Slashdot Mirror
MPAA Sends Linux Australia Dubious Takedown Notice
L1TH10N writes "News.com has a story on how the MPAA sent a takedown notice to Linux Australia for the movies 'Twisted' and "Grind.' What was actually hosted with Linux Australia is Twisted (being a Python framework) and Valgrind (being a tool for finding memory management problems in programs). An interesting question that the article raises is whether automatic takedown notices based on blind keyword searches constitutes spam."
I'd say yes. Why wouldn't you at least have real people double checking for false positives?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Yes, unwanted un-asked-for and undeserved email is spam in many people's eyes. It's very similar in another way because normal spammers automatically search the web for the "@" symbol, and these spammers look for Motion Picture titles. There's very little difference.
main(0)
Doesn't the loser of some cases have to pay court costs for both sides? They should take the MPAA to court and show them whats up. The MPAA wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on, they'd have nothing except empty threats which got them in trouble.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I suppose likewise it could be said that movie titles should be the same way to some extent. Some will say, "Well no, a movie should be creative because it's more a work of art and expression than software." And on the flip side people will agree software is creative expression too. But either way, the redefinition of program naming standards shouldn't be brought about by the damn MPAA
"the article raises is whether automatic takedown notices based on blind keyword searches constitutes spam."
Spam? How about unwarranted and unprovoked legal harrassment? I say Linux Australia should contact the EFF or similar and look into suing the pants off those MPAA bastards.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Fair enough, but out of curiosity, please tell me, what do Excel, Outlook, C, Pascal, and Java do? None of those names are descriptive, but all are simple and easy identifiers.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
It's like a company other than Microsoft using a word which *sounds* like "windows"...unheard of.
Most films are just copyrighted rather than trademarked. Some like Star Wars (TM) are both. However, was Twisted trademarked, and is there any film called Valgrind?
Which brings us back to whats in a name. Both Twisted and Valgrind are somewhat linked to their function. Would you prefer to invoke something called Twisted.py or "An.event.driven.threaded.engine.for.messing.with. networks.py"?
Lets keep the names short and memorable. If we want semantic value, we can always look them up.
See my journal, I write things there
Huh?
Unbelievable. You actually got modded up for that troll.
Firstly, a name is just a name. A tool for association. It's not supposed to be a description of something. As another poster said, how about C, Pascal, Outlook, Excel, Apache, blah blah. Hell, how about your own name? Dancing Santa? That name describes you? "It's just a nick" you say? Well, how about David or William or Veronica or whatever your real name - does that describe you?
What rot! Creative names are easier to remember. Would it be easier to remember names like Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, etc., or names like MyLinux, YourLinux, HisLinux, YetAnotherLinux?
Naming issues aside, the MPAA should have at least downloaded the files in question and verified their assumptions. If they're just going to go off of the filename, maybe a more appropriate way to phrase the letter would be "we suspect you are distributing our content, but if not, kindly disregard."
You really have to laugh at such a stong yet misguided threat. Do they really expect people to take them seriously?
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -- Lord Acton
Because here in the United States laws are made based on how much corporations pay polititians. Common sense or accountability never enters the equation, that would be bad for business.
That's why things like the DMCA (and whatever the Disney copyright extension law is called) exist in the first place, the laws were purchased by corporations.
SO what would you call the 13th mailclient? MailD, DMail, LetterSend, MailSend, SendMail, ShipMail, MassMail, LetterHead are all used up, what next?
Also, these are very easy to distinguish, right?
And then the US forces them upon other countries in the name of Free Trade and international harmonization.
From what I recall of the restrictions in the size of the bandwidth of the lines to/from AU, the misuse of resources could be causing an impact there. Of course I'm sure spam tops the list of unnessesary traffic across those links, but someone ends up paying for the bandwidth no matter if it's automatic scanning or whatever.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Why the UK? This thing called the Computer Misuse Act. Basically, you're prohibited in England from using a computer's resources without proper authority. Now, sending unwarranted Cease and Desist notices, especially for the purpose of intimidation, may well be considered by some UK judges to be misuse of resources. (Hey, the British legal system is notoriously unpredictable - just ask Judge Pickles! :)
There's also some question as to whether it violates the Data Protection Act, as an account is considered "personal information" (one reason bulletin boards had to be registered under the Act) and the trade in personal accounts (and therefore personal information) is definitely going on here. Under the Act, the MPAA is not authorized to hold personal information without permission. Even with permission, it has to be accurate, and the individual whose information it is has the legal right to demand that inaccuracies be rectified, under penalty of law.
Now, I fully understand the MPAA's situation, here. They want to get to grips with piracy, which is a fair point. In the 1990s, there were over 60 million Internet sites. It's probably closer to 600 million, these days, or more. Checking each by hand would be both tedious and impractical. Some kind of automated filtering system, to make the problem managable, is inevitable.
Do simple keyword searches do the job? No. Anyone who wanted to could easily set up a name translation table, and then store the files under a fake name. Hey, automatic word replacement systems are two a penny. Most "Echelon Jammer" software out there works on that principle. It would be trivial to operate file-sharing using a filename substitution system.
Would hashes work? No. Lossy encoding means that it'd be impossible to check for every possible hash of the same movie, never mind every movie out there.
Ok, what about checking the file type? No good. Pirates would just use zip, or some other common archiving format, and a binary check for the file type signature (eg: using Unix' 'file' command) would reveal nothing.
No, piracy won't be solved by brute-force methods, any more than system cracking is solved by applying Microsoft patches. There's always a way round. The key lies in the people, not in the technology. In the same way systems are secured OR broken by social engineering, the only sure-fire way that exists to stop piracy is by changing attitudes.
Now, attitudes are rather resistant to change, especially when people have the idea that they're being ripped off royally. The MPAA needs to address this image problem. Fix the image, and the piracy problem will take care of itself. It always does. History has encountered the problem before, and it'll encounter it again. It's efficient to learn along the way, however.
Now, it doesn't help that movie studios quote price tags in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for movies. Why? Because most movie-making sites are noting that the REAL price of making the movie is generally between a tenth to a hundredth that which the studios are giving. It's like that story of crying wolf - once you're established as being "economical with the truth" (as one British Minister famously put it), nobody is going to believe anything else you say.
Which goes right back to the image thing. The MPAA needs to give the movie studios a serious image make-over. Accuracy and honesty are vital, if the studios are to convince anyone that they have any kind of money problem from piracy at all. (Especially when the consumer watchdog groups keep claiming that sales are booming.)
Nor does it help the MPAA that movie studios are notorious for vice-related crimes. Who, exactly, did Madame Hollywood supply those (il
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That would be fun, of course, but wouldn't the judge be able to saddle you with legal costs for wasting the court's time (when a simple phone call would have cleared up the whole mess)?
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
Perhaps it's time to have an Echelon Day equivalent for the MPAA.
:)
Something like everyone having a list of 0k files with generic english words ala Twisted and Grind would put a spanner in the works.
Cheers
rob
OK.
I have no experience of the USAnian or Australian court systems (being Norwegian), but I would suspect a judge would be pretty miffed at both parties. Shared costs, maybe?
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
The problem: they will most likely send a letter to your ISP, and normally the ISP will cut you off or remove your site and leave it up to you to resolve the matter.
So when you just ignore them and patiently wait until they bring the matter to court, you will lose your connectivity or your site in the meantime.
Maybe when your ISP is reasonable or likes to end these questionable practices (they of course get dozens of letters like that and have to administratively process them, all for nothing) they will accept your explanation for the file content and keep them online without sending formal legal replies?
Simple, they plan to extradite the server owner.
:(
It doesn't matter where the files are hosted
Innocent until proven guilty? The {MP|RI}AA are trying hard to make proving your innocence your responsibility.
I guess the best thing to do is ignore the takedown notice, and hope they are stupid enough to start proceedings without checking what they've got.
Well, the MPAA can make sure such things never happen again, and in future improve the accuracy of their hits by using random numbers and leters for names! I can't wait to see '1hg7i3nfl43' when it comes out!
I don't know much about Australian laws, other than them being based on the UK's laws.
In a civil case in the UK, however, you have to submit details of the arguments you intend to present to the court before the hearing. I would suspect the MPAA's solicitors would back down on receipt of this, rather than let it go to court. In the UK this means you would have cost them a GBP 30 filing fee.
I'm sure I'm in US-dodgy legal territory here (but then, what isn't?), but isn't it every web site owner's responsibility to host a file called "matrixrevolutions.avi", which is of course a renamed HTML of the RIAA/MPAA website or something?
;-)
Hmm... maybe cover it with robots.txt and see if anyone finds it. Maybe you could get them on two counts of stupidity and misuse?
Not all of us are in the US (or it's outlying provinces)
so why not do the same kind of thing that the riaa has done and make lots of bogus files available using the name of various popular movies. even better, put together a bunch of small utitilies that are named generic names (which are also the names of some popular movies too) like 'twisted' and 'grind'...
if these jerks are doing simple keyword matches and sending out formletter threats, make them have to actually do their homework. if they start sending out tons of letters to folks that carry these bogus files on their site, it will weaken their case and make them look foolish...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
In other words, let's say I produced a file called TEST.JPG, and I find that you have a file named TEST.JPG on your website. I could send a DMCA takedown notice to your ISP requesting that they remove the TEST.JPG file, and regardless of any inconvenience this caused you, I would not be liable for any consequences. That's because even though the two TEST.JPGs are clearly not the same, I do hold copyright to a file named TEST.JPG, and that's all I'm claiming under penalty of perjury in the DMCA notice.
The DMCA is a bad law. It must be struck down, the sooner the better.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
IANAL, etc...
But it seems like it would be a fairly clearcut case to claim that these takedown notices do not constitute a legitimate notice that the ISP is hosting copyrighted material.
This may or may not apply under Australian law, but my understanding is that the reason these things work under American law is that ISPs are classified as "common carriers." So they don't have to monitor their systems for copyrighted material, but in order to maintain common carrier status and not be liable for infringement they have to respond promptly when a copyright holder informs them of a violation. If there can be no reasonable level of certainty that a takedown notice actually refers to copyrighted material because the MPAA isn't actually checking for accuracy, then the MPAA is effectively imposing the burden of monitoring the network for infringements on the ISPs. As common carriers, they shouldn't have to do this.
MPAA: "The ISP was duly notified of infringing material..."
ISP: "No we weren't. We've gotten hundreds of these emails. Nobody at the MPAA actually looks at them, why should we?"
Judge: "So who at the MPAA informed them of infringement?"
MPAA: "..."
Actually a mopre fun way of poking the lions...
I run a email harvesting poisioner on my websites, a similar system to make the MPAA and RIAA think you are offering thousands of downloads which in reality are bogus or harmlessly link to their own information.
If thousands of sites put up RIAA MPAA poisioning pages then they might get a clue.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is a *FANTASTIC* Idea!
metallica.mp3
I guess if everyone put in there home page files such
lotrdvdrip1.iso
lotrdvdrip2.iso
starwars.iso
and whatever they can thinkof etc , then we can start rendering this USELESS and OFFENSIVE system into the ground.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
This is EXACTLY what I was thinking. We already know they do not check for file size. Obviously a 140k file is NOT a movie, unless someone has invented some miracle compression technique.
I was thinking about setting up a page that has links to small text files with random content, named the same as all the popular movies. Might even add text on the main page using the terms "These files are not warez or pirated movies" just to let them find those key words.
This *might* be an effective method to create so much noise that their lame efforts will have to be changed, assuming enough people do it. It would seem to me that if you are going to send legal letters with threats, you should at least have a real person review the alleged infringment first. Otherwise, it IS spam, and no different than a spider that trolls for email addresses.
This is kind of like a reverse DDOS attack on their lame spider that is searching for infringment. Oh yea, and who ever wrote the code for this spider, and whoever agreed that this was a good idea and should be implimented, should be fired.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I had the idea of honeypot-like hosts that would fool the bots. Imagine thousands of pointless cease and desist requests. Thousands of "fsck off" answers. It would be great if it could cost them a lot of time and money. Plus, we could use the information collected by the honeypots to build a blacklist of servers that run spying bots.
More importantly, I wonder if the RIAA uses similar tactics. It would make an interesting court battle for one of the potentially innocents who get nailed with a P2P piracy charge. Publicity like this could be used to get the case thrown out of court (if it can be shown that the RIAA is equally lazy in checking the validity of their searches).
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I dunno about "defamatory". It would be hard to prove that they intentionally misinterpreted the name of a file just to bug you. I think that "negligent" would be a more productive concept to explore. Maybe there's something in the public-nuisance laws that would apply? :-}
do not read this line twice.
> their demand necessitates a response at their expense
Source, please.
I hope no one's actually considering taking the up-modded "legal" advice of the Anonymous Coward in parent post seriously.
Filing frivolous lawsuits in small-claims courts is legally and morally wrong.
IANAL, but it's only common sense that you have no right to bill another party for your time unless there's a pre-arranged contract between the parties allowing such. Or shall I send Slashdot an invoice for "services rendered" because I spent 5 minutes contributing this post to their site? Do you think they'd pay?