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MPAA Makes Unauthorized Copies of DVD

Posted by Zonk on from the pot-i-would-like-you-to-meet-kettle dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a story on ArsTechnica about how the MPAA has admitted that they made unauthorized copies of a movie. That in itself is a bit of tasty hypocrisy, but if it turns out that they ripped a DVD, then the MPAA could find themselves in violation of the DMCA." From the article: "According to Mark Lemley, a professor at the Stanford Law School, the MPAA may have been within its rights to make copies of the film. Given that the MPAA's intent isn't financial gain and that the whole situation may rise above the level of trading barbs through the media into legal action, making a copy may be justified. Personally, I can't see any justification for an organization such as the MPAA ignoring a directive from a copyright owner, but IANAL." Update: 01/24 19:52 GMT by Z : Made title more accurate.

2 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Bah, that's nothing. by Lars+T. · · Score: 5, Informative

    In Europe, there was a police raid on a couple of "Release Groups" today, supported by the the GVU (Geman leg of the MPA). Funny thing is, one of the places searched was the GVU's office, becasue they were actively involved in swapping the movies. Two stories about it (in German) one and two

    --

    Lars T.

    To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

    1. Re:Bah, that's nothing. by Chuckaluphagus · · Score: 5, Informative

      In my mind, this raid on the Hamburg offices of the GVU is even more jaw-dropping than the MPAA copying one single movie and distributing it to employees. Here's my summary, I don't have time to hack out a full translation right now:

      <summary>

      The GVU (The German analog to the MPAA) had its Hamburg offices raided today after a criminal investigation into the German warez scene turned up at least one server and warez group being actively funded by the the GVU. The GVU paid the admin of the server (called "IOH", located in Frankfurt) for access to server logs, sort of as a "honeypot" setup. They were collecting information about warez distribution, but they additionally paid for hardware upgrades to the server as well. The investigation is trying to determine whether they also paid for the bandwidth and additional infrstructure for the server operation.

      </summary>

      I'm sorry, this takes astonishing gall. The article denotes this as a major, high-capacity warez server, which would mean it hosted and handled a huge amount of copyrighted material. It looks to me like a case where the GVU decided "we're the good guys, so we don't have to follow the laws." I can only hope some nice, schadenfreude-laden prosecution comes out of this.