MPAA Sues Movie-Swappers

aacool writes "The MPAA has filed a first wave of lawsuits against individuals they say are offering pirated copies of films using Internet-based peer-to-peer file sharing programs." From the article: "The MPAA said it would also make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file sharing programs. The MPAA said the information detected by the free program would not be shared with it or any other body, but could be used to remove any 'infringing movies or music files' and remove file sharing programs."

Re:So...

[TheSpoom]

No, because you'd have to download the program, scan your computer yourself, and probably also choose which files to delete, kinda like a virus scanner.

"The MPAA said it would also make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file sharing programs. The MPAA said the information detected by the free program would not be shared with it or any other body, but could be used to remove any 'infringing movies or music files' and remove file sharing programs."

That said, of course, I wouldn't run a program created by the MPAA on my computer period.

Sweating over whether you'll be serverd?

[Noksagt]

This article cites St. Louis as the first city to receive suits, followed by New York and Philadelphia. Examples of movies: "Troy," from Warner Bros., "Spider-Man 2," from Columbia Pictures and "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen," from The Walt Disney Co.

Re:yeah, right

[SoulOfMyShoe]

Most of the commenters on this article so far seem to think that the MPAA is going to force the program on people. I think it is more that they are making it available as a free download so that people who aren't sure if they are infringing, or parents who don't want to get sued over what their kids download, can find and delete the stuff. The article says that the data uncovered by the program wouldn't be shared with the MPAA or anyone else. It also says that the program will be made available on a website. That is a far cry from virus behavior.

Not that I think it is a particularly useful tactic, but they may get some parents to clean out their kids pirated movies.

Re:Bittorrent block?

[cgadd]

Many ISP's are blocking the default ports that Bittorrent uses. In the very least they are throttling those ports. But you can simply tell your client to use a different set of ports.

Snort?

[bsd4me]

However, as a Systems Admin, it would be nice to have this available to scan my corporate LAN. I am all for file-sharing, but I don't trust users to do so safely and would prefer to protect my servers and avoid lawsuits at work.

Won't the normal snort p2p.rules pick up most of this traffic?

Re:yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

Supposively is not a word. Did you mean supposedly? I'll wager that you did. Please don't make up words, and clean your ears so you can hear how a word is properly pronounced. Thank you for your cooperation.

Re:Snoopery

[fanboy19]

You guys should really read the article. It said the program would be available for parents to download to find music and movies that their kids may have downloaded. It doesn't just bounce around the internet looking for music and movie files.

Easy...

[DAldredge]

Easy, this is a program that you install and run on your own. It doesn't install itself with out your permission nor does it erase anything with out your permission.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it involves terrorism.

Well that's REALLY easy to defeat

[Sycraft-fu]

Go change one byte in the file. Doesn't really matter where, MPEG will at worst just glitch from a bad byte, but there's plenty of places that it won't do anything. Hashes are such that a small change will completely alter the hash (that's the point).

Re:Completely anonymous P2P?

[hacker]

"Great. So now this'll just further fuel the movement of the extremely large file-sharers to move to those P2P networks that are completely anonymous, like GNUNet or Freenet."

..which will then provoke ISPs to be forced to block the ports required by those applications..

..which will then cause the authors of those applications to start tunnelling across port 80..

..which will then cause ISPs to start blocking port 80 inbound (most do anyway, but it will become a mandate).

..which will force users to get dedicated lines to host their p2p resources, and now with the new ICANN regulations, you can no longer hide your identity by using anonymous or false information in your domain record. This means the MPAA/RIAA/PA/DHS have you by the balls anyway.

..and so on. This only spirals downward into an ugly path.

Quote from their press release

[rminsk]

The MPAA also announced the availability soon of a free program that identifies movie and music titles stored on a computer, along with any installed peer-to-peer file-swapping programs. Information generated by the program would be made available only to the program's user, and would not be shared with or reported to the MPAA or any other body. Armed with the program's findings, a computer user can remove infringing movies or music files, and remove any P2P applications.

"Our ultimate goal is to help consumers locate the resources and information they need to make appropriate decisions about using and trading illegal files," said Glickman. "Many parents are concerned about what their children have downloaded and where they've downloaded it from. They will find this tool to be an excellent resource. "

The MPAA's www.respectcopyrights.org site will link to the download site for the Windows-compatible program when it becomes available. The MPAA plans to provide easy access to other such tools in coming months, as demand continues to grow for programs that protect computers from the deleterious effects of peer-to-peer software, including such common problems as viruses, Trojan horses and identity theft.

Re:Completely anonymous P2P?

[burns210]

freenet can run on any port you want. Editable in the config file.

MPAA ad campaigns at universities

[Xref]

I just posted a screenshot of an add the MPAA ran yesterday (Monday) in the school newspaper here at the University of Michigan:

http://adamjh.blogspot.com/2004/11/lawsuits-begin- this-week.html [blogspot.com]

The ad features the usernames and partial IP addresses of peer2peer file sharers, surrounded by bold, red captions reading:

IS THIS YOU?

IF YOU THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH
ILLEGALLY TRAFFICKING IN MOVIES, THINK AGAIN.

LAWSUITS BEGIN THIS WEEK.

It then proceeds to note that:

Pursuant to the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. Section 504(c)), statutory damages can be as much as $30,000 per motion picture, and up to $150,000 per motion picture if the infringement is willful.

*sigh*

Automatic tool deletes Grind-0.1.tar.gz?

[Anonymous Coward]

The MPAA said it would also make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file sharing programs.

I wonder if this will result in more blunders like this one? [slashdot.org]

Not even

[BobPaul]

Then again, it would be a handy program to have if you're expecting a knock on your door from a cops' battering ram.

Heard of the undelete command? How about Norton Unerase or RunTime's GetDataBack?

Even if you did a low level format, it's not hard for a lab technition to recover the data. You'd need something that wrote random data to the entire disk multiple times, not something you could do if they were at your door.

Now a self destructing laptop [mac.com] on the other hand would prevent data recovery.

Re:Sure, so long as

[Baseclass]

Although your logic is sound, I believe the parent's point was that you would be punished to a greater degree for downloading a movie than than you would for actually stealing the physical DVD.

I think most people would agree that stealing a tangable item is worse than downloading a copy of something you would probably never buy anyway.

Re:yeah, right

[Chris-Mouse]

It doesn't really matter. We pay a fee on all blank media, and in exchange, we can freely download music, software, and movies - legally.

You might want to go back and check the Canadian copyright act again. You can find it at: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/ [justice.gc.ca] Section 80 deals with the personal use exemptions. It specifically says that the exemptions only apply to musical works. Software and movies are not covered by that exemption.

Re:Not even

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there's no shortage of secure delete programs out there that do just that.

On my PC once a week I have a scheduled task that runs which runs SysInternal's SDELETE utility to write random data to free space (multiple times per sector), then defrags the HD, then runs SDELETE again (ditto).

'course this doesn't help you if you don't delete the "problematic" data in the first place.

Good Old USENET :-)

[mwilliamson]

Funny thing is I can download a ton of movies right from a time-warner owned server. No, I'm not talking about their "movies-on-demand" system...I'm referring to their very own moviez/warez/tunez service aka usenet. rr.com's usenet feed has it all.

If Time Warner collaborated with the MPAA and attempted to go after usenet users _downloading_ from their feed (the only thing they could track), wouldn't it be some form of entrapment?

Re:Not even

[Carnildo]

That's iffy. The materials a hard drive is made out of don't demagnitize until around 750C.