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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."
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.
"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 :) .
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.
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!
Not really, stealing a car is straight-up theft no matter whose car it is (even a family member's, if you don't have their permission). It's a bit different when a copyright holder is saying "Hey, downloaded our copyrighted material for free! Simply writing this statement is us giving you written permission to copy my copyrighted material! BTW we're going to scan your computer for files and store in our big database about everything you've got on your computer!" ...
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.
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.