A Research Site Devoted to the Past and Future of Found Footage Film and Video


"The Literary and Artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes." - Gil J. Wolman

“A lot of people who call themselves artists now are cultural critics who are using instruments other than just written language or spoken language to communicate their critical perspective.”
-Leslie Thornton

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

MPAA's Copyright Woes

The MPAA's software to sniff out copyright files on student run P2Ps has gotten the organization into some hot water. Apparently, the Ubuntu-based toolkit they used requires that the source code is published along with the program. This is obvious to all of us open source Linux proponents but could not be understood by the minds of the MPAA. If the source code were published hackers could easily develop new technology to get around copyright tracking. But guess what? TOO BAD--use of Ubantu programs requires it and if you don't follow the licensing rules YOU GET SUED. Did Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett sue? No, like a nice guy he called and emailed the MPAA. Did they take the program down? No. So he had to call the ISP to do it. The MPAA forcefully had the program taken off their website last Tuesday. Thank you Matthew Garrett. Now if the MPAA could just learn something from this...

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