MPAA ‘bad day’ screw-up
p2pnet.net News:- The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) says its recent monumental cock-up in Australia was down to a “bad day”.
Infringement notices were sent to Linux Australia vis-a-vis Grind (Warner Bros) and Twisted (Paramount) demanding that Linux Australia “cease providing access to two copyrighted movies”.
Linux Australia? Copyrighted movies?
MPAA spokesman Matt Grossman grovelled that it was all just an ‘everyone has a bad day‘ mistake and, “we do our best to prevent this from happening and due to the sheer number of pirated infringements that we deal with on a yearly basis it is a possibility of happening,” he’s quoted as saying in a Builder AU report, which goes on:
“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 wasn’t doing blind keyword matching against Net content and sending out automatic infringement notices without checks, as Linux Australia had previously claimed.
Yeh, it is a keyword search, he admitted to Builder AU, but, “there [are] checks and balances that basically is a manual review before the infringement [notice is] sent”.
The files inquestion comprised open source software with the same names as movies and, “frankly we’re not sure how this got so blown out of proportion,” Grossman blustered. “In some respects I mean, I guess they are unsolicited because 99.9999 percent of individuals who get them are infringing on the works and they certainly not soliciting a notice of infringement from us or their ISP.”
Asked why this slipped through their checks, Grossman said, “the answer is a simple human error unfortunately. Everyone has a bad day”. Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails.
“No, frankly we’re not sure how this got so blown out of proportion,” he told Builder AU. “In some respects I mean, I guess they are unsolicited because 99.9999 percent of individuals who get them are infringing on the works and they certainly not soliciting a notice of infringement from us or their ISP.”
“On the other hand, I assume you are talking about spam or something along those lines, and this is our means of communicating with Internet service providers to ask them to comply with the Copyright Act.”
The MPAA recently had a Canadian ISP threatening Canadian surfers with America’s DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which, of course, doesn’t apply in Canada.
It also tried to use the DMCA to attack a Swedish web site.
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See:-
Infringement notices – MPAA cock-up in Australia, p2pnet, September 21, 2004
bad day – MPAA blames Linux Australia notice on ‘human error’, Builder AU, October 6, 2004
threatening Canadian surfers – DMCA League of Nations, p2pnet, August 30, 2004
