MPAA’s ‘unethical practices’
p2pnet news | P2P:- A major online news outlet has finally picked up on highly questionable methods used by Hollywood’s “face of copyright enforcement,” as CNET recently christened the MPAA’s Dean Garfield.
“A lawsuit filed last year by TorrentSpy – a BitTorrent search engine – that accused the movie studios’ trade group of intercepting the company’s private e-mails, was tossed out of court last week,” says another CNET News item, going on:
But while a U.S. District judge found that the Motion Picture Association of America had not violated the federal Wiretap Act, as TorrentSpy’s attorneys had argued, the MPAA acknowledged in court records that it paid $15,000 to obtain private e-mails belonging to TorrentSpy executives.
The MPAA’s acknowledgement is significant because it comes at a time when the group is trying to limit illegal file sharing by imploring movie fans to act ethically and resist the temptation to download pirated movies.
To critics, the revelation by the MPAA is a possible sign that the organization is itself not above adopting unethical practices in its fight against file sharing.
As p2pnet pointed out yesterday, “Garfield was one of the people behind the infamous raid on a major Swedish ISP when evidence was planted so gullible Swedish cops could find it.”
Ethically, “it’s pretty clear that reading other people’s e-mail is wrong,” CNET has Lorrie Cranor, an associate research professor and Internet privacy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, saying.
“Being offered someone else’s e-mails by a third party should have been a red flag.”
Cranor was the principal technical staff member at AT&T Lab’s Secure Systems Research program and together with four other people, she studied how unauthorized copies of movies were, and are, being distributed online.
“Part of the reason we were looking was because we suspected there would be some insider leaks,” she told p2pnet at the time, “but not so many.”
Of a total of 285 movies she and her team sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders.
Moreover, only 5% first appeared after their DVD release date on a web site that indexes file sharing networks, indicating that consumer DVD copying currently represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks, said Cranor in Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Movie Production and Distribution Process, the paper which flowed from the research.
Meanwhile, “The MPAA, which says that illegal file sharing costs the film industry more than $2 billion annually, did not respond to interview requests,” says CNET.
It has Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney, saying, “We believe that the MPAA, when it paid $15,000 for about 30 pages of e-mails, knew or should have known they were involved in purchasing something in a wrongful manner.”
Rothken said that TorrentSpy will appeal the court’s decision that the pilfering of TorrentSpy’s e-mail did not violate the Wiretap Act, adds the story.
Also See:
CNET News – Court rules against TorrentSpy in hacking case, August 28, 2007
pointed out yesterday – The ‘face of copyright enforcement’, August 28, 2007
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August 29th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Wonder how much time a citizen would get for purchasing copies of RIAA’s emails…
August 29th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
THAT WOULD BE SOOOOOO UNETHICAL !!!!