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MPAA Violates Another Software License
Patrick
Robib, a blogger who wrote his own blogging engine called Forest Blog recently noticed that none other than the MPAA was using his work, and had completely violated his linkware license by removing all links back to the Forest Blog site, not crediting him in any way. The MPAA blog was using the Forest Blog software, but had completely stripped off his name, and links back to his site. He only found about it accidentally when he happened to visit the MPAA site.
I am quite sure MPAA would fail in many similar regards if someone would take the effort to investigate.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Apparently they're hiding now. I get a "Page cannot be found" on the MPAA blog...
This is not the first time the MPAA has been caught pirating the copyrighted works of others. They got caught making and distributing copies of This Film Is Not Yet Rated without permission (and after they claimed they did not make any copies).
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
At least *I* make sure that "grep GPL /dev/dvd" gets a match before I copy a DVD.
It looks like a replay of the times when Hollywood was flaunting the Edison patents. Anything new here?
What?
Who's the pirate now, MAFIAA?
In spite of the fact there is criminal legislation in place for copyright infringment, I expect the prosecutors will look the other way and declare it to be civil. This will just be another example of the double standard.
As a civil issue ( the only other legal avenue ), you can only hope to obtain justice through the courts. It will cost $1000's to get a judgment, perhaps $100,000's. There is no justice. All we have is persecution it would seem with the powerful pretty much doing whatever they like with impunity.
While its not fair, the question any prosecutor is going to ask is if spending the taxpayers money on this is a good idea. Of course, spending the taxpayers money prosecuting a person charged with a traffic incident is always considered a good idea because its cheap (usually) and meant to keep the sheep in line and paying the fines.
Am I a cynic?
Here, I suggest contact MPAA about the whole piracy issue and point them to the offending party; themselves.
http://www.mpaa.org/ReportPiracy.asp
Please feel free to let them know about their own transgressions.
Perhaps the MPAA considered it "Fair Use"--after all, they were modifying the pages for their own personal use...
Well, I must say I'm surprised;to after getting no response to my previous emails to the MPAA about their use of Forest Blog at the tail end of last year I got a result within five hours this time, unless they were just replying to the original email?
Anyway, thanks to Paul Egge and Richard Kroon the situation has now been resolved and they've removed Forest Blog from their web server.
If you want the MPAA to hang for this, you must also call for all the movie downloading pirates to hang as well. To not do so would be hypocritical, and having selective morality. It's called "practicing what you preach".
I've concluded that the traditionalist forces and thinkers (read: MPAA, "follow the rules without question simply because they are the rules and everyone follows them") are evolved in such a way as to be unable to adapt once the traditions have been set. Such people simply need to die off more quickly now that the world is changing more quickly thus significantly reducing overall conflict. Rather horrifying, but an unavoidable conclusion.
One respondent to TFA suggested using the MPAA's own logic against them in court. Another suggested suing them in small claims court which is apparently much easier.
I submit that a software author is the same as a music CD author on an artistic level, perhaps more so since he does not have all the studio people to massage his work into something palatable.
If this artist is left on his own, he could make some cash in small claims court, or at least his 150 pound license fee if he is not the litigous sort perhaps.
However I think this is also a very good opportunity for a big guns lawyers supplied perhaps by the EFF to find the paper where the MPAA writes down its killer legal strategies, and tear it up into tiny pieces, much as IBM is doing to SCO.
Equate software to music. Equate running softare or viewing a webpage as a "performance" in the legal sense. Use MPAA rules. Since the license costs about $100, calculate based on a 300% markup over a $35 average MPAA cd price. The sum will be punitive damages for theft, plus the 300% of what the MPAA sues for a song, plus the price of a "performance" multiplied by the number of visits to any of the blog's pages, based on the evidence of the MPAA's server logs which is must produce in court. Although this sounds over the top, it is simply using the same non-common-sensical strategy the MPAA is using in court, and I think a judge and jury might just see justice in that, or at least a reason not to throw the case out.
I think this ought to net a nice award for the author.
When you think about it, SCO has lasted this long because it is like a pathogen that bends the organism that is the legal system to its intent, far beyond the realm of common sense: If they don't show the infringing code it is common sense that they ought not be able to argue beyond that. The MPAA also also exhibits pathogenic qualities; it sues its own customers for such outrageous sums that it is not only beyond common sense, you have to wonder if their worth is based more on legal games than actually what their members sell. Unless we take advantage of such amazing incidents as this one and use their own weapons against them, it will just continue. We now have a chance to stir up some talk about whether the MPAA is also over the top, and what to do about it.
What if someone else violated the license and made a stripped version of Epic Movie available, without any references to the original author? How in general can one tell whether one is getting the original movie with intact copyright notices?
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
P.S. Personally I think there is a major problem with the existence of an industry association like the MPAA and it being able to generate limitless lawsuits against customers on behalf of its members. I say Sony or Toshiba EMI ought to be required to do the suing, and see if they really have the stomach to do it and get caught out.
As it is now, the MPAA appears to exist for the sake of making lawsuits; its profit is based on the success of the lawsuits, and it is presumably paid by its members the startup cash needed to hire all those lawyers, to generate enough income to eventually make the lawsuit engine self-sustaining. Sounds like Microsoft/Baystar and SCO doesn't it? Or a recent RAM patent company?
When Sony embeds a rootkit they get clobbered with bad PR, and when EMI's copy protection sucks they get clobbered. Conversely, when EMI considers removing all copy protection they get even more, positive, PR. But when the MPAA sues soccer moms, the record companies seem to be wearing some kind of armor. All the bad PR sticks to their stalking horse, the MPAA. (Which like JASRAC in Japan has been the number one impediment to online distribution.)
I say the MPAA is a menace to the public and serves no purpose other than to make frivolous lawsuits on the behalf of big record companies while insulating them from the media. It does not exist to protect authors at all, but rather seeks to cause enough mayhem to scare people from trying other distribution mechanisms, by grabbing "rights" that never previously existed for music before the digital age. This is remembered well by anyone who grew up with cassettes or 8 track tapes.
I posted elsewhere in this thread that the MPAA's logic should be used against them to generate a huge award for the theft and performance of the Forest Blog software for a potentially huge number of page views. This model, in which a software author is granted the same rights as a music author, turns software downloading and web page views into something much more insidious than trite torrent sharing, in a legal sense. So I think now is a good time not only to make a legal case against the MPAA, but in fact to start aiming at them with big cannons like RICO and public opinion. Let the record labels do their own dirty work and pay for it individually when their customers get mad.
http://www.patrickrobin.co.uk/default.asp?Display= 5
The MPAA claim that it was in use only privatly and they had no advertising. Good to know. If they ever come knocking, I will tell them I watched the movies and home and never sold them to anyone.
insight through the mind
ORLY? Note the lack of anything resembling an apology. Also, I must remember that defence when I get a P2P Tax demand from them: "Oh, sure, I copied your memebers' work, but only for testing purposes, and now that I've been caught, I can totally assure you that I intended to buy licensed versions."
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In other words when informed they do the correct thing about it.
How many of the targets of **AA action were afforded the opportunity to just say the same thing - "okay, sorry, I took it down, and it wasn't really meant for public consumption anyway, so we didn't do anything wrong", as opposed to being on the wrong end of a settlement demand?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
We want to remind the MPAA that "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." If the MPAA wasn't complaining about other people's copyright infringment, then I wouldn't complain about its. But it is, so I will. Get it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's not about whether or not anyone supports or opposes copyright law. The MPAA has claimed in public that copyright infringement is immoral and unethical. Their motivation for doing this is obvious: If they inform the public that some action is illegal, while the public thinks there's nothing wrong with the action morally and ethically, then they risk having the law changed to reflect the public's opinion. Convincing people that they have the moral/ethical high ground ensures that they can continue to benefit from the current legal system, or even lobby successfully for stricter measures in their favour.
Remember their ad campaign:
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CARYOU WOULDN'T STEAL A HANDBAG
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A TELEVISION
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A DVD
DOWNLOADING PIRATED FILMS IS STEALING
The message that they are obviously trying to advance is that copyright infringement is stealing, and therefore is immoral, unethical, and illegal. However, their blatant disregard for the exclusive legal rights of others under copyright law demonstrates the hypocrisy of this claim to the moral and ethical high ground. It shows that even the people behind the MPAA are not themselves convinced that the issue is as simple as "copyright infringement is stealing". How, then, do they expect the rest of the public to be convinced?
http://outcampaign.org/
Just so everybody knows, this story does have a happy ending. The MPAA responded, finally, to his inquiries after a very long wait - by saying essentially that they were only using his software for 'testing' purposes and that the offending site was never made live, advertised on the internet etc.
The Forest Blog Author retorted, in his update to this story, that he doubts they would have been so kind if he 'borrowed' some movies for 'testing' purposes but never distributed them to anybody. He makes a valid point.
The entire trial over those dvd-codec software coders was based on them 'circumventing' a DVD's protection mechanism - it had nothing to do with them actually committing piracy, and were it not for the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act the MPAA would have had no case at all. Essentially they sued and won, establishing for the first time in history that you can purchase intellectual property but essentially not have ownership of the rights to even use it, however you see fit.
Remember that all laws previous to the DMCA were to protect against piracy, (bootlegging, distribution, etc). But now the DMCA actually limits your freedom of use, even for personal use. And it's been proven. If they can do that, why can they abuse fair-use of software they essentially got just by agreeing to it's terms of use?
I say he still send his case to the EFF and hope that they can use something in this as ammunition against the MPAA.
---
DMCA Doesn't Protect Against This!
Ace
The point of the article and what everyone is hollering about is that the MPAA is not practising what they are preaching. This makes it seem as though they will selectively apply the concept of IP to further their own interests.
Besides, the guy had released the thing for free on a Linkware license. How difficult is it to retain backlinks in the source code? Or even pay the mere 25 pounds he was asking for a commercial license?
"..."
Simply send a DMCA take down notice to their ISP requesting that the site be taken down because it is infringing.
Dekker Dreyer
what hole have you been hiding in? RIAA has been claiming damages to the tunes of %750 PER SONG, I have no idea how much MPAA has been claiming. The point is both about the amount and not about the amount. It's about that the MAFIAA have been claiming that piracy has put such a dent in their God-given right to make tonnes of money, that they should be asking for such disproportionate amount of damage to cover their losses. And YET, when THEY are the ones "stealing" other people's work, all of a sudden, it's not such a big matter? Do you think the MAFIAA would let people get away if they just say that they never put links to the songs they downloaded, they never publicised it and it was purely for personal use?
And a DVD costs what? 12 bucks or so.
See my journal, I write things there
You are wrong. Here's why and also how a Good Lawyer can sue and win atleast 1.2 million dollars from MPAA.
First, the fact that MPAA violated his license. According to the DMCA under section 1204 penalties range up to a $500000 fine...
Next, each visitor to MPAA pages could have been a POTENTIAl licensee of the software. This POTENTIAL was lost by the author since no link backs were provided. Assuming a good lawyer subpoenas' MPAA website administrator and gets a total of number of visitors to the page(s) from date of violation till date of verdict, takes a very conservative estimate that atleast 50% of the people visited could have licensed the software, (same calculations that MPAA uses to send take-down notices and suits for damages), the author can easily claim atleast $1.2 million.
Now, once the case goes to court, by that time it has been proven MPAA had violated his copyright. The judge would have no qualms declaring MPAA guility under DMCA. The second play is for more damages outside the $5000000 fine.
If only 1,000 visitors visited the site since the day of violation the fine would stand reduced, however i bet it is more.
A more serious lawyer can pursue it even further and argue that since the MPAA in its role as a guardian of digital copyrights has ITSELF violated the DMCA (thus a case of fence eating the flock), it must be criminally tried and asked to pay a more amount as fine to the poor author.
One sympathetic judge is enough to screw MPAA in this case.
I would say, first get a GOOD lawyer.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
After doing some similar research, I came to the conclusion it is either a clever marketing ploy by blog author, or more likely some hidden prototype site their web development team was using and as it was never linked from main page, it was never found by any spiders (yet referrers to authors site showed up in his logs, which is exactly how he found out about it), Turns out the latter is the case
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
short of it is:
MPAA Response:
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
The MPAA and RIAA are concerned about nothing more than maximizing revenues for the organizations they represent. Period.
The mention of the artists is only to make it appear as if the MPAA and RIAA have some sort of noble purpose. The MPAA and RIAA represent the media content industry executives, not the artists.
*By 2007, IDC Research expects Internet users will access, download, and share information equivalent to the contents of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times every day.
So, when they sue me for music sharing I can use the following?:
1. No html links were ever pointed to my music
2. My music was never assigned a domain name
3. The music was never advertised to the public in any way (only privately)
4. The music in the file sharing program was a proof of concept and never moved into production
5. The music in the file sharing program was only used for testing purposes
6. Should I have decided to make the move to production, then I would have paid the appropiate royalty fees
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
If as the MPAA says there were never any Web links to the blog, then how did the author of the software stumble upon it? No Web links equals no search engine listings equals effective invisibility to the outside world.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'm certain their own seizure subpoenas could be referenced for precedent and legal justification.
But I Am Not A Lawyer.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't agree with the folks who say he should have sued. He's just a nice guy.
He should have filed a DMCA "Takedown" notice and then sued.
Sauce for the gander and all that....
Perhaps this explanation could also apply to music:
.99 cents that would have authorized me to play a version of the music without internal moral objection.
The Britney Spears music has been removed from my personal computer.
* The songs were never assigned to a playlist.
* The songs were never played to any of my friends.
* The material on the harddrive was a proof of concept awaiting approval to be moved into my library.
* The songs were only ever used for testing purposes.
* Should I have decided that I enjoyed the music, then I would have paid the
Of course, I'm pretty certain that defense wouldn't prevent a lawsuit, as I'm sure the MPAA are hoping it will in their case...