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MPAA Blames Linux Australia Notice on Human Error
rjch writes "According to ZDNet Australia, the MPAA is blaming their recent takedown notice to Linux Australia as 'human error'. 'MPAA spokesman Matt Grossman denied the MPAA's system, which sends out 100,000 notices of claimed infringement on an annual basis was flawed. He said the organisation was not doing blind keyword matching against Internet content and sending out automatic infringement notices without checks, as Linux Australia had previously claimed.' When asked why this slipped through their checks, Grossman told Builder AU 'the answer is a simple human error unfortunately. Everyone has a bad day'. Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails."
Can you really believe that they are going to manually check 100,000 files for legimacy?
I say "Don't come the raw prawn with me, sunshine!". Human error? Perhaps at a very abstract level, ie the motivations of the organisation :)
---
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"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." - David Bradley, inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Del
Wouldn't that be the BSA, not the MPAA?
And since when does the MPAA have authority in Australia? Wouldn't that be the "Screen Producers Associarion of Australia?
Wait... since when has ANYTHING the MPAA done contained some sort of common sense?
Perhaps SCO may choose to oursource their Linux lisence campaign to MPAA. I am sure SCO can't send 100,000 letters an year!
Everybody get's away with human error:
..."
Some guy:
"No it ws human error, I didn't mean to:
- violate the speed limit by 100KM/h
- kill that guy
- steal money from tax payers
- cheat the stock market
- use an aimbot
- attack iraq because I thought they have WMD
-
Judge:
"Oh, if it was human error then law doesn't apply, so it's ok."
Can somebody spell bullshit?
In which case, human error (based on rubbish instructions) would be true.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Yah I am curious what the hell is going on also. I think it looks horrible. The summaries generally shouldnt be more than 3 or 4 sentences, which fits perfectly into a paragraph. This story is only 5 sentences long, yet 3 paragraphs. Yah that makes sense :P
Joseph?
Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails.
An infringement notice is an unsolicited e-mail, last time I checked. Can you imagine someone asking to be sent an infringement notice? Though, I don't think that you could say, "Hey, you're saying I'm infringing and you're going to sue me? Well, I'm going to sue you for sending me an unsolicited email! Ha!" I'm sure some lawyer would take your money to file a lawsuit against them, but I don't think you'd get very far in your case.
My other first post is car post.
And? All it means is that they assigned him a low UID. He is a new editor.
I wonder if a group of recipients of the MPAA cease and desist letters, meaning only those who are not distributing copyrighted material, could band together and sue the MPAA.
The approach might be to start a MPAA victims (again consisting of only those who are provably not distributing copyrighted material) web-site or forum where you could document the MPAA's phishing attempts.
Assuming the reality is as bad as the we're reading about, some lawyer or perhaps even the EFF might offer some pro-bono time to righting the wrongs that the MPAA appears to be committing.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Exactly.
The truth of the matter is, we don't know how often this has happened before because the ??AA makes the accused sign non-disclosure agreements upon settlement. Something which shouldn't be considered admission of guilt, by the way.
The American civil justice system is broke. It operates under the false assumption that all parties have equal legal representation and funding. But that's not even remotely the case when a multi-billion dollar coalition of corporations sues a middle-class citizen for millions of dollars in "damages."
Given this, why should the MPAA care to check the validity of its legal threats? As far as they're concerned, they the only MISTAKE they made was to send the letter to another company/group. Had it gone to the low-income parents of another thirteen-year old girl, we wouldn't even be talking about it. No bad PR--just the life-savings of a person who strayed from the righteous path of consumerism.
-Grym
"Gee sorry, Mrs. Smith, but the officer who shot your dog made a human error. It happens; hey, everyone has a bad day occasionally."
What a crock of shit. IANAL and I haven't really thought through the consequences, but while "stealing" a song may or may not be wrong (let's not go into that argument), its net effect per incident on the "owner" is economically small. Conversely, hitting grandma with a $10k pay-up-sucka-or-we-sic-Joey-da-lawyer-on-you blackmail job, per inicident, has a relatively high economic impact on the target. Think speeding fines in Finland, commensurate with the level of your personal income and wealth.
When someone's committed a crime (once again, without going into whether this is really justifiable as such or not), punishment appropriate to the level of the crime is, well, appropriate. Speed, pay a fine. Kill, go to jail. Usually, even if it's "by mistake".
Governments, as enforcers of law & order authorized as such by the population of a commonwealth (yet again, please don't go into this argument, I think this is a fairly neutral way of putting it) will usually get away with making mistakes as a whole, even if the individual cop who shot Mrs. Smith's dog may suffer personal consequences. Restitution may be in order to the victim, but not consequences as such for the government as a whole.
Private entities have no such privilege of authority. I kill your dog, I probably must make some sort of amends to you personally, as well as suffer possible consequences to myself personally.
Soooo...taking this a step further, when someone's not done anything and is wrongly hit up for restitution for his supposed wrongdoing by a pack of malicious, thoughtless, greedy and unethical baboons (**AA for starts), they should be punished personally. As I would be if I nailed the Smith pooch, even by accident, and be forced to pay restitution appropriate to (a) the level of the wrongdoing committed, and (b) the relative level of nastiness of the wrongdoing.
In this situation, the corporate thuggery, racketeering, blackmail, bullying and generally being a slobbering pack of cunts (not a crime, although it should be) makes for a pretty awful bit of work.
In short, make the fuckers pay. Every time they "have a bad day". Through the nose. With criminal lawsuits and prison if possible.
Grr.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
What's more concerning is that this may open the door for spammers to pull the "accident" route and bypass the law. It wouldn't be a long running business practice, but what's to stop them setting up a shell company, "accidentally" spamming a lot of people, then closing the company up so it doesn't "accidentally" do it twice?
Set up a new company, wash, rinse, repeat.
-- james
... is that someone on the inside is purposely sending out false notices to make them look bad, which is highly unlikely.
Otherwise, you're right, there's no way any rational person is going to see supermetroid-speedrunv3-frenom.avi and think that it is a copy of the movie "Speed". Human error my ass. A bot linked "speed" and ".avi" in the same file, simple as that. Hell, at least this file was 180+ MB. Other times it seems like they are calling out files that are a couple of K and saying they are full movies. Yeah... human error. I guess they mistakenly thought someone had come up with the greatest video compression in the history of computers.
The MPAA's tactics continue to disgust me and I hope that, eventually, someone who gets falsely accused has the courage/money to take it to them for this. At least for slander, or something.
Surely if a legitimate website recieved a letter threatening leagal action when it shouldn't have then the system IS flawed regardless of whether it was a human or machine error.
Besides ultimatly all errors are human errors (if you blame machine errors on the programmer/engineer).
I would strongly encourage anyone who receives a wrongful takedown notice to use whatever legal means are at their disposal to punish the sender for wrongfully harassing them.
Another post in this thread mentioned a fake warez generator tool. Perhaps the mass adoption of random filename generators would be a way of demonstrating that the MPAA is sending shotgun legal threats. To that end, I would encourage the creators of open source projects to adopt a named release policy. For example, Perl 6 could be called "Finding Nemo". Debian could rename their next distribution "Fight Club".
This is not my sandwich.
Actually I find the MPAA the lesser evil, they just send out notices but they don't sue you on the first offense.
May I offer a userful suggestion? Each time you refresh this page you get a different, randomly chosen list of files. Were this an actual warez site, it would have the same list more or less on a given day. My suggestion is to come up with a way of generating the randomness of the page using the current date and the ip address of the client requesting the page, such that refreshing the page with a given IP address will return largely the same list on a particular day. Otherwise their bots would have a fairly easy task (once they catch onto this idea) of determining that the list is bogus.
Keith D.
<cynicism>
Why go to the hassle of setting up a new company every time? The movie companies don't set up a new MPAA every time they repeat this "accident", after all.
</cynicism>
insightful?
These things have happened before and always have been attributed to human error. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made.