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MPAA Shuts Down Town's Municipal WiFi Over 1 Download
nam37 writes with this BoingBoing snippet "The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."
Wow, talk about misrepresenting the facts. I hate the way the MPAA is using copyright law as much as the next digital rights activist. But, for the record, the MPAA didn't take down the network. They just sent their usual infringement notice to the ISP, who then forwarded it on to Coshocton County. The county then made the decision to shut down the wifi service, they weren't ordered to by any judge or MPAA executive/lawyer/asshat.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=117273
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Hate to be pedantic.. but the fourth Geneva Convention (which OP was referring to) sets forth protection for civilians in times of war. Last I checked, there is not a war going on in Coshocton, OH and the MPAA is not a sovereign authority (as much as it might like to be). I always cringe when people reference the Geneva Conventions like this in such an overly dramatic and misrepresentation way.
Another troll by Cory. The WiFi was using a single IP address and NAT. The one connection was shutdown, that's all.
Only applies to content hosted on their network. If the ISP is not directly hosting the content on servers they own, then they have no requirement to take it down. When the content is hosted on the customers system the ISP has no legal liability regardless of claims to the contrary, Why? Because the they can take legal action against the person directly at that point, and they have a legal obligation to minimize the affects. That would be like me forcing LEVEL3 to take down Comcast because one of Comcast's customers is hosting a file for download on a machine outside of Comcast's direct control.
Notice there is no absolutely no requirement to terminate the user.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Actually, it's more a case of something less. This is another Cory Doctorow nonsense-piece. What appears to have happened is that the town had a set up a single shared wifi network running from a single connection which they allowed anyone to use. The MPAA sent a letter saying that this connection was being used for downloading copyrighted material without permission and the Sheriff's office panicked and shut it down.
FOX News doesn't distort the facts for their agenda as much as this guy has. (Well, not all the time, anyway).
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I've found more information on this as well, actually. Far from being a whole town, the wireless network was a free network broadcast for ONE BLOCK around the county courthouse.
So real situation: Someone opens up a wireless network with open access in one block of the town. Someone (very probably) did something illegal with it. The people who pay for the connection get a letter saying there is illegal usage being made of it and decide to shut it down.
The Slashdot Headline and Doctorow Blog:MPAA shut down entire town's Municipal WiFi against their will. Contravention of Geneva Conventions.
This is utter garbage and the editors if they were doing their job would post an update on the story right now.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I suspect that you are mistaken, the wireless hotspot was capable of handling more than a hundred users at once and the county is considering purchasing filtering hardware and software so they can bring it back up.
Obviously you didn't RTFA.
Their "Municipal Wifi" covers a one block area around the courthouse, which probably just means the block that the courthouse is on. That's hardly "municipal". Maybe you can call a single open access point "progressive", but come on... TFA is obviously blowing things way out of proportion.
Furthermore, the MPAA didn't even ask them to shut it down. They simply notified the ISP of an illegal download, the ISP notified the access point operators, and then the AP operators shut down the access points. Basically, the politicians panicked.
No offense is taken by a request for citations. The Coshocton Tribune has a much more detailed article here. It details the area covered by the wifi point (the block containing the County Courthouse), the typical usage of the open network (from around a dozen people a day surging up to a hundred during county fairs held there) and the facts that they had no direct connection with the MPAA, but that Sony Pictures sent a notification of illegal usage to their ISP which then passed it on to the customer who decided to shut the network down. They're response - for a small town, under-resourced considering a network that is a useful but hardly critical public resource, actually seems reasonable. "Let's turn it off and think about what we can do." They're considering whether they need to spend a few thousand dollars (a lot of money for them) on filtering software. (I'd personally counsel them against that as it's merely throwing good money after an unguaranteed solution) Who's to blame for this? Well certainly not the council, and to be honest, not really Sony Pictures which sounds like they just sent one of their standard "you're doing illegal stuff, we know it, please stop and play nice" letters. So really, I think the most to blame for the withdrawal of the free service is the twat that decided to abuse their free service by helping himself to some copyrighted material.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. As you can see, a lot more facts and a strikingly different conclusion to the original "OMG! MPAA are depriving towns of Internet and Geneva Conventions are being violated" blog post.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.