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MPAA Sets Up Fake Site to Catch Pirates
thefickler writes "Media Defender, a company which does the dirty work for the MPAA, has been caught setting up 'dummy' websites in an attempt to catch those who download copyrighted videos. The site, MiiVi.com, complete with a user registration, forum, and "family filter", offered complete downloads of movies and "fast and easy video downloading all in one great site." But that's not all; MiiVi also offered client software to speed up the downloading process. The only catch is, after it was installed, it searched your computer for other copyrighted files and reported back."
Unless an EULA actually states that their software shares your harddisk's contents with another party this it's utterly illegal. Everybody reads the EULA's don't they?
How did you hear about it? I'd be interested in learning how they advertised their existance. Forum posts? I've never heard about this site, and I often frequent the shady parts of town.
So, if they provide free movie downloads, does that mean I can legally keep it?
No. Leave Zeta Jones out of it.
The worst kind would be "The only catch is, after it was installed, it searched your computer for other copyrighted files and reported back."
I've read the article and glanced at many google links and does anyone have any evidence of this other then a quote on a website?
If the MPAA tricked me into downloading a bogus file and stored my ip, well, that would be my fault. Such is life. Everyone who visits my website has their IP recorded too. They have that right.
If the program they get me to download is laden with spyware there are laws for that though. This is the only part of the story that concerns me, and I am sure, concerns them.
First off the *IAA is not a government agent or acting as one.
Second, they are not leading these people to commit the crime. They are just holding the door open. Its like a cop(male or female) can dress as a girl and walk down dark steets at night. If (s)he called out "Come on just try and snatch my purse," to everyone who passed by that might be entrapment, now if you just jump her because she looks like an easy target (s)he can bust your ass and you ARE going to jail.
To the second point, does putting something on a webserver constitue proffering it, or is it just leaving the door open. This is an interesting question because it gets back to who is responsible of distribution when copyrighted material does change hands, the person hosting the file or the person doing the downloading?
I know most slashdot'ers look at it the other way but I have always thought that hosting the files is not the issue, that person has done nothing. The downloader is the one actually making the copy, writing out a new file. This is likely the wrong leagal position though because it would seem contray to most recent laws like the DMCA, the take down notice would make no sense if the above is true. I don't know what if any case law might clarify but the current understanding of legislators seems to be contrary to my view.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If MiiVi.com is distributing movies with the MPAA's permission, then downloaders are ok.
If MiiVi.com is distributing movies without the MPAA's permission, then MiiVi is in trouble.
Either way, something is wrong with their tactic.
any sense of right and wrong includes punishment. however, the punishment must always be less severe than the crime itself. otherwise, you do not have justice, you have revenge
this observation applies to the mpaa/ riaa versus music pirates
this observation applies to social and religious conservatives and why sharia law is wrong/ why homosexuals should be allowed to marry/ etc.
this observation applies to the wackjob end of the liberal spectrum who believe something like 9/11 or bali bombing or 7/7 in london is appropriate response for western cold war crimes, etc.
there's a whole raft of other ideological failures, that are failures simply because they confuse justice and revenge
whatever you believe, if your belief includes responses to perceived crimes that are harsher than the crimes themselves, then that automatically means whatever you believe is wrong, and will fail. this is a cornerstone concept of the validity of any ideology: revenge is not justice. justice elicts support from other people, and therefore is an ideology which can take hold and spread to other people. rvenge elicits no support. it causes others to turn away
and this is why the riaa/ mpaa will never prevail: what they do gets no sympathy. because what they do is worse than music/ movie piracy. it is cold and cruel and therefore without an ability to garner support from the general populace
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Not to defend the RIAA's actions, but I don't know if you can call it entrapment or not. Entrapment, by definition, involves the police persuading you to commit a crime you wouldn't otherwise commit. This is a private entity catching people committing a crime they would otherwise commit. I don't condone their methods, but I doubt you could successfully adopt an entrapment defense."
It's actually an interesting question... The police have successfully put out honeypot cars (attractive and maybe a bit easier to steal than normal) to catch car thieves, and those convictions have been upheld AFAIK.
OTOH, I remember in a community college class on criminal law, they discussed when the cops sent a guy out with 20 dollar bills visibly hanging from his pockets and pretending to be drunk, arresting people who tried to roll him. That was ruled as entrapment because the cops made him such easy pickings as to induce people to commit a crime.
That's why I said I'd have liked to see the site. How much the MPAA/MediaDefender did to lure people to the site and then entice them to download content would determine where it fell on the range from honeypot to entrapment.
-- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
So, they give someone their copyrighted stuff for free and then call that someone a criminal? Doesn't make sense to me :) .
Yeah, Trouble is I also "download" full movies. I do it from this thing called "Broadcast TV" Apparently the movies and TV shows are just free for the taking. My rabbit ears plug into my Mac's Elgato EyeTV and I get nice digital copies of these shows and movies. All for free. And Legal too! I don't understand why "downloading" from one cable (attached to my rabbit ears) should be any different than "downloading" from an Internet site.
In fact they were innocent - the MPAA are acting for the copyright holders, so if they give something away it's completely legal.
Entrapment issues aside (since mpaa is a private organization and does not have the limits put on the GOVERNMENT by the constitution), each one of these scans (if unauthorized) is a copyright violation if perfomred on a computers that contains any sort of creative work (for example a piece of code that someone is working on for their CS101 class). Perhaps mpaa should be reminded what kind of penalty copyright violations carry with them. Reminded, that is, through a subpoena for every instance of such violation.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Plus one crime has no bearing on the other.
You can't say 'I murdered him because he was a pedophile'. You get tried for murder, he (if he lives) gets tried for pedophilia. They're separate crimes.
So they can't say 'we spied on him because he is a pirate' and get away with it. You get tried for copyright infringement, they get tried for breach of privacy laws.
What is the actual legal position on this? If the copyright holder gives you the copyrighted work, then how is it a crime for you to take it?
If I understand this correctly, this is something completely different from entrapment and likely to get the RIAA into serious trouble.
First, if I download copyrighted files from a site run by the RIAA, then this is _completely legal_. What is illegal is downloading such material without permission of the copyright holder. The way this was described, I would have the _permission of the copyright holder.
Second, if the RIAA installs spyware on my computer, they are in deep shit. Especially if there is nothing illegal on my computer that they could use to blackmail me.
'' No they don't. They just can't lie about it, but they sure can tapdance around it. ''
It is absolute legal for a cop to lie about it. If you are say a drug dealer, and you ask a potential customer "are you a cop", that cop can lie about it, straight to your face, in front of a dozen witnesses, and when you try to sell him drugs, he can then arrest you. Perfectly legal.
It's not. Even the summary covers this: The hook was to get people to download the client which searched for "other copyrighted files." Besides, there's nothing in the story to indicate that they actually did let people download real movies. They might all have been dummy files.
I'm guessing because Media Defender don't own the copyright on the works. They're employed by the MPAA who also don't own the copyright on these works. Its probably a convenient way to avoid entrapment or whatever legal or copyright issues giving away the media themselves would involve. Its up to the copyright holder to decide who to sue, but its still a very questionable action.
Although, if Media Defender are financially profiting from illegally offering copyrighted works, I would think they are in a much worse position than any users who downloaded the media.
I'd be more interested in the legality of the software. It is spyware, reporting personal identifying details about the users. Wouldn't this be an illegal search of some kind even with a ridiculously cryptic/solid looking EULA. I Seriously doubt it would be used in court. Its more likely to be useful as someone else said for hard statistics about actual numbers of users. It would be easy to make the data show anything they wanted, as evidence in an attempt to get even more laws passed. I bet also that more than a few users will soon cease downloading possibly illegal media.
If this is an attempt to get evidence for lawsuits/collection letters then I hope any users contacted by the MPAA collection squads do fight, as the number of questionable actions made here would I think make it a very hard case for the MPAA to win. Any filenames, metadata, checksums or search queries collected would certainly not be proof of infringement.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
http://www.baitcar.com/ Police in Vancouver have been using bait cars for years to catch auto theifs. If that is legal, then this would probably be legal.
insight through the mind
In some places it is. When I was younger i was given a police warning for Larceny by finding, because i found a cricket bat which had been sitting on the side of the road for a few days. I picked it up thinking it was abandoned, was reported to the police and given a warning. In this state (in Australia) if you find a wallet, and do not hand it in to police or try to return it, it is theft.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
As for P2P... really, there's nothing risky about P2P. P2P isn't evil spyware bent on corrupting your computer. Some of the content can, sure.. but... well.. that's what you scan files for with an anti-virus app before running them (if you're on a Windows system, of course).
As for people respecting the rights of artists and copyright owners? I think people tend to feel less obligated to organizations that themselves have no respect for the consumer or the artist. Personally, I gladly hand over $10 for artists that I love to listen to. I'm glad to help them out and pay for some great material. But I'm not going to give $20 to Sony or Universal or BMG. Even if their artists were something I wanted to listen to. Frankly, I'd rather do without. But a lot of people see copyright infringement as an underhanded thing to do to the corporations just like the way the corporations treat artists and consumers and fans is often underhanded. They get away with as much as they possibly can under the law or even despite the law. The only difference is, what they do is acceptable and they can get away with it, because they have billions with which to lobby lawmakers and politicians and fund court campaigns while the consumer does not.
The more I think about this the more brilliant it is.
When you download Kazaa, Limewire or most other clients they offer you the opportunity to scan your harddrive for content to share. That information is then available to the network, essentially reporting home.
How can anyone claim, in court, that action alone as being illegal? I posted earlier that if it scanned your harddrive it may very well be spyware and as such illegal, but I think I might be wrong on that.
The same principle also applies in civil cases. If the plaintiff intentionally induced the defendant to commit the act for which the plaintiff is now suing, the court is going to take a very dim view of the suit.
I'm not saying it applies in this case, because I don't know how much "inducement" went on, but the principle is there.
Interesting.
In living in Victoria myself, and have in fact taken a "found wallet" to the police before with no id in it, they gave me a call a few months later(well, a friend who works there did at least) to advise me that since it hadn't been claimed I could submit a request for claiming the funds.
Its not always a bad thing to help, but check your local laws first (remember, ignorance of the law is not a defense).
...
Any discussion about US copyright must start with the fact that these folks have paid lawmakers to subvert copyright to make it effectively infinite: 70years + life of the author, or 95/120 years depending on circumstances. These terms are completely absurd and they change the reasons for ALL the behavior in the marketplace of copyright-protected IP.
There is no rational discussion that can occur about "fair", "legal", "right or wrong", until this time scale for copyright is corrected. It is my opinion that the term should be about 20 years max regardless of circumstances.
As long as the EULA for the software indicates that this is what they are going to do it is fine. If however the say that the software is going to speed up your downloads, it should speed up your downloads. If it does not mention that it also downloads a scanner then it should be clasified as fraud. Just because I install a program that states it will make certain files/information available, does not mean I give permission for every piece of spyware/trojan that wants to access the same information is free to install itself without my permission.
If the file they do let you download is a dummy file when they told you they were giving you a movie, then it is also fraud.
In a court of equity, it's called unclean hands. The same or similar doctrines apply to cases at law (meaning those where you get sued for money damages), depending on your jurisdiction. Also, it may be that there are criminal laws against this sort of Trojan horsery - similar to how the law of false pretenses makes it a crime to obtain title to another's property by false pretenses. This could be considered a theft of computer services and/or a trespass to your computer by false pretenses. IANAL, but it's altogether likely that this kind of behavior can be punished in civil court, criminal court, or both.
I guess you never heard of the problems that book publishers gave libraries when copy machines were first installed.
What if you recorded it simultaneously using two VCRs, and gave someone just one of your copies?
In the UK i think this would fall under the false advertising laws. The fact that they advertise you can get it for free means its perfectly fine for you todo this. They are in fact breaking the law if they says its for free and its not.
So it's time to dig out that old PC from the attic that you don't use any more, wipe it clean, install an old copy of Win98 or something (I assume the spyware/ dl-client is Windows-only) and start downloading! I don't mind it scanning my computer if that computer is one without any other content at all...
You need to understand that there is a difference between law enforcement and a private corporation (or cartel).
Your analogy is incorrect because the societal agreement in America is the police are mandated by the public to enforce laws on our behalf. They can use methods that are above the laws in order to achieve this. A private corporation is not mandated by the public, and therefore not given the ability to break laws to enforce them. This includes the act of accessing my computer without my direct authorization. If a police team drills past my security and finds illegal materials on my computer, with proper authorization (court-ordered warrants) that act is legal. If a MPAA/RIAA funded corporation does it, it is a violation of the law and should be enforced. If a corporation is breaking the law to catch people breaking the law (not to mention that corporation directly profits from catching those criminals), how can we trust that known lawbreaking corporation to be unbiased?
A better analogy would be a private investigator breaking into a house to find out if someone was a criminal.
If your friend burns you a copy of Metallica's CD and gives it to you, it's illegal. If your friend gives you his original to borrow for a day, and you burn yourself a copy while you have it, it's legal.
Stupid distinction, I know. But, you know how politicians think.....
Something I'm not sure about, though.....if your friend burns himself a backup copy, and just happens to give it to you a few days later, I think it's arguably OK, because the copy wasn't made to give to you. But, IANAL, so any Canadian lawyers want to take a stab at that last one?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
As much as I appreciate the funny mod, I was making a serious point here. There has never been a free information utopia. Information is hoarded, especially when it confers an advantage to one group. Whether it be stone cutting, iron (or steel) smelting, beer recipes, gunpowder, power looms, steam engines, hardware architecture, or software, those who gain a political, military, or economic advantage from the technology are very reticent to share.
It just so happens that the industrial revolution made us much better at deciphering other's secrets. It is no coincidence then that the birth of IP law happened around the same time.