Taxpayers to Foot The Bill for MPAA Lawsuits?

I saw this over at Download Squad and figured everyone should know about it.

"As DownloadSquad gears up for "Download Like a Pirate Day" this Friday, it appears as though our friends from the MPAA and the boys on Capitol Hill are also hard at work. The U.S. Senate appears ready to give Bill S. 3325 - the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 - the green light as early as today.

A quick look at this article by Alex Curtis and this open letter from twelve different advocacy groups will provide some insight into the proposed bill.
Why should you care? Well, for starters, S. 3325 would allow the Department of Justice to sue offenders in civil court. That's a bad thing. A really bad thing.
First, it means taxpayers are footing the bill while the DOJ does MPAA dirty work. Not good. Second, defendants are guaranteed free legal representation. Third, there only has to be a "preponderance of evidence," which is not nearly the same as "beyond a reasonable doubt." As a kicker, it looks as though fines for violation would be doubled.
Over at OpenCongress there appears to be a lot of buzz about this one (64 blog posts and growing), and rightfully so.
Holy crap. The MPAA has filed 30,000 suits over the past five years. Do you really want to pick up the tab?
For the truly interested, you can view the bill's text here. Read up, and then call your Senator. You can use Cause Caller to contact members of the Senate Judiciary, find and call your own senator, or send a fax

MPAA's "University Toolkit" Violates Copyright Laws

You just can pay for this kind of humor.

You might have heard about the MPAA's "University Toolkit" which is essentially spyware (rootkit). Well they forced schools to install this on their servers to monitor if students are violating copyright laws by pirating movies. Well the Toolkit is based off of GPL-licensed Xubuntu version of Linux, which requires any code written with it to have its source code licensed under the GPL. Well the MPAA felt that they didn't need to license the code, and refused to do so.

So in a strange twist the Ubuntu developer send the MPAA's ISPs a DMCA notice, ordering them to take it down for Copyright violations!

That's right, the MPAA is violating copyright laws!

The Ubuntu developer should sue for $10,000 per violation, and offer them a settlement of $3000. Isn't that the way we do things now MPAA?

[Slashdot via Gizmodo]

MPAA claims victory: 31 illegal recordings of Spider-Man 3 stopped

This time the MPAA Association has made the rather preposterous claim that the efforts of staff and customers in preventing illegal recordings of Spider-Man 3 gave the film "a fair shot at its record-setting opening." In all, 31 people were caught illegally recording the movie, a figure which is apparently thanks to night vision equipped cinema staff (motivated by a $500 reward for each case) and reporting from the patrons themselves in a few cases.

Their logic is that some how this has ensured the commercial success of the film. Which makes absolutely no sense since all it takes is one single recording for the film to become "pirated." And of course, if the system for detecting illegal recordings of movies is working so well, why do we still have to sit through those stupid anti-piracy PSAs?

Polish University raided for P2P file sharing

The RIAA and the MPAA have been targeting Universities lately, in an effort to stop students from downloading their product. Most of the time it would end with a law suit against some kid for downloading 'My Hump'.

But students at a University in Poland took it to a new level.

Polish police officers conducted a raid on the campus of the 18,500-student Koszalin University of Technology. The officers recovered one main PC running the DC++ hub software, 10 laptops and 60 hard drives. A total of 35,000GB (Wow, that's getting it done) of movies, music and software. The administrators were arrested as you might imagine.

The Polish music industry doesn't go after the casual music sharer, instead they go after main hub administrators and major uploaders.

You here that RIAA and MPAA!!! Stop going after and suing grandma's, college kids, and Joe average.

Oh, so this is how they're doing it.

From the bittorrent site 'Torrent Freak' gives us a detailed view on how RIAA and the MPAA are able to find out that someone is sharing illegal files.

"The cleverly named “File Sharing Monitor” is the system being used by Logistep to gather evidence against file-sharers. It is actually just a modified version of the Shareaza P2P application that is configured to search for infringing files, and collect the information from the hosts that share these files."

The “File Sharing Monitor” only targets Gnutella and eDonkey users, so it is still unclear how they track down BitTorrent users. Here is how it works:

1. The client connects to the P2P network, searches for sources of the infringing file, and collects the IP addresses that were gathered through the search.
2. The client requests to download (a piece of) the file from the host that was found through the search.
3. The filename, file size, IP-address, P2P protocol, P2P application, time, and the username are automatically inserted into a database, if the host permits the download.
4. This is the “best” part. The application does a WHOIS search for the ISP information and automatically sends an infringement letter to the ISP if needed.

So now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

Click here to read the entire article.