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MPAA Violates Another Software License
Journal written by Alien54 (180860) and posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 18, 2007 01:46 AM
from the that's-a-little-cold dept.
from the that's-a-little-cold dept.
Patrick
Robib, a blogger who wrote his own blogging engine called Forest Blog recently noticed that none other than the MPAA was using his work, and had completely violated his linkware license by removing all links back to the Forest Blog site, not crediting him in any way. The MPAA blog was using the Forest Blog software, but had completely stripped off his name, and links back to his site. He only found about it accidentally when he happened to visit the MPAA site.
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Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't it be nice to send the friendly folks from the BSA to do a complete software audit of the MPAA?
Maybe an auditing circle-jerk could be set up: the BSA investigates the MPAA, who investigates the RIAA, who invesigates the BSA, etc. ad nauseum, and they could just leave the rest of us alone.
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Funny)
Their circle is already a bunch of jerks.
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The screencaps show very little detail
2) "Dan Glickman Forum" from the screencaps turn up nothing in Google.
3) The line provided http://www.mpaa.org/blog_default.asp doesn't exist, isn't found in google OR the wayback machine and the home page back in September 06 looks very much like it does today - I don't find any obvious links to this.
If the MPAA accuses me of stealing files they had better produce some evidence and I damn well expect (not that they desterve it) that evidence has to be provided on this.
Of course my Google skills might not be up to snuff - but come on community, find the evidence while it still exists - if it did at all.
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117931921.html?
Now, it's possible that he was lazy and just dumped an article he was paid for straight into his BLOG, but it's equally likely the screenshot was faked using data that was already out there.
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Informative)
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Since they've admitted to having done it (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm certain their own seizure subpoenas could be referenced for precedent and legal justification.
But I Am Not A Lawyer.
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Informative)
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True, but not exactly true - follow up needed (Score:5, Informative)
-Em
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Re:True, but not exactly true - follow up needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, well they had it set up on a public-facing web server, accessible by anyone. You don't test software on a public server. Given that the MPAA is not exactly known for being a forgiving bunch, I don't think their excuses amount to much. If they had some public goodwill, I could see giving them a pass on it, but they seem to feel so strongly about copyright infringement that it just wouldn't seem right to let them off on this. I'm sure they would agree, right? If copyright infringement is so terrible, surely they should be facing a really hefty fine here, right? Maybe some jail time? If they're going to insist on strict enforcement, then they had better get their own affairs and people under some seriously tight control too.
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Re:True, but not exactly true - follow up needed (Score:4, Interesting)
So the actual reality is closer to this idea, that if you really want to hurt organised crime, you a far more morally compelled to pirate media and distribute it for free and as a result, cut off a substantial portion of their income.
As a bonus, just think of all the 'artists' (well at least in their own minds) you will be saving from a life of drunken, drugged up depravity ;-) (instead they will look forward to long healthy life as food service professionals and as a double plus, we get to avoid the endlessly monotonous exposure to their aberrant behaviour).
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:5, Informative)
1) The screenshots show as much detail as possible, I can/could only view the output of my system and not the source.
2/3) I came across the blog through my website referals when they accessed the RSS feed from my site. The site was live and online but I'm unsure whether it was ever linked to or if it was spidered by google, but it was on a live web server that was accessable by any member of the public. It has been removed from their web server since the article was written after some dialogue between myself and the MPAA.
I have been in communication with Paul Egge and Richard Kroon (Director of Application Development) at the MPAA and have copies of all of the emails that were sent.
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Re:Maybe they should be investigated som more (Score:4, Interesting)
http://blawg.bsadefense.com/2006/12/bsa_timeline.
Personally, I'd be tempted to farm out the communication with the BSA to the chaps who write the responses for the Pirate Bay. . . .
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Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, come on. 150 pounds is not $97. 97 pounds is $150.
Besides, he could go after full penalties now, which is significantly more than 150 pounds. Sure, it's nothing to the MPAA, but still, it doesn't look good that they do so much to enforce IP then they lose in court for similar violations
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Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
No no no. It has nothing to do with the cost of the albu^H^H^H^Hsoftware. You see, since they didn't pay initially, they should have had a link. And if they had placed a link, then there would have been more users of Forest Blog, and thus they are liable for each user who did not use Forest Blog because they were missing the link. Therefore their liability should be $97 times everyone who has visited mpaa.org, and thus was a lost customer, plus punitive damages of $150,000 per page that should have had a link.
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Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporate criminals are clever enough to distance themselves from all crimes they oversee. They're going to release a statement about how this page was handled by some lowly contractor, who takes all fault, they removed it as soon as it was found, and walk away clean.
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Re:Well, not anymore... (Score:5, Funny)
O
/ \
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Its sorta legit.... (Score:5, Interesting)
short of it is:
MPAA Response:
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Re:Its sorta legit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Its sorta legit.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual point of the software is to be used by large number of people to read/respond to postings - this was not done in this case, just an internal mock up of a site (which of course should not have been posted on a public website, but still).
And despite my dislike of all things with AA in the title (sorry AAA, aardvarks) and given our collective thirst for revenge against THIS *AA, it does not seem to be THAT outlandish to use the software in this way, and even the author of said software agreed.
-Em
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Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Should you happen to rent or buy This Film Is Not Yet Rated [netflix.com] the "incident" discussed in-thread is detailed during the audio commentary (by the film's director and producer) and again within a deleted scene (the phone call from an MPAA lawyer that informed the director of unauthorized copying was filmed, though the MPAA's half of the conversation was not directly recorded).
In a nutshell, the director had submitted the film to the MPAA for ratings review and was told that no one other than the raters would view the tape provided. He was also told that no copies would be made of the supplied materials. It came to pass that members of the MPAA admitted to not only screening the film for several non-raters but also to making at least one complete (and unauthorized) copy of the supplied tape.
Wikipedia covers this same ground [wikipedia.org] though that summary is about as lacking as mine in terms of substantive references.
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How hard is it to check the license? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, this is like the futility to pointing out that MPAA or RIAA heads' family members pirate content. At the end of the day, what are people against the copyright lobby fighting for? Some say downright incorrect prosecution, which obviously happens, but underneath it all, its the result of a lack leniancy and less strict laws. The only reason that breaking a "Linkware" license is news is because of it highlites that copyright laws are, in the end, only selectively enforced, not because of some organizational hypocricy. The hypocricy basically is unintentional, and to me, thats really what the problem is. Its not some blatent flogging, its just the old adage of the impractibility of ensuring that those around you practise what you preach. Getting onto that soapbox and being adamant about how you live your life is in no way an argument against an organzation that is hypocritical for the very reason that it is not one single person but a large organization of people. Its like some company saying that j-walking in all cases, always, everytime, hurts their bottom line; it'd take you less than 10 minutes if you had full access to everyone at a company to spot apparent hypocricy, but that wouldn't be the time to point out, "Hey, *I* don't j-walk." Its not revelent, because at some point, the eagerness of enforcement is more relevant than the actual law.
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Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the age of digital copies, strict copyright law is unenforceable.
Regular theft leaves evidence behind - the stolen item is gone - you know you have been robbed. Stealing a copy of something leaves behind no evidence. If you do not know it has been stolen, you can not even begin to start looking for the thief.
Someone is likely to pipe in that there is evidence of theft - the stolen item/copy itself. Before that someone starts piping, ask yourself just how many crimes are investigated because the cops found a guy with stolen items versus how many are investigated because something went missing? I am going to SWAG and say at least 1:10,000 maybe even 1:100,000, which is about as good an example of unenforceable as you are going to get. Of course those 1 out of 10 thousand cases have about a 100% success rate, but that's only because the crimes are already solved by the time they are discovered.
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Re:How hard is it to check the license? (Score:5, Insightful)
Over and over.....copying is not stealing. It is copying. There is a difference. The powers that be LOVE when people call copying stealing. If I steal an object - you no longer have the object. If I copy an object, you still have the object. Copyright is a givernment granted monopoly so what I am doing in copying is ignoring your monopoly. What I actually do with that copy then defne the damage that potentially could occur to your income from that copy.
I grew up copying my friends albums on tapes. We all bought stuff, but no one bleated then about stealing. We called it sharing.
How many people out there are buying NOYTHING and only aquiring music via copying. Very few I would imagine.
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It looks like a replay (Score:3, Insightful)
Who's laughing now! (Score:3, Funny)
Civil (not criminal) (Score:5, Insightful)
As a civil issue ( the only other legal avenue ), you can only hope to obtain justice through the courts. It will cost $1000's to get a judgment, perhaps $100,000's. There is no justice. All we have is persecution it would seem with the powerful pretty much doing whatever they like with impunity.
While its not fair, the question any prosecutor is going to ask is if spending the taxpayers money on this is a good idea. Of course, spending the taxpayers money prosecuting a person charged with a traffic incident is always considered a good idea because its cheap (usually) and meant to keep the sheep in line and paying the fines.
Am I a cynic?
Contact MPAA about piracy (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.mpaa.org/ReportPiracy.asp [mpaa.org]
Please feel free to let them know about their own transgressions.
Here's the MPAA response: (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I must say I'm surprised;to after getting no response to my previous emails to the MPAA about their use of Forest Blog at the tail end of last year I got a result within five hours this time, unless they were just replying to the original email?
Anyway, thanks to Paul Egge and Richard Kroon the situation has now been resolved and they've removed Forest Blog from their web server.
Re:Here's the "/." response: (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of the targets of **AA action were afforded the opportunity to just say the same thing - "okay, sorry, I took it down, and it wasn't really meant for public consumption anyway, so we didn't do anything wrong", as opposed to being on the wrong end of a settlement demand?
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MPAA existential dilemma (Score:5, Insightful)
As it is now, the MPAA appears to exist for the sake of making lawsuits; its profit is based on the success of the lawsuits, and it is presumably paid by its members the startup cash needed to hire all those lawyers, to generate enough income to eventually make the lawsuit engine self-sustaining. Sounds like Microsoft/Baystar and SCO doesn't it? Or a recent RAM patent company?
When Sony embeds a rootkit they get clobbered with bad PR, and when EMI's copy protection sucks they get clobbered. Conversely, when EMI considers removing all copy protection they get even more, positive, PR. But when the MPAA sues soccer moms, the record companies seem to be wearing some kind of armor. All the bad PR sticks to their stalking horse, the MPAA. (Which like JASRAC in Japan has been the number one impediment to online distribution.)
I say the MPAA is a menace to the public and serves no purpose other than to make frivolous lawsuits on the behalf of big record companies while insulating them from the media. It does not exist to protect authors at all, but rather seeks to cause enough mayhem to scare people from trying other distribution mechanisms, by grabbing "rights" that never previously existed for music before the digital age. This is remembered well by anyone who grew up with cassettes or 8 track tapes.
I posted elsewhere in this thread that the MPAA's logic should be used against them to generate a huge award for the theft and performance of the Forest Blog software for a potentially huge number of page views. This model, in which a software author is granted the same rights as a music author, turns software downloading and web page views into something much more insidious than trite torrent sharing, in a legal sense. So I think now is a good time not only to make a legal case against the MPAA, but in fact to start aiming at them with big cannons like RICO and public opinion. Let the record labels do their own dirty work and pay for it individually when their customers get mad.
Update on his site (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the update as well (Score:4, Funny)
ORLY? Note the lack of anything resembling an apology. Also, I must remember that defence when I get a P2P Tax demand from them: "Oh, sure, I copied your memebers' work, but only for testing purposes, and now that I've been caught, I can totally assure you that I intended to buy licensed versions."
Story isn't up to date (Score:5, Insightful)
The Forest Blog Author retorted, in his update to this story, that he doubts they would have been so kind if he 'borrowed' some movies for 'testing' purposes but never distributed them to anybody. He makes a valid point.
The entire trial over those dvd-codec software coders was based on them 'circumventing' a DVD's protection mechanism - it had nothing to do with them actually committing piracy, and were it not for the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act the MPAA would have had no case at all. Essentially they sued and won, establishing for the first time in history that you can purchase intellectual property but essentially not have ownership of the rights to even use it, however you see fit.
Remember that all laws previous to the DMCA were to protect against piracy, (bootlegging, distribution, etc). But now the DMCA actually limits your freedom of use, even for personal use. And it's been proven. If they can do that, why can they abuse fair-use of software they essentially got just by agreeing to it's terms of use?
I say he still send his case to the EFF and hope that they can use something in this as ammunition against the MPAA.
---
DMCA Doesn't Protect Against This! [douginadress.com]
DMCA (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't fool yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
The MPAA and RIAA are concerned about nothing more than maximizing revenues for the organizations they represent. Period.
The mention of the artists is only to make it appear as if the MPAA and RIAA have some sort of noble purpose. The MPAA and RIAA represent the media content industry executives, not the artists.
Re:Middleman? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Apply MPAA logic (Score:4, Insightful)
It might be, if it were even possible. You can't sue anyone for copyright infringement in small claims court. There is exclusive federal jurisdiction for copyright suits, which means you'd have to go to federal district court.
Equate software to music. Equate running softare or viewing a webpage as a "performance" in the legal sense.
First, why? What possible advantage would that get you? Second, that is not likely to work. Merely running software could only infringe the reproduction and perhaps derivative rights, but there's an exception under 117 which may well be applicable here. Viewing a webpage is pretty much reproduction only. Having a globally-accessible webpage could be considered a performance or display (depending on precisely what it consisted of) but the present caselaw leans toward distribution instead. But it could be a moot point anyway; this author didn't write the web pages at issue, he wrote the program used to write the web pages. Portions of the page are based on his work, but probably not enough, given the whittling-away effects that a decent lawyer could achieve by using things like merger and scenes a faire, to matter much.
Since the license costs about $100, calculate based on a 300% markup over a $35 average MPAA cd price. The sum will be punitive damages for theft, plus the 300% of what the MPAA sues for a song, plus the price of a "performance" multiplied by the number of visits to any of the blog's pages, based on the evidence of the MPAA's server logs which is must produce in court. Although this sounds over the top, it is simply using the same non-common-sensical strategy the MPAA is using in court, and I think a judge and jury might just see justice in that, or at least a reason not to throw the case out.
No, it sounds utterly moronic.
There are two ways to compute damages for copyright infringement suits. First, you can get actual damages and profits. This means you get money in the amount you were actually damaged (in this case a paltry sum, since the software was available so cheaply) and also in the amount of net profit realized by the defendant that is attributable to the infringment (Gross profits, and profits that are attributable to other sources don't qualify). Since this is MPAA's blog, there are likely to be no awardable profits. Maybe $1 as a token sum.
The other way is statutory damages, which range from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, and can go down to $200 or up to $150,000, depending on certain factors. But you have to have registered your work within a certain time limit in order to be eligible for this, and although I don't know either way, I'd be willing to bet that this work wasn't registered within the time limits. That means these damages would not be available.
RIAA does bother to register their works, however, which is why they routinely ask for the maximum amount of statutory damages ($150,000 per work infringed) which can add up if you infringe on a lot of works.
The crap you're talking about is just that; made up crap without a basis in reality. You don't get to arbitrarily name figures and multiply them by whatever. And there isn't even any such thing as punative damages in copyright, so that's out the window too. RIAA has a solid basis for what they do, even if you don't like it and don't understand it. You don't.
I think this ought to net a nice award for the author.
The reality is that this is probably not worth suing over; the author would probably lose money or at best break even. The best strategy is probably to write a nasty letter and then ignore it. A victory wouldn't be hard to get, but wouldn't be worthwhile either.
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Re:Oh, the sweet paradox for Slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about whether or not anyone supports or opposes copyright law. The MPAA has claimed in public that copyright infringement is immoral and unethical. Their motivation for doing this is obvious: If they inform the public that some action is illegal, while the public thinks there's nothing wrong with the action morally and ethically, then they risk having the law changed to reflect the public's opinion. Convincing people that they have the moral/ethical high ground ensures that they can continue to benefit from the current legal system, or even lobby successfully for stricter measures in their favour.
Remember their ad campaign:
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A HANDBAG
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A TELEVISION
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A DVD
DOWNLOADING PIRATED FILMS IS STEALING
The message that they are obviously trying to advance is that copyright infringement is stealing, and therefore is immoral, unethical, and illegal. However, their blatant disregard for the exclusive legal rights of others under copyright law demonstrates the hypocrisy of this claim to the moral and ethical high ground. It shows that even the people behind the MPAA are not themselves convinced that the issue is as simple as "copyright infringement is stealing". How, then, do they expect the rest of the public to be convinced?
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No, we get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
We want to remind the MPAA that "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." If the MPAA wasn't complaining about other people's copyright infringment, then I wouldn't complain about its. But it is, so I will. Get it?
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Re:so what ? - his theoretical loss is only 25 pou (Score:5, Informative)
First, the fact that MPAA violated his license. According to the DMCA under section 1204 penalties range up to a $500000 fine...
Next, each visitor to MPAA pages could have been a POTENTIAl licensee of the software. This POTENTIAL was lost by the author since no link backs were provided. Assuming a good lawyer subpoenas' MPAA website administrator and gets a total of number of visitors to the page(s) from date of violation till date of verdict, takes a very conservative estimate that atleast 50% of the people visited could have licensed the software, (same calculations that MPAA uses to send take-down notices and suits for damages), the author can easily claim atleast $1.2 million.
Now, once the case goes to court, by that time it has been proven MPAA had violated his copyright. The judge would have no qualms declaring MPAA guility under DMCA. The second play is for more damages outside the $5000000 fine.
If only 1,000 visitors visited the site since the day of violation the fine would stand reduced, however i bet it is more.
A more serious lawyer can pursue it even further and argue that since the MPAA in its role as a guardian of digital copyrights has ITSELF violated the DMCA (thus a case of fence eating the flock), it must be criminally tried and asked to pay a more amount as fine to the poor author.
One sympathetic judge is enough to screw MPAA in this case.
I would say, first get a GOOD lawyer.
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