p2pnet.net News:- In its tireless quest to present its owners (the obscenely wealthy movie studios) as the honest but hard-done-by members of an industry under siege by ‘pirates’, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) frequently borders on the farcical.

Its latest travesty centres on Grind (Warner Bros) and Twisted (Paramount) and it’s fired a notice of infringement at Linux Australia.

The MPAA recently released a study it had commissioned claiming 25% of surfers have illegally downloaded a film and predictably, significant segments of the mainstream media carried the ‘report’ as if it were factual and had credible origins.

Recently, inspired by the MPAA, a Canadian ISP started sending its Canadian customers warnings under America’s DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) about Swedish BitTorrent tracker www.supernova.org.

Now, "a notice of claimed infringement, demanding that the group [Linux Australia] cease providing access to two copyrighted movies - one called "Grind" and the other "Twisted" - and ordering it to ‘take appropriate action against the account holder’," says CNET News.

The trouble is - Twisted is a framework, written in Python, for writing networked applications. And Grind is Valgrind, a tool that helps you find memory management problems in programs.

"We realized that the MPAA must be doing blind keyword matching against Internet content and then sending out automatic take-down notices with no real research or double checks," LA president Pia Smith is quoted as saying in the CNET story, going on:

"This seems to be a huge misuse of resources, an infringement upon various global spam laws, an infringement upon our own Copyright Act under Section 102 and needless stress and cost upon small Australian organizations and companies."

Stay tuned.

==================

See:-

credible origins - Hollywood file sharing study, p2pnet, July 12, 2004

inspired - DMCA League of Nations, p2pnet, August 30, 2004

appropriate action - Linux group rebuffs Hollywood piracy charge, CNET News, September 21, 2004

Python - Twisted Matrix Labs

Valgrind - Memory management

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2004 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 2587 times