The MPAA will act in seconds when you violate its copyright but won't act at all when it violates your copyright.
Last month, the MPAA began
sending out a "university toolkit" to several universities across the US. These toolkits monitor network traffic and created graphs and charts showing the prevalence of file sharing across the school networks.
The whole aim was to bring more attention to copyright infringement happening in these networks but the toolkit itself is chock full of irony -
it's violating the GPL agreement.
The toolkits were built upon open source software that is licensed under the GPL. As we all know, when you use any GPL'd code in your software and distribute it, you're required to provide the modified code to all. Well, that's the part that the MPAA apparently does not understand.
After being contacted by Matthew Garrett, one of the coders of the GPL'd software, several times in an attempt to have the source code distributed, Garrett took matters into his own hands. The fine gentleman contacted the MPAA's ISP and
had the content removed from the servers. Take that MPAA.
So far, the source code and changes have yet to be made available so this could get even more interesting if the MPAA does not provide them. Maybe Garrett will take them to court like
other GPL holders have done lately. That would certainly make this man's day/week/year.
Are you laughing from the irony yet? Poke fun at the MPAA
over in the forums.
27 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replywait... hold that thought!
Does this mean we (the community) can scan/hack/monitor all the MPAA networks for use of iligaly activities and get away with it?
Thank you for reporting this, Bit-tech!!
Made my friggin week!
How does that medicine taste, MPAA?
*sigh*
Oh yeah. Good stuff, good stuff...
What a buncha weasels, those guys.
Sam
They deserved it !!!
ROFL ;) :) :)
it also means we can add very bloated DRM into all GPL software just to make sure that they only use it on the one machine they downloaded it onto oh and of course a program to make sure that they only use it in a certain way also
i think this is the best news of the year i hope they get stung bad for this
Do they still get to preach morality?
I hope not.
take them to court and be the modern-day robin hood
c.u.later