Developer Draws Legal Threat For Exposing Indian Telco's Net Neutrality Violation

knightsirius writes: Indian broadband and cellular operator Airtel was discovered to be injecting third-party JavaScript files into web pages delivered over their wireless networks. A developer was viewing the source of his own blog and noticed the additional script when viewed on a Airtel connection. He traced the file back to Flash Networks, an Israel-based company, which specializes in "network monetization" and posted the source on GitHub. Since then, he has received a cease-and-desist from Flash Networks and the code on GitHub has been removed following a DMCA takedown notice.

Readers may remember Airtel from its previous dubious record with network neutrality.

Comments

Re:Of course, it's likely copyrighted.

[Anonymous Coward]

He can probably one-up them and sue THEM for tampering with his code. I bet if you did something like this to a company's page, they'd sue you, guns blazing like the terrorist you are.
They must know their code gets out there for everyone to see, the way they're doing it. It's trivial that it can be looked at and copied. If it's such a trade secret, keep it out of the public's face.

Re:Of course, it's likely copyrighted.

[hey!]

Well, this is one of those things where copyright law doesn't necessarily behave the way people think it should.

Take the famous case of science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley. For years she encouraged fan fiction in her Darkover universe -- until she wanted to use some plot ideas from a fan story she had read in one of her own novels. The author of the fan story successfully blocked the publication of MZB's novel.

So it's clear that original authors don't automatically get ownership of derivative works. What they get is more like a veto power over various uses the derivative author can put his work to. Actually slinging around the word "ownership" in this kind of context tends to be misleading. Copyright is considerably different from the usual concept of "ownership", e.g., the way that you own your car or your pants. It's actually a kind of legal monopoly on certain activities as they apply to a work. That explains why an interlocking web of monopoly rights can lead to a work being simply unusable; that's a result which violates people's intuition that someone must "own" the work and therefore must be able to do whatever he pleases with it.

In this case the best position for the developer to take is that his posting is covered in some way by fair use.

Counter attack?

[everett]

Perhaps someone should write a javascript library that can detect if this "ad injection" library has been injected to the page, counter/block its effects and display a notice to the viewer that their ISP is up to some jackassery. Now that would have value.