright infringement claim to have any validity, and provides no punishment for even blatantly erroneous claims.

Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA

[jwilhelm121]

Since history seems to repeat its self, I wonder; " Is this an automated way of saying, Witch !!, WITCH !!, Burn the Witch !!!"

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you. Did I say anything about the DMCA???!!! You stupid mother fucker! I was talking about all the other crap that Bush specifically has foisted on us. May you rot in hell with Bush and his clan!!

That's the wrong way to go

[fizbin]

What you need is something you can point to a judge and say, "see? Clearly any reasonable human being wouldn't think this was infringing."

That's the case in the example cited at the top of the article. It's not the case in what you're proposing.

You don't want to be able to point to the lawyers and say "see, they're technically wrong." You need to be able to point to them and say "see, they're completely nuts and out of control." Remember, the law is run by humans, and most humans have a relatively short attention span. Don't appear to be taunting the lawyers who send you threat letters. Make their actions obviously unreasonable.

Do this first, and get legal precedent established to the effect the lawyers having to take some due diligence to determine which things really are infringing, and on whose copyrights. Then, push the edge a little bit. I do think that if you keep pushing slowly you can eventually get to the point where automated lawyergrams in response to the files you describe would cause trouble for the lawyers. However, the time is not yet right for taunting honeypots.

Fortunately, the lawyers use some really stupid bots, so all we may need at this point is some sort of central clearing house to coordinate all these blatantly false DMCA actions. Either that, or get a Congressional representative to introduce a provision that allows for a small claims court action to recover, say, $500 for each false claim. (For the defamation suffered) But in that event, the claim will have to be such that no reasonable and awake person could have made it; your taunting filenames still wouldn't work.

The EFF could then publish guides on filing such claims. This results in a legal DDOS on firms with stupid bots.

The result? Fewer lawyerbots, or significantly smarter ones, or both.

Re:Support Bush or ELSE!

[fussman]

...life free from oppression or involvement in the capitalist system."
Don't like capitalism? Live in another system for a while then.

He forces people into religion by encouraging "faith based" intiatives.
Ok, you liberal trash-spreading automiton, if you're going to say such garbage, SUPPORT IT WITH FACTS AND NOT SOME WORDS THAT ENCITE EMOTION.

He has put people into further financial bondage by giving "tax cuts". When someone like me who only makes $24,000 a year will see no benefit. On the other hand folks that make upwards of $100,000 + will benefit greatly. Unfair. Tax cuts are supposed to make life easier for the poor and harder on the rich.
If you want to sway an intelligent person's opinion, please relay more facts.

It is no longer possible to speak out against the president in a large venue (televsion for instance) without either having your job taken away from you, your reputation ruined or perhaps even being hauled off to a tribunal for being a "terrorist".
Well, again, get your facts straight. On public TV you see fun at the president's expense ALL THE TIME! (Example: Stand-up comedy shows are a start)

George W. Bush is not about freedom. He is about opression with a smile. His administration plays nice while they do evil at every turn. His administration encourages stupidity instead of intelligence.
That is just FUD in politics, plain and simple. Of course, trolls would know all about that.

It's good to be dumb these days.
In your case, yes.

Re: Update

[jswitte]

I reviewed the rest of the court summary, and in the interest of completeness, have to say I was wrong about the conclusion of a basis for an "emotional distress" ruling in the US Federal Code. The judgement of "emotional distress" in the case described was made in a previous court ruling under Iowa law. The decision of this particular case was whether the debt was "nondischargable" under Federal law. This involved the principle of collateral effect (of the previous State judgement) and the doctrine of "collateral estoppel" which bars re-liitigation of factual elements of a previous court proceeding.

There were several references made to the applicability of the terms "willful" and "malice" with respect to the infliction of the emotional distress in the case (I think), which do appaear to refer to Federal caselaw (see page 5 of the PDF). However it is not clear to me whether these cases simply help define the terms, or whether they could provide a basis for ascertaining the infliction of emotional distress under Federal law.

That being said, it is my general impression that, even if a legal definition of emotional distress does not exist in the Federal code, it does exist in the codes of a number of different states. I would assume that any case brought against ESA would be brought in a court local to its place of residence (California, I assume, but am not sure). However, since a class-action suit would neccesarily involve many parties in many different jurisdictions, I am not sure that they could all be litigated under the code of ESA's home jurisdiction. The case would also cross state lines, possibly invoking the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (though I am not sure whether that clause could be stretched quite that far..)

Again, this is why I'm not a law student..

Re:excellent!--who said that

[ireallylovelinux]

I believe Napoleon said that.

I knew this story looked familiar...

[Poor College Student]

Back in February, a very similar case occured with the BSA mistaking an RPM distribution of OpenOffice with MS Office.

Re:You can't prove a negative... (GOOK)

[jan.kristiansen]

You seem to like proof by intimidation. Try to rephrase it with some math in it and I shall take you as a genious. So far our only certainties are IMPOSSIBILITY results. Like the Godel theorem. Or Fisher-Lynch-Paterson impossibility result in distributed computing. Axioma-model-theory-prediction-verification then we have some way to estimate evaluate how usefull is a theory. Now have you heard about INDUCTION? Logic at this level, boils down to reasonning about beliefs, faith etc. Man that was a post. Complete chaos. what are you trying to say? Trashing bandwith. Talk about your faith, then I shall listen to you. You should take care of yourself. Resume your normal life. Follow instructions you are given. Then you were rated insightful. That must slashdot legendary sense of humour. J.