Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
NMG
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.
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.
NMG
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.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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
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.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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