MPAA Blames Linux Australia Notice on Human Error 254
rjch writes "According to ZDNet Australia, the MPAA is blaming their recent takedown notice to Linux Australia as 'human error'. 'MPAA spokesman Matt Grossman denied the MPAA's system, which sends out 100,000 notices of claimed infringement on an annual basis was flawed. He said the organisation was not doing blind keyword matching against Internet content and sending out automatic infringement notices without checks, as Linux Australia had previously claimed.' When asked why this slipped through their checks, Grossman told Builder AU 'the answer is a simple human error unfortunately. Everyone has a bad day'. Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails."
automatic checking! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:automatic checking! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:automatic checking! (Score:2)
Re:automatic checking! (Score:5, Funny)
They are rented monkeys from the RIAA, so they use RIAA math, its just two monkeys but they are really really really fast.
Re:automatic checking! (Score:4, Funny)
"They are rented monkeys from the RIAA,
so they use RIAA math, its just two monkeys
but they are really really really fast."
Nah
Two doing the math, and the rest trying to screw in the bulb.
Re:automatic checking! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:automatic checking! (Score:5, Insightful)
So if there are 10 people who get bad notices, did they really send out infringment notices to 10 million people? That is a lot of monkies you need.
Re:automatic checking! (Score:5, Interesting)
If they had that many validated email addresses - they'd be the king of spam !!.
Re:automatic checking! (Score:2)
If they had that many validated email addresses - they'd be the king of spam !!.
Nonsense!!!!
There's Only one King [abc.net.au] of [google.com] spam [zdnet.com.au] in Australia.
Re:automatic checking! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:automatic checking! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:automatic checking! (Score:4, Funny)
No, but I can believe that you didn't manually check all 15 words for legitimate spellings.
Re:automatic checking! (Score:2)
Human Error ? Everyone has a bad day ? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Human Error ? Everyone has a bad day ? (Score:4, Informative)
Multiple paragraphs on the front page? (Score:3, Funny)
What is this? A change in policy on Slashdot. This can only be for the worse. I am very angry. Rabble rabble rabble (or something).
Re:Multiple paragraphs on the front page? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Multiple paragraphs on the front page? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Multiple paragraphs on the front page? (Score:2)
What has bothered me more is the people who submit stories like this:
when it should be:
I know it is silly but the link should go on the verb reports if there i
Human errors will not be tolerated at MPAA (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you.
Re:Human errors will not be tolerated at MPAA (Score:3, Funny)
I didn't mean to make 1000 of my MPAA MPEG collection public. I mean to make 1000 of my Indie artist MPEG collection and movie clips. I have the right to distribute those freely.
I'm sure you'll understand and quietly overlook the incident because you know that we're all human.
Sincerely,
--- Honest Miss Taek Wright
Yeah right. (Score:4, Funny)
In their defense.... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm certainly no fan of the MPAA, but maybe it might not be a bad idea to give them the benefit of the doubt... this time (then when it happens again everyone can really lay into them full throttle).
Re:In their defense.... (Score:2, Informative)
No, I'm afraid this has happened too many times already.
Re:In their defense.... (Score:2)
Re:In their defense.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
The truth of the matter is, we don't know how often this has happened before because the ??AA makes the accused sign non-disclosure agreements upon settlement. Something which shouldn't be considered admission of guilt, by the way.
The American civil justice system is broke. It operates under the false assumption that all parties have equal legal representation and funding. But that's not even remotely the case when a multi-billion dollar coalition of corporations sues a middle-class citizen for millions of dollars in "damages."
Given this, why should the MPAA care to check the validity of its legal threats? As far as they're concerned, they the only MISTAKE they made was to send the letter to another company/group. Had it gone to the low-income parents of another thirteen-year old girl, we wouldn't even be talking about it. No bad PR--just the life-savings of a person who strayed from the righteous path of consumerism.
-Grym
Re:In their defense.... (Score:2)
In which case, it might be to everyone's advantage to go public as soon as the ??AA fires their opening volley. Then either EFF or ACLU could keep a running total of grannies and kindergartners being sued, and list those that settle for "undisclosed sums".
OK, here's a thought - do the ??AAs have to publish their accounts?? If so, would they be able to hide those "undisclosed
Re:In their defense.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just in case anyone didn't see this as satire....
MPAA mistakes various free code in small zip files (all under 64k) as the movie "Basic" and television serial "Alias")4 0047
[scene.org]
http://www.scene.org/showforum.php?forum=5&topic=
MPAA mistakes a file manager for X windows as X-Files movie based on television series.a _iselfhelpi.html
[typepad.com]
http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/09/dmc
ESA mistakes "INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip" as Pac Mac video game.e r
[indiana.edu]
http://gauley.ucs.indiana.edu/~cshields/dmca_lett
RIAA accuses Penn State's Peter Usher of pirating music by rap band "Usher".n g+letter/2100-1025_3-1001095.html
[com.com]
http://news.com.com/RIAA+apologizes+for+threateni
RIAA admitts to "several dozens more additional errors" but won't disclose details. No direct link to Cnet coverage on May 13, 2003.. php#_edn2
[eff.org]
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/20030926_unsafe_harbors
Diebold intentionally files false takedown notice to silence (very well deserved) criticism of its shoddly voting machines:. php
[corante.com]
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/001465
Cult of Scientology attempts (yet again) to shut down xenu.net, which exposes embarrasing truths about their documents made public in a court case:1 044497702-DMCA_Takedown_Notice_Scientology_and_Pac Bell.shtml
[peerfear.org]
http://www.peerfear.org/rss/permalink/2003/02/04/
Apparant con artist David Waathiq attempts to use DMCA threat to shut down critical website:
http://mdwaathiq.worldwidewarning.net/DMCA.aspx [worldwidewarning.net]
.
To be fair, many of these aren't the MPAA (though at least the 2nd one is)... but there is definately a pattern of abuse. These are just the ones I found in 5-10 minutes of searching. It's quite likely there are many more out there, and many that go utterly unreported.
Re:In their defense.... (Score:2, Funny)
They are not human beings and therefore human error is not a valid defense.
Unsolicited emails... (Score:5, Interesting)
Doubtful, but I would need to check.
Is the mail sent of a commercial nature?
"Take this down or we sue." Kinda commercial, if suing people is their business (for the RIAA it seems to be, maybe it is for the MPAA as well).
CAN-SPAM?
Apparently they can.
Re:Unsolicited emails... (Score:2)
Under the Spam Act 2003 it is illegal to send, or cause to be sent, 'unsolicited commercial electronic messages' that have an Australian link.
I'd love to try turning that one around... (Score:5, Funny)
Me: Human error. Watch. *Click* - OOPS! Finger slipped!
Re:I'd love to try turning that one around... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more concerning is that this may open the door for spammers to pull the "accident" route and bypass the law. It wouldn't be a long running business practice, but what's to stop them setting up a shell company, "accidentally" spamming a lot of people, then closing the company up so it doesn't "accidentally" do it twice?
Set up a new company, wash, rinse, repeat.
-- james
Re:I'd love to try turning that one around... (Score:3, Insightful)
<cynicism>
Why go to the hassle of setting up a new company every time? The movie companies don't set up a new MPAA every time they rep
We apologise for the fault.. (Score:4, Funny)
Those responsible have been sacked.
Maybe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
---
Re:Maybe.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not like you are dead meat once you get a takedown notice. There's no court case running against you yet, and you can still inform the *AA that what you're doing is, in fact, completely legal. Then maybe they'll do an actual assesment, or they might just drop the case and go after an easier target.
I think people are really giving the RIAA too hard a time. Yes, they refuse to see the light on online distribution. And indeed, we don't need them to distribute our music. However, it is their task to find copyright infringers and bring them to justice, and that's what they're doing. Even those teenagers who get sued get sued because they are breaking the law. If you disagree with the law, fine, get the law changed. You live in a democracy, right? Right?
Re:Maybe.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Maybe.. (Score:2)
If it were that simple you'd expect to see individuals and small corps sending these kind of letters to big corps. e.g. SCO should be swimming in them, since they are commercially pirating Linux and making a big fuss about it.
If the RIAA or MPAA were to off and sue one of the people (what they'd have to do without the DMCA), you cou
Re:Maybe.. (Score:2)
Legally they are all innocent people. There is the principle that people are "innocent until proven guilty" (by a suitably competent court). Just because some individual accuses another individual of doing something wrong does not make them guility.
Re:Maybe.. (Score:2)
Have fun!
Re:Maybe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I could. But why should I? They are looking for something, it's their job to verify their search results. Why should I waste a second of my time pointing out to them what they should've checked themselves?
They're sending these messages out in the thousands. If we assume an error rate of 1%, and that is a very forgiving assumption, that's a hundred or so errors. If it takes 30 minutes to sort things out, that's 50 hours burnt on account of the **AA, 50 hours that they don't pay a dime for, but should.
Re:Maybe.. (Score:2)
besides, THEY FUCKING ARE just mining the web for keywords and sending out takedown notices without proper checking. otherwise they would notice that the file is too small for a movie file(and not a torrent file) and of a totally unrelated project as well. also they don't do any checking of where in the world the possible infringer lives(and state us laws, and dmca, regardless of if they're in ef
Re:Maybe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time, judging if somebody broke the law was not based on betting...
You seem to have missed the point of the article. It's about a case where finding copyright infringers was not what they've been doing,
So you're saying that Linux Australia is a bunch of teenagers who broke the law?
Which law is it that gives the MPAA the right to harass innocent people?
Re:Maybe.. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I live in a representative democracy, and as such have no real say on the laws that are created. My only chance of making the changes I want is to run for office. The only problem with that is do to choices and actions I have done in my past I would be un-electable. I can ask for the legislature to modify copyright laws but do you really think they are going to listen.
Just check by hand. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just check by hand. (Score:4, Informative)
So no, I don't think it would be eaiser or cheaper.
Mail Delivery by Penis; it's the way of the future (Score:2, Funny)
Wow! So you said...
"Hey, uh, groovy chick. What say we, uh... check out Star Wars Episode II and maybe we can... have sex?"
And in the split second it took her to reply
"Stay away from me, you Slashdot reading geek-fiend!"
and run out of the building, she was able to prepare the mailing?
I am impressed.
On a side-note, the grandparent mentions delivering letters by hand. Well, I sometimes get charity junk-mail (through m
Re:Mail Delivery by Penis; it's the way of the fut (Score:2, Funny)
Rather like the Hentai-anime Delivery Bots, then?
future mails (Score:4, Funny)
I can imagine it
Re:future mails (Score:5, Interesting)
At least in this forum post. [nesvideos.stc.cx] MPAA is accusing that the guy was downloading the movie "Speed", when the file name is "supermetroid-speedrunv3-frenom.avi."
I would understand the mistake if the file name was something like "Supermetroid -Speed-frenom.avi", since many movies floating in p2p networks have the name of the ripper/encoder/releaser in them, but the name had the word "speedrun", not just "Speed."
Re:future mails (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry! (Score:5, Funny)
"We accused an innocent group of copyright infringment and threatened a lawsuit, wasting a bunch of people's time and possibly money and causing much emotional suffering, but we're vewy vewy sorry.
That makes it OK, right?"
Demoscene also under MPAA scrutiny (Score:5, Interesting)
See here [scene.org]
Reading it, you can clearly see that their 'human error' is no other than an automated filename scan.
Re:Demoscene also under MPAA scrutiny (Score:2)
Come on... ALIAS1.zip, filesize: 23 K.
Even if it's an automated tool, it's a very stupid automated tool.
Jam MPAA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Jam MPAA (Score:2)
Re:Jam MPAA (Score:3, Interesting)
Run it from a cron job (scheduled task) once a week and that should keep things hopping...
simple humans (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, some simple humans made an error.
Potential SCO oursouring? (Score:2, Insightful)
Human error, sure ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some guy:
"No it ws human error, I didn't mean to:
- violate the speed limit by 100KM/h
- kill that guy
- steal money from tax payers
- cheat the stock market
- use an aimbot
- attack iraq because I thought they have WMD
-
Judge:
"Oh, if it was human error then law doesn't apply, so it's ok."
Can somebody spell bullshit?
Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)
Possible (Score:5, Insightful)
In which case, human error (based on rubbish instructions) would be true.
Re:Possible (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't take a lot of time to write a robot that finds files with a certain name. I think that the most likely scenario is that they do have a bot that checks filenames, but the output would be so full of false-positives that human filtering is almost certainly required. In that case, the human error would be sending out 101 notices from a list of 10,000 files when they should have only sent out 100.
Naturally, if the people are being paid for their throughput and not their accuracy, they are simply
An intermediate scenario is more realistic (Score:2)
Assuming he is telling the truth, I think it's more likely that some kind of scanning software is involved. It'd seem very difficult to either develop sufficiently intelligent software, or to hire people to simply search manually. Even in the latter case, it's unlikely that someone might "accidentally" wander into an open source repository and accidentally assume that a file in the middle of all those other legitimate files happens to be a ripped off movie.
But the intermediate possibility seems much
let's find out, shall we? (Score:2)
What we need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What we need... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any reason why this may not be allowed? [In both the EU (where I live) or the US?]
I would like to have a good lawyer as a friend before doing that, though.
Re:What we need... (Score:2)
http://xzzy.org/warez/ [xzzy.org]
For the month of September, that directory became the most popular location on my site.. over seven thousand unique visitors.
Fighteningly, the file with britney spears in it's name was the most popular download by about 40%.
Sadly, no DMCA/MPAA takedown notices.
Who solicits takedown infringement notices? (Score:5, Insightful)
An infringement notice is an unsolicited e-mail, last time I checked. Can you imagine someone asking to be sent an infringement notice? Though, I don't think that you could say, "Hey, you're saying I'm infringing and you're going to sue me? Well, I'm going to sue you for sending me an unsolicited email! Ha!" I'm sure some lawyer would take your money to file a lawsuit against them, but I don't think you'd get very far in your case.
Human error? THEY ARE LYING (Score:5, Informative)
The only other explanation... (Score:2, Insightful)
Otherwise, you're right, there's no way any rational person is going to see supermetroid-speedrunv3-frenom.avi and think that it is a copy of the movie "Speed". Human error my ass. A bot linked "speed" and ".avi" in the same file, simple as that. Hell, at least this file was 180+ MB. Other times it seems like they are calling out files that are a couple of K and saying they are full movi
Re:Human error? THEY ARE LYING (Score:2)
The Telecommunications Act provides that a corporation may be liable for a penalty of up to $10
million (AUS) in respect of a breach of section 313(1).
Looks like the amounts are in Australian dollars.
you can laugh now.
Perhaps someone can host a forum to fight this (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if a group of recipients of the MPAA cease and desist letters, meaning only those who are not distributing copyrighted material, could band together and sue the MPAA.
The approach might be to start a MPAA victims (again consisting of only those who are provably not distributing copyrighted material) web-site or forum where you could document the MPAA's phishing attempts.
Assuming the reality is as bad as the we're reading about, some lawyer or perhaps even the EFF might offer some pro-bono time to righting the wrongs that the MPAA appears to be committing.
"Bad Day"? WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
What a crock of shit. IANAL and I haven't really thought through the consequences, but while "stealing" a song may or may not be wrong (let's not go into that argument), its net effect per incident on the "owner" is economically small. Conversely, hitting grandma with a $10k pay-up-sucka-or-we-sic-Joey-da-lawyer-on-you blackmail job, per inicident, has a relatively high economic impact on the target. Think speeding fines in Finland, commensurate with the level of your personal income and wealth.
When someone's committed a crime (once again, without going into whether this is really justifiable as such or not), punishment appropriate to the level of the crime is, well, appropriate. Speed, pay a fine. Kill, go to jail. Usually, even if it's "by mistake".
Governments, as enforcers of law & order authorized as such by the population of a commonwealth (yet again, please don't go into this argument, I think this is a fairly neutral way of putting it) will usually get away with making mistakes as a whole, even if the individual cop who shot Mrs. Smith's dog may suffer personal consequences. Restitution may be in order to the victim, but not consequences as such for the government as a whole.
Private entities have no such privilege of authority. I kill your dog, I probably must make some sort of amends to you personally, as well as suffer possible consequences to myself personally.
Soooo...taking this a step further, when someone's not done anything and is wrongly hit up for restitution for his supposed wrongdoing by a pack of malicious, thoughtless, greedy and unethical baboons (**AA for starts), they should be punished personally. As I would be if I nailed the Smith pooch, even by accident, and be forced to pay restitution appropriate to (a) the level of the wrongdoing committed, and (b) the relative level of nastiness of the wrongdoing.
In this situation, the corporate thuggery, racketeering, blackmail, bullying and generally being a slobbering pack of cunts (not a crime, although it should be) makes for a pretty awful bit of work.
In short, make the fuckers pay. Every time they "have a bad day". Through the nose. With criminal lawsuits and prison if possible.
Grr.
Re:"Bad Day"? WTF (Score:2, Informative)
actually, if you hit someone's dog with your car and kill it, the dog owner is responsible to pay for damage to your car caused by their unleashed dog.
It's the pet owner's responsibility to keep their animal under control and out of the way of cars and others.
Anyways, it takes very little to thwart these *iaa morons. reverse the text,rot13,etc the filename and their search devices will only detect f
Auto-Generated Fake Warez Movie Site (Score:5, Interesting)
If you try and download a file, you will get the correct mime-type, and filesize, but the transfer will gradually get slower and slower and it will never finish (well, maybe some day, but its garbage anyways).
Preview: http://ciagon.dnsalias.com/movies/ [dnsalias.com]
Source: http://ciagon.dnsalias.com/movies/index.phps [dnsalias.com]
Movie List: http://ciagon.dnsalias.com/movies/movies.txt [dnsalias.com]
Enjoy!
First Notice of Infringement (Score:2, Funny)
According to our web monkey (#134723 known as Eric),
your post contains URL(s) to copyrighted material.
Our gaggle of lawyers informs us that this is ver, very, very, bad. We ask that you remove the offending links immediately and replace them with high-quality flash banner ads that inform the young people to say no to P2P.
Yours Sincerely
Matt Grossman
Re:Auto-Generated Fake Warez Movie Site (Score:2, Insightful)
The solution (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Anyone who administrates a web/ftp site put a fairly big random file on your site that is called >.mpg or
2. Look at the MPAA spam flowing in
3. Wait for the stage where the majority of the MPAA's spam is sent to people who are not actually infringing.
4. Complain to the relevant authorities.
PS It might be a good idea to put a disclaimer with the file so that people looking for movies don't eat up all your server bandwidth trying to download your random file. Even better configure you server to give an error when someone actually tries to downoad the file.
"Everybody has a bad day" (Score:3, Funny)
Now, today, Sue here has a bad day. Tomorrow it will be Janet's turn, and the day after it will be Margaret's turn. See that chart over there? Yeah.. we are pretty well organised.
It just so happens that everybody has a bad day. And since our legal department is all women, what if they have a bad day once a month?
These errors are just due to human errors.
RIAA Pit of Confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
The system has still been proven flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely if a legitimate website recieved a letter threatening leagal action when it shouldn't have then the system IS flawed regardless of whether it was a human or machine error.
Besides ultimatly all errors are human errors (if you blame machine errors on the programmer/engineer).
Re:The system has still been proven flawed (Score:2)
Movie People Are Assholes (Score:3, Funny)
Taste of their own medicine (Score:4, Insightful)
I would strongly encourage anyone who receives a wrongful takedown notice to use whatever legal means are at their disposal to punish the sender for wrongfully harassing them.
Another post [slashdot.org] in this thread mentioned a fake warez generator tool. Perhaps the mass adoption of random filename generators would be a way of demonstrating that the MPAA is sending shotgun legal threats. To that end, I would encourage the creators of open source projects to adopt a named release policy. For example, Perl 6 could be called "Finding Nemo". Debian could rename their next distribution "Fight Club".
Re:Taste of their own medicine (Score:2)
o that end, I would encourage the creators of open source projects to adopt a named release policy. For example, Perl 6 could be called "Finding Nemo". Debian could rename their next distribution "Fight Club".
That is not a good idea, because such titles are also trademarks. Doing so would only harm those open source projects.
Re:Taste of their own medicine (Score:2)
Here in Germany, the German equivalent of the MPAA shows movie ads which purport the idea that it is "just" to expose copyright infringers to rape. [hartabergerecht.de] (For those who wonder, "hart aber gerecht" means "hard but just", and in the full ad, the guys in the poster talk about raping a copyright infringer.)
Opportunity here? (Score:2)
People like the MPAA would subscribe, save them writing their own spiders. Google could look inside zips for mpeg or other content, and users, maybe individual studios, could register various keywords such as "hero" or "manonfire" if they liked.
Of course, google would be bound by robots.txt, whereas the MPAA will probabl
Well MPAA can just pay penalties (Score:5, Informative)
Since the MPAA thinks a $3,000 to $11,000 judgement is acceptable for someone accused of 'stealing' music, then I suppose a $3,000,000 to $11,000,000 judgement is acceptable for someone from MPAA accused of fraud and perjury. I figure MPAA is at least 1,000 times the size of the average file swapper.
Re:Well MPAA can just pay penalties (Score:3, Interesting)
Time to post bait? (Score:2, Interesting)
Human error (Score:2)
human error (Score:2, Insightful)
Madness! (Score:3, Funny)
MPAA doing their duty. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MPAA doing their duty. (Score:3, Insightful)
And since when does the MPAA have authority in Australia? Wouldn't that be the "Screen Producers Associarion of Australia?
Wait... since when has ANYTHING the MPAA done contained some sort of common sense?
Re:Wow, MPAA blames themselves (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wow, MPAA blames themselves (Score:2)
Or you can blame the CIA OR the Chinese OR them both (according to some of the thoeries anyway).
Note to self: Gotta take some more of those pills to keep me calm.
Re:so about this CAN SPAM thing... BLACK AND WHITE (Score:2)
I always find it funny that so many ppl think that can spam was about stopping spam. That is nothing than a brain washing via the feds. What it does show is how easy the public can be made to accept anything. Which would also explain our current situation with regards to Politics
As to MPAA/RIAA, I wonder if the public can be taught to accept all of their crap? I fear that they are taking the road of attrition and counting on lawmakers giving into their twisted logic.