Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

In case you still had any doubt. The MPAA does not like you. (link via BoingBoing) In the past, this intense dislike of you (coupled with an obsessive, kinda creeeepy love of your money) has resulted in lawsuits for file sharing. Lawsuits that included children’s parents or legal guardians. Lawsuits that included service providers. Lawsuits that included employers. All in the name of protecting intellectual property.

Of course, if you produce intellectual property outside of their system, they like you even less. Witness Patrick Robin, whose freeware blogging software has been ripped off by the MPAA. How do you “rip off” freeware? By completely ignoring the license, of course.

Now I know I’m not exactly reknowned for my legalese but I did think that the terms and conditions that I had released Forest Blog under were pretty solid, specifically the section relating to removing the back links:

You may not remove, alter or otherwise disable all or any of the hyperlinks to the Host Forest website (http://www.hostforest.co.uk). All images, links or text must remain unchanged and intact and visible when the pages are viewed unless you first obtain explicit written permission from the copyright holders.

The story gets better. After a second e-mail, Robin receives a reply from the MPAA informing him that the infringing material has been taken down. What’s most interesting is their list of reasons why they didn’t do anything wrong.

1. No Web links were ever provided to the blog.
2. The blog was never assigned a domain name.
3. The blog was never advertised to the public in any way.
4. The material on the server was a proof of concept awaiting approval to move into production.
5. The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.

1. Should we have decided to make the move to production, then we would have paid the 25 Pounds that would have authorized us to run a version of the blog without the logos and links.

   I think Robin has a great point. If you download a movie to watch it before deciding whether or not to pay $20 for a DVD of it, the MPAA still considers you to be just as guilty as if you downloaded it with no intention of even considering buying it. They don’t recognize “testing purposes” as an excuse when they fire up their lawyers – but they expect other copyright holders to do so. And Goddess forbid that I should invite five or more people to my apartment for a private screening of Shock Treatment (that’s an affiliate link, yo). That would be an unauthorized performance of the work.

   But your software? Hey. That’s fair game.

   This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 9:29 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.