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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).
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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
I suppose that BEING A BUNCH OF ASSHOLES could be construed as a form of human error.
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.
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.
I'm going to start sharing a video of my kid playing and title it "PlanetOfTheApes.mpg".....
These things have happened before and always have been attributed to human error. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made.
Cars that speed themselves up, MPAA sending out false accusations, fradulent voting machines, OS/X running on an Xbox... Madness!