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."

Comments

A few quotes from the article -

[thewldisntenuff]

"This seems to be a huge misuse of resources, an infringement upon various global spam laws, an infringement upon our own Copyright Act under Section 102 and needless stress and cost upon small Australian organizations and companies," Smith said. ......

"Linux Australia is concerned that this kind of shoot-in-the-dark approach to copyright protection is potentially damaging for Australian organizations and companies," Smith added. "Organizations that participate in such behavior should be held accountable and forced to put at least some effort into researching the validity of their keyword searches."

Why aren't there any similar laws in the United States? Or are there similar laws that are applicable here (in the States)? I mean, it's understandable once or twice (ie- story where professor posted an mp3 of his lectures and RIAA hounded him for it), but any more than that and it just doesn't make any sense...... "Should be held accountable" indeed......

Offtopic - what movies were named "Twisted" or "Grind"? Anybody?

-thewldisntenuff

Re:A few quotes from the article -

[ajs]

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
$mp3junk = `cat template.mp3 2>/dev/null`;
$avijunk = `cat template.avi 2>/dev/null`;
$top = get("http://www.imdb.com/chart/top");
while($top =~ /\/title\/\w+\/\"\>(.*?)\s*\(/g) {
push @names, $1;
}
foreach $name (@names) {
$name =~ s/\&\#(\d+);/chr($1)/eg;
open(MP3,">$name.mp3"); print MP3 $mp3junk; close MP3;
open(AVI,">$name.avi"); print AVI $avijunk; close AVI;
}

Put whatever you like in template.avi and template.mp3

Not only spam

[riotstarter]

It constitutes stupidity and makes them hated by even more people (is that possible?). If it happened to me I'd be very pissed, especially if it happened in my workplace.

Groundless legal threats

[PitaBred]

I'd hope there was something in Australian law that allowed them to sue for groundless legal threatening. An automated lawsuit threatening system... welcome to America!

Re:Groundless legal threats

[dissy]

Actually the one nice thing about the safe harbor provision for ISPs is that the ISP has the ability to deligate a DMCA contact at their company, and the provision specifically states the notice -must- be delivered to this contact.

The way we handled this at the ISP I used to work at was, on the main webpage, as an image of course, was a message stating all DMCA and copyright notices must be sent to [address here] which was an address at our domain which forwarded directly to our lawyer and not us.
We also had to file this address somewhere, I believe the copyright office, but I am not sure on that detail as it was our legal department that handled it.

If a bot is doing whois lookups for an email and it is sent to one of the addresses we get at the NOC, the letter can be legally ignored.
If its not sent to the specific address, we have not been notified as per the safe harbor provision and thusly have a legal defense.

In our case, one would have to go to our website to look for contact addresses, and look either on the main page or the contact page to find the right address.
Any emails like that sent to us were ignored.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID 129

The above URL is the only quote I can find at the moment, but it states:

In order to facilitate the notification process in cases of infringement, ISPs which allow users to store information on their networks, such as a web hosting service, must designate an agent that will receive the notices from copyright owners that its network contains material which infringes their intellectual property rights. The service provider must then notify the Copyright Office of the agent's name and address and make that information publicly available on its web site. [512(c)(2)]

Seeing as we did get a large number of claims of copyright infringement sent to our staff and support addresses, and to my knowledge our legal team never mentioned any, it looks like both bots and stupid people don't look up the correct address at all.

MPAA of America or Australia?

[hughk]

What is the MPAA doing trying to get a take-down notice against an Australian entity anyway? They do not even have rights to the films in Australia, having signed them over to the distributors there.

I wonder what the MPAA found? A tar.gz file, an rpm? If their agents are so idiotic to chase after something called python-twisted-1.3.0-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm without checking if it is a film then they should be made to suffer by forcing the issue into court. Let the MPAA engage a lawyer in Oz and and then show them to be wasting the court's time.

Re:MPAA of America or Australia?

[Cred]

What is the MPAA doing trying to get a take-down notice against an Australian entity anyway?
As far as I know, the free trade agreement between the two countries pretty much makes sure MPAA & friends have similiar power in Australia than they have in US.

Re:That does it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone else already had this idea:
http://www.xzzy.org/warez/

But they're actually just .jpgs of kittens :-)

A more interesting question...

[Todd Knarr]

A more interesting question is whether a takedown notice from a party who does not own the copyright on the material in question and who, given the nature of the material subject to the notice, could not reasonably have believed they owned the copyright constitutes illegal interference with the right of the copyright holder to distribute his works, and if so exactly what civil and criminal penalties does the law prescribe?

Re:That does it!

[Jason1729]

How about creating a video in povray of a matrix of objects being. Call it MatrixRevolutions.avi and host it on your site. Make sure your site has clearly posted TOS that the MPAA and RIAA and all associated and employees are prohibited from accessing your site.

Why stop there?

[kgbspy]

While they're on a roll, they could always go after the writers of Python with infringement takedown notices.

In light of the above, it wouldn't be all that farfetched, would it?

Heres a few more MPAA

[polyp2000]

(lynx)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0392368/

(windows)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081759/

(more)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0188913/

(nero) (if thats not a prime candidate ?)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104983/

I spent five minutes finding that lot - sure there are many more. Methinks this is just anti-linux FUD again from the Microsoft Puppet Association America.

The worst part

[Ghostgate]

The worst part of this are two very big lies.

When they send out these bogus takedown messages (which has been happening often lately), they will claim they are acting on some kind of "good faith" belief that the work is copyrighted and should not be distributed. LIE. They are simply doing keyword searches and auto-spamming people when download matches come up.

Then, they will claim that they are acting on behalf of the copyright holder of the work. LIE. The work in question is not really a film, so they are NOT acting on behalf of the real copyright holder of the item in question.

If you ask me, they should at the VERY least be legally liable for the second big lie, and be forced to pay some kind of damages every time they send out something this blatantly false.

This is ridiculous and it has to stop.

Re:What it proves

[surprise_audit]

Why wouldn't you at least have real people double checking for false positives?

Errrm, because you'd have to actually pay them?? Don't forget that motion picture studios aren't in the business of giving money away, which is why, through creative accounting, no movie shows a profit. Never mind the umpteen bazillion dollar box office take on the opening weekend, somehow the expenses almost exactly match the costs...

IIRC, that's how they screwed over the original artist who drew (and owned copyright on) the original Spiderman comics. He was offered, and accepted, a percentage of the profits, which turned out to be almost worthless. Or something very similar - it's been a while since I read that.

another sad/funny example...

[Anonymous Coward]

to see more of this hilarity in action, see the recent copyright infringement notice sent to scene.org

http://www.scene.org/showforum.php?forum=5&topic=4 0047

" But it is kind of flattering for them to think that the demoscene coders now have found a way to pack 1 whole tv series episode into a ~30KB file :) "

Using meta tags as bait

[eelriver]

I wonder how long it would take for the MPAA to get a hold of me if I inserted "stolen movies" or "national talk like a pirate day", etc into the meta tag of every web page I code?

Re:You mean...

[wheany]

Not to mention "speed." I just read that one guy recieved a letter from MPAA for downloading Super Metroid speed run.

Quote from the letter: "Also, we hereby state, that the information in this notification is accurate and that we are authorized to act on behalf of the owners of the exclusive rights being infringed as set forth in this notification."

What I dont get ...

[polyp2000]

Is that I find it trivial to find illegal copyright movies using suprnova and bittorrent (thats pretty common knowledge) - Now judging by the fact that they dont bother checking filesize or content (as we have seen demonstrated today) how come they havent come down on suprnova to take down .torrent files that contain the name of copyright works? I know that most p2p get around the "storing on a central server" issue by splitting the file into tiny pieces that no one person is offering the complete file at a single time. Judging by the evidence the mere fact that a file contains the name of a work is enough. So how come they havent c&d'd suprnove et al yet? ( its not exactly difficult to stumble accross)

Re:What I dont get ...

[moonbender]

I'm sure SuprNova has gotten numerous letters from various copyright holders and their proxies. But using the name of a copyrighted isn't illegal by itself, as this story has shown once more, and SuprNova will probably claim their files are, by themselves, just as innocuous as the ones hosted by Linux Australia.

I know that most p2p get around the "storing on a central server" issue by splitting the file into tiny pieces that no one person is offering the complete file at a single time.

Not really. Most recent P2P schemes - eMule and Bittorrent in particular - have huge sites dedicated to them. Those sites manage to survive because they are (arguably) not hosting any copyrighted works, not even tiny pieces of them. They just host checksums in the case of eMule, or files containing checksums and network data in the case of BT, which other people do use to copy protected works. The latter is still quite illegal, no matter how tiny the pieces are, and after all the purpose is to have the whole thing in the end, and not just pieces of it.

Note that the biggest eMule site - Sharereactor - was taken down by the authorities and the owner is facing serious charges. I don't know what exactly is the state of that trial.
As far as I am aware, the whole "storing checksums is legal" thing has not been tested in court yet. From a technical point of view it's sound, but from a different point of view it's ridiculous: you're effectively linking to copyrighted works, the technical details on how the files arrive on your computer are irrelevant, could be HTTP (as in the geocities-hosted Warez of yore), FTP or it could be a distributed channel like P2P. As I said, two different ways of looking at it.

Judging by the evidence the mere fact that a file contains the name of a work is enough.

Enough to trigger those idiotic search engine/FUD spam programs they use. Not enough for anything else.

Billing the MPAA for your wasted time?

[kurisuto]

If I got hit with one of these incorrect letters, I think I'd write up a bill at a typical consulting rate for the amount of my time which the MPAA used, and send it to them.

When the MPAA sends you an incorrect notice of copyright violation, there's a cost to you for your time for investigating the claim and searching your machine for potentially offending materials.
They're effectively shifting the cost of doing a more careful search to you.

Of course, they wouldn't cough up the money without a fight, and the fight would not be worth it if the only thing you wanted was the small amount of money. But if even a few people chose to go thru and fight it and set a precedent, I'm sure that the MPAA would start being more selective with its letters.

Doesn't US lawyers have anything better to do?

[madsatod]

Harassing people outside the US with the DMCA and the like. When will they get, that US law only applies in USA? I think these swedish guys speak for all of us, when they say 'go fuck yourself' to these fuckers:
http://static.thepiratebay.org/dreamworks_response .txt
See more responses to meaningless legal threats at:
http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/

Spam my bloody arse!

[Pan T. Hose]

"An interesting question that the article raises is whether automatic takedown notices based on blind keyword searches constitutes spam."

Spam my bloody arse! Those incompetent imbeciles from MPAA wish it was spam but this is in fact extortion. I have actually made some of my holiday movies available as files named "star_wars_dvd_rip_divx.mpeg" etc. and I honestly hope to sue those bastards as soon as they dare to send me one of those pathetic "automatic takedown notices."