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Posting Publicly Available URL Claimed a "Hack"
Urban Strata writes "Popular mobile phone community HowardForums.com is being hit with take-down notices from MobiTV. At issue is the fact that a HowardForums community member uncovered a publicly accessible URL for MobiTV's television stream. This URL is not encrypted or authenticated in any way, and yet MobiTV sent site owner Howard Chui a cease-and-desist letter for hosting a forum with the public URL, claiming that doing so is equivalent to hacking their service."
As always, that kind of position is missing the fact that google is technically doing the same thing.
It's not that far fetch: imagine you are googling for your favorite show, and find some url with a video stream; and it's form a respectable "nbc.com" or the like website. How do you guess it's supposed to be a paying service?
Want a real life example? The other day I was looking for some bash command help, and the third google result was from http://www.experts-exchange.com./ If you access it directly, it hides the answers and asks you to pay. But from google, you get to the answers directly because of some glitch.
What I'm saying is you can't blame the user (or here, the website) if they never went through a dsiclaimer page that made them realise: "well, if I click this link, I will have done something illegal". Free equivalent services exist.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
I wonder if they decided it simply wasn't worth the development effort to put their content behind encryption? Maybe they thought litigation against improper access would be cheaper, or at least simpler. With the RIAA's successes in court over the lsat few years, there is some precedent for that idea.
Yes, I know, secure connections are not rocket science. But it's business; the path perceived most profitable is the path chosen.
I concur, just because the door to my house is unlocked, that doesn't mean anyone is legally allowed to enter. IANAL, but this could be a similar precedent.
WRONG! YAdefinitelyNAL!
Entering a house or other property without permission is trespass. Visiting a website is not trespass.
If this were a precedent, people could start suing you just for surfing the web. Visit my website without paying? That's a default judgement for $2500.
Let's go with something that fits the bill a little better. On a hot summer day you run a long garden hose out from your yard on the sidewalk turn it on and leave it running. Then you run an ad in the paper telling people that if they mail you five bucks they can use your hose to get a drink. But one day you notice a neighbor has been telling friends about your hose and they start coming by and getting a drink without mailing in the money.
You've put your resource out in a public place with no restrictions - and they should be accountable?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
In most places, it is illegal to leave a running car unattended, but it is not illegal to borrow something with permission. A sign saying "take one" is an invitation to take one item that doesn't belong to you. They have them at supermaket checkouts. If you are told you can take something, you may take it and it isn't illegal. In the example, the car was running, open, and with a sign indicating that the person should take a free joyride. If the sign can be reasonably assumed to be placed there by the owner (which would be reasonable, since in the example it was placed there by him) then it is perfectly legal to take the car. The only one that broke any laws was the owner, leaving the car running and unattended.
Learn to love Alaska
Did anyone ready the PDF of the letter they sent to Howard . . . in Canada . . . citing the DMCA (a US law?) I don't know where HoFo's servers are, or if Canada has a DMCA-like law yet, but that seems pretty silly and maybe Howard should prep a backup server not in the US just in case. Then write the idiots at MobiTV a funny reply like the guys at the pirate bay do.
Silly MobiTV -- you can't copyright an URL!
everything in moderation
Is it wrong? Yes
WRONG. Based on your scenario we need to get permission from the site owner to visit any web site.
Any web site which is publicly available is de-facto a public web site. This is precedent since the inception of the www. Even if you had a button that said "Do not click unless you are a paid member of this site" you would have no legal leg to stand on if anyone else clicked it.
Everyone is making real property analogies to this. A web site is not a house, it is not a building, it is not a car. If it were, it would be taxed as such and we would all need written permission to visit each site.
For most state laws that I've looked at, if you encounter material that is child pornography, it is not criminal if you immediately report it and surrender it to law enforcement. This happens fairly frequently, and you only get embroiled in legal troubles if it's not clear that you happened upon the CP innocently.
It's also not a crime to be in possession of CP if you did not willfully acquire it and did not discover its presence. You may, however, have some significant legal wrangling ahead of you before that defense is accepted. (For example, one individual was found with an external hard drive containing CP on top of his computer. He claimed that he had purchased it from a neighbor and never used it. Forensic evidence corroborated this story, and so he was in the clear. His neighbor, not so much.)
They made it publicly available. It's the same as watching an HBO broadcast in a store window. If you do something silly in a public location, the public cannot be blamed for viewing it.
Or, even better; there used to be a hill you could sit on in this town that let you watch over the fence into a drive-in movie screen. Is that theft? No; it's just spillover, a consequence of where the theater was located. They are broadcasting into the public space. They could have raised the fence another twenty feet to fix the problem, but they didn't care enough to.
This site could have restricted the accessibility of the URL, but didn't care enough to.
Plus, as a practical matter, they are now the latest idiot of the week on the internet. There is no way this will work out in their favor.