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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 know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
What is this? A change in policy on Slashdot. This can only be for the worse. I am very angry. Rabble rabble rabble (or something).
...but haven't they done this before, in I want to say Europe I believe? Or was that the RIAA, so the mistake's okay?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
MPAA vowes to eliminate any posibilty of human error on their next "mailing" by incorporating high tech tools that will seek out and verify the violations using descriptive meta-data and file naming system. Furthermore any attempts to circumvent this proccess will be dealt with in a strict and obscure manner. We reccomend that you check your current library against known copyrighted work unless you want to get pwnd.
Thank you.
Everyone knows Linux Australia are pirating Unix on a massive scale and owe Eleventy Billion Dollars to SCO for every piece of intellectual property downloaded. MPAA is just doing their duty for the owners IP everywhere.
If that's so, I would be happy to serve any Adult Movie Industry Association for such antipiracy purposes.
I'm certainly no fan of the MPAA, but maybe it might not be a bad idea to give them the benefit of the doubt... this time (then when it happens again everyone can really lay into them full throttle).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Doubtful, but I would need to check.
Is the mail sent of a commercial nature?
"Take this down or we sue." Kinda commercial, if suing people is their business (for the RIAA it seems to be, maybe it is for the MPAA as well).
CAN-SPAM?
Apparently they can.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
MPAA: OMG! You're downloading movies you evil pirate! Why?! STOP IMMEDIATELY!!
Me: Human error. Watch. *Click* - OOPS! Finger slipped!
.. in the subtitles^Wextortion^Wnotices.
Those responsible have been sacked.
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
---
-
"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." - David Bradley, inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Del
Isn't it easier and less expensive to just send the letters by hand? If it was someone other than Linux Australia, they could possibly have a nasty legal issue on their hands (IANAL).
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I can imagine it
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"We accused an innocent group of copyright infringment and threatened a lawsuit, wasting a bunch of people's time and possibly money and causing much emotional suffering, but we're vewy vewy sorry.
That makes it OK, right?"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
See here
Reading it, you can clearly see that their 'human error' is no other than an automated filename scan.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
the answer is a simple human error
Yep, some simple humans made an error.
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.
is more people running this script on their pages.
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.
All the worlds problems are caused by human error it would be a much more stable place without them. In 50 years we should have good enough AI to be able to code ourselves and we can dispose of our carbon based masters.
We don't even have WMDs, nor do we have assassinations of our country's leaders. What makes you think piracy would be any different ;)
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.
I always find it funny that so many ppl think that can spam was about stopping spam. That is nothing than a brain washing via the feds. What it does show is how easy the public can be made to accept anything. Which would also explain our current situation with regards to Politics
As to MPAA/RIAA, I wonder if the public can be taught to accept all of their crap? I fear that they are taking the road of attrition and counting on lawmakers giving into their twisted logic.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"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
I finally got around to scripting a dynamic fake warez site. There are currently 250 movies, but you can add your own to the flat text file. This should work on ANY php webserver.
If you try and download a file, you will get the correct mime-type, and filesize, but the transfer will gradually get slower and slower and it will never finish (well, maybe some day, but its garbage anyways).
Preview: http://ciagon.dnsalias.com/movies/
Source: http://ciagon.dnsalias.com/movies/index.phps
Movie List: http://ciagon.dnsalias.com/movies/movies.txt
Enjoy!
Remember Jam Echelon? Perhaps it's time we all filled our http/ftp servers with files whose names will attract attention but whose contents are completely legal...?
... 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.
So that's their problem. What they should've used is of course pigeons! (Just look at google, they haven't sent out a messed up notice of unsolicited sharing to anyone!)
From many of the previous posts it is clear that the MPAA's explanation of "human error" is bull, so here is what we do:
.avi or whatever.
1. Anyone who administrates a web/ftp site put a fairly big random file on your site that is called >.mpg or
2. Look at the MPAA spam flowing in
3. Wait for the stage where the majority of the MPAA's spam is sent to people who are not actually infringing.
4. Complain to the relevant authorities.
PS It might be a good idea to put a disclaimer with the file so that people looking for movies don't eat up all your server bandwidth trying to download your random file. Even better configure you server to give an error when someone actually tries to downoad the file.
siener's youtube channel
Now as you can see, our legal department consists of many people. After all we need a lot of man power to send out all those threathening letters.
Now, today, Sue here has a bad day. Tomorrow it will be Janet's turn, and the day after it will be Margaret's turn. See that chart over there? Yeah.. we are pretty well organised.
It just so happens that everybody has a bad day. And since our legal department is all women, what if they have a bad day once a month?
These errors are just due to human errors.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
It was supposed to be funny. But after reading it again, I guess I didn't word it well enough! Dang!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
My tarpit scripts are all GPL2'd for your lawbot defeating pleasure.
it took her longer to decide not to go out with me than to process the mail...
Wow! So you said...
"Hey, uh, groovy chick. What say we, uh... check out Star Wars Episode II and maybe we can... have sex?"
And in the split second it took her to reply
"Stay away from me, you Slashdot reading geek-fiend!"
and run out of the building, she was able to prepare the mailing?
I am impressed.
On a side-note, the grandparent mentions delivering letters by hand. Well, I sometimes get charity junk-mail (through my front door) that says stuff like
"Delivered by hand to save money".
Really? That's impressive. My mail is normally delivered by hi-tech robots with penis-shaped tentacles that use suction to hold the letters in place while they deliver them.
Absolutely true; I get nostalgic for the days when the postman used to put them through my letterbox using his hands, but the Post Office prefer to waste money with the latest "Hentai-anime Delivery Bots". Disgraceful.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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).
Dear Anonymous Coward,
According to our web monkey (#134723 known as Eric),
your post contains URL(s) to copyrighted material.
Our gaggle of lawyers informs us that this is ver, very, very, bad. We ask that you remove the offending links immediately and replace them with high-quality flash banner ads that inform the young people to say no to P2P.
Yours Sincerely
Matt Grossman
Yeah, and what happened to Harold Holt? As if that wasn't an assasination ...
Or you can blame the CIA OR the Chinese OR them both (according to some of the thoeries anyway).
Note to self: Gotta take some more of those pills to keep me calm.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
I suppose that BEING A BUNCH OF ASSHOLES could be construed as a form of human error.
Assuming he is telling the truth, I think it's more likely that some kind of scanning software is involved. It'd seem very difficult to either develop sufficiently intelligent software, or to hire people to simply search manually. Even in the latter case, it's unlikely that someone might "accidentally" wander into an open source repository and accidentally assume that a file in the middle of all those other legitimate files happens to be a ripped off movie.
But the intermediate possibility seems much more realistic. My guess is that they have software to do the bulk of the searching and spidering. It probably presents a big list of filenames and perhaps contextual information to a few humans. These people most likely scan down a list checking boxes or clicking buttons on any entry that appears at a glance to be a movie copyright violation, and the pattern-matching system, having received confirmation of the infringement, generates a notice and does the rest.
The human error to which he refers to could quite conceivably be someone simply clicking an incorrect item, or some-such mistake. Just because humans don't run the entire process doesn't mean they can't play a part in it.
I'm not trying to suggest that it should be excused. Chances are that there were a lot more mis-sent notices before this one went wrong. But on objective grounds, it seems premature to write it off on the by claiming that it's impossible for a human error to be involved just because of the sheer volume of infringement notices.
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.
a subpoena would surely reveal if they're using automated software or just hiring fuckwits off the street.
Fellow /.ers unite!
Let's all setup our own download services that keyword scanners will recognize as being illegal -or at least dodgy. Make pages containing words of popular artists ( e.g. Bony M, The Sweet, Mud, Showadywady, Pat Boon, Engelbert Humperdinck etc... ( Oh shit I just gave away that I'm an old fart in a wheelchair. So shoot me! ) ). Then make mp3s/oggs/whatever named like song titles ( e.g. "by-the-rivers-of-babylon.mp3", "dynamite.ogg" etc... ) but which contain the sound of you monotonously repeating the words like in a meditation.
Then let's see how many "human errors" are made by the*AA. And let's also see whether the *AA can cope with this. And let's see how long until they have to change tactics.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
But the machine is fast and has enough moving parts to be interesting.
Rather like the Hentai-anime Delivery Bots, then?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
am mpaariaa.vb mp3 and p2p distribution worm is coming.
that'll make everyone automatically "guilty". and automatically innocent, as it got there by no action of their own.
besides helping the mpaariaa efforts *really* backfire of course
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
While RTFA, I thought "opportunity for google here". How about google create a new service that notifies subscribers as soon as a large file appears on a site that a googlebot happens upon?
People like the MPAA would subscribe, save them writing their own spiders. Google could look inside zips for mpeg or other content, and users, maybe individual studios, could register various keywords such as "hero" or "manonfire" if they liked.
Of course, google would be bound by robots.txt, whereas the MPAA will probably ignore that, so maybe it's not such a great idea anyway.
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Since the MPAA thinks a $3,000 to $11,000 judgement is acceptable for someone accused of 'stealing' music, then I suppose a $3,000,000 to $11,000,000 judgement is acceptable for someone from MPAA accused of fraud and perjury. I figure MPAA is at least 1,000 times the size of the average file swapper.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Or you can blame the CIA OR the Chinese OR them both (according to some of the thoeries anyway).
I blame the Norwegians you know...
I'm going to start sharing a video of my kid playing and title it "PlanetOfTheApes.mpg".....
99.9999% - riiiight excuse or notice threatening to take your business down - it was a mistake. what a load of crap - they should sue these bastards and sue the hard - that is the only language they understand and it will set a precidence. so please, please, please sue these bastards
just like my music downloads are human errors...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
As I would be if I nailed the Smith pooch, even by accident, and be forced to pay restitution appropriate
actually, if you hit someone's dog with your car and kill it, the dog owner is responsible to pay for damage to your car caused by their unleashed dog.
It's the pet owner's responsibility to keep their animal under control and out of the way of cars and others.
Anyways, it takes very little to thwart these *iaa morons. reverse the text,rot13,etc the filename and their search devices will only detect false positives.
Hell, taking one of the spam email harvester poisioner scripts and rewrite it to give pages fill of "links" to movie and song names that are not real. get yourself 30,000 suponeas in one day for fun and profit!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
These things have happened before and always have been attributed to human error. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made.
If their take down notices are generated by a brain-dead automated process, then why don't we all engage in a little civil disobedience? We should all start sharing zero-byte files that happen have the same names as movies. It would be trivial to overwhelm this system with noise.
All of the NES emulator assisted speeds runs that I have seen are utter crap, as they use extremely inaccurate NES emulators and exploit bugs in the emulation to get their fast speeds. One of the worst offenders that I saw was a Zelda speed run. Not only were there numerous graphical glitches, but there were actually gameplay glitches that let the guy not get hurt by his own bomb explosions and at the same time let him plant a bomb on one end of the screen, and as it was exploding he could run across the screen and whatever was near him took the explosion damage... so one bomb could take out a room of baddies AND open a secret.
After watching about 10 minutes of that, I fired up my real NES with a real copy of Zelda... comfirmed that those things were not possible... AND THEN I LOST ALL RESPECT FOR NES EMULATOR ASSISTED SPEED RUNS!
I mean, come on guys, at least use an accurate NES emulator like FCE Ultra.
Whoever modded this offtopic is a cretin--he's right in the particular situation he refers to, but my initial analogy still holds.
And I like the "countermeasures" technique--unfortunately, any such concept applied to p2p networks will end up causing the same sort of shit as the RIAA flooding the airwaves with the eqiuvalent of "10--Like_a_virgin.mp3" that's nothing more than Madonna cussing out p1r8z (1)--i.e. dropping the SNR pretty substantially.
(1) the new, MPAA anti-pirate version has far more artistic merit than the original.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
"Everyone has a bad day."
True, but the rest of us have to suck it up and accept any losses we cause ourselves when we have a bad day. If I have a bad day and forget to come out to feed the parking meter after a couple hours, I still have to pay the ticket. They admit they made a mistake and that it was their fault. They should have to pay Linux Australia for the time wasted reading and responding to the empty legal threat.
In legal matters, saying "oops, my bad" doesn't help. You still gotta pay.
Who do they think we are? Little red riding hood?
Hey, grandma... why are your teeth SO big?
Cars that speed themselves up, MPAA sending out false accusations, fradulent voting machines, OS/X running on an Xbox... Madness!
Are a human error.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The MPAA makes baseless threats and false claims of "infringement" all the time.
It's nothing new.
-r
So we've gone right past blaming the programs and computers and now they're so infallible that people are the problem?
I think I can feel myself slipping from the top of the food chain already.
What the hey!?!
What did we do now?
We're innocent I tell you, Innocent!
Oh - I forgot. The RIAA don't do innocence. Except when it's them spamming of course. It's not spam if it's them.
No, I didn't RTFA, I'm just knee-jerking. Why?
Given the nature of the files they claimed infringed, no reasonable person looking at those files would even have concluded that they were movies, let alone that they were the movies named in the takedown notices. If they're claiming they actually had a human being review the case before sending the letter, wouldn't that make the MPAA's violation of the DMCA knowing and willful? Seems to me that this is a perfect opportunity to tie the MPAA up in a nice double-bind.
Of course, the joke would have been a lot more fun if I'd remembered to include that I'm from Norway...
in the case of the *AA organizations, malice is the way to bet. Malice amplified by stupidity is their usual modus operandi.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Vegemite is _not_ a WMD, it's a nutritious food, part of what makes Australia great. I used to eat the stuff by the spoonful when I was a kid, but I'm not sure I could still do it ...
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Chernobyl was a human error too.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2