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MPAA caught infringing copyright |
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Written by Felix Da Silva (fdasilva@bitnip.com)
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Wednesday, 05 December 2007 |
 Last month, the MPAA began sending out a "university toolkit" to several universities across the US to help them monitor network traffic. However, these toolkits were recently removed because they might have violated copyright.
The MPAA, famous for suing for people that violate people's rights, released these toolkits to bring more attention to copyright infringement happening in these networks. However, these toolkits were built upon open source software that is licensed under the GPL.
One of the requirements for using open source software under the GPL is that they have to share the modified source code with the public which the MPAA failed to do.
Transgressing the GPL is a violation of copyright legislation, a fact not
lost on Matthew Garrett, a Cambridge (UK) Ubuntu developer who sits on the
distribution's technical board. He and others in the open source community wrote
to the MPAA to point out they could be breaking the law.
After Matthew Garrett tried to contact the MPAA several times in an attempt to have the source code distributed,
Garrett took matters into his own hands. He contacted the MPAA's
ISP and had the
content removed from the servers under the DMCA.
MPAA, an organization that is so adamant on protecting people's rights, can't even respect others. This does not help the image of the MPAA at all. In addition to bad PR, the toolkit could expose universities' entire network traffic to the Internet in its default configuration.
I wonder when the last time MPAA did anything right. In the last couple of years that I've been monitoring these issues, I can't recall something that they've done that has been positively received.
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