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]

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.