[wordup] Fingered by the movie cops

[Adam Shand]

dmitri sklyarov (the russian acedemic who was accused or putting the bits
in adobe's e-books back into a useful order) has pled not guilty.  good
for him that's some big balls he's got a long way from home.  homefully
it'll go to the supreme court and the dmca will get ruled
unconstitutional.  also note that the russian government has issued an
official warning to it's computer programmers warning them that travel in
the usa may be dangerous for them.

  http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010831/tc/tech_russia_usa_dc_1.html

here's to free trade, may it continue to have some wonderful effects on
the world!

Here's a little parable about how bad things could get.

  http://www.macopinion.com/columns/tangible/01/08/30/index.html

and now a little story for your reading pleasure about what's actually
happening.

From: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/23/pirate/index.html

Fingered by the movie cops
By Amita Guha

Under today's copyright laws, you are guilty until proven innocent.
I know -- it happened to me.

Aug. 23, 2001 | One recent Monday, my boyfriend and I returned home from a
long weekend away. As usual, one of the first things we did was check our
e-mail, only to discover, to our dismay, that Time-Warner Cable, our
Internet service provider, had cut off access to our account sometime
around midnight the Friday before. My boyfriend, a software engineer who
takes his e-mail seriously, called the tech support line and was
transferred to several people that evening, none of whom could help. All
he could find out was that the account had been suspended for "security
reasons."

The next morning, we received an express-mailed letter from Time-Warner
Cable, which stated that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
had accused us of distributing copyrighted material. The MPAA had
determined that someone, supposedly with an Internet protocol (IP) address
assigned to our computer by Time-Warner at the time, had distributed the
material on July 4. The part that got me was the second paragraph: "In
accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Section
512, (ISP name) has removed or disabled access to that material."

I can't describe the shock I felt reading that someone in my household had
been accused of breaking the law. Even worse -- we had evidently been
tried, found guilty and penalized before we were even told of the
accusation.

The letter went on to inform us that our account would be suspended for
one week, pending assurance from my boyfriend that it wouldn't happen
again. There was no mention of what materials we had distributed.

My boyfriend called the number given in the letter. After 24 hours of
phone tag, he finally spoke to a network technician, who told him the
details. The MPAA had found out that someone had uploaded a movie to
Usenet, allegedly from our IP address, on the evening of July 4. However,
at that time, we were out watching fireworks. There is no way we could
have been responsible for the infraction. My boyfriend logs all network
activity on his machines, and there was no activity at the time we were
allegedly dealing in pirated flicks. When my boyfriend suggested that
perhaps the MPAA had transposed the IP address, the network guy said that
that was not possible. When he asked for a hard copy of the information
the MPAA had sent them on us, Network Guy agreed to send one, but as of
this writing had yet to do so.

Before we could regain access to e-mail, Time-Warner Cable required a
signed letter from my boyfriend promising that he wouldn't upload any
copyrighted material. A few hours later, we were able to restore our
e-mail accounts. It took over 48 hours to clear everything up.

But it'll take a lot longer than that to undo the real damage. The
incident raises some serious questions about where our society is headed,
as the corporations who guard intellectual property such as movies and
popular music get ever more zealous in their attempts to prevent
unauthorized use.

Why did Time-Warner take the word of the MPAA and immediately cut us off
without even asking us about the allegations, or even notifying us about
what was going on? We were our ISP's customers, not the MPAA -- although,
of course, Warner Brothers is a member of the MPAA too. But when we asked
Time-Warner about it, we were told that they "had to take immediate
action."

I later learned that under the provisions of the DMCA, an ISP does indeed
have to take action immediately when it is told about a case of copyright
infringement. Doing so protects the ISP from liability for the
transgression.

But how exactly did the MPAA get its information about the movie that we
supposedly uploaded to Usenet? Is our every move in cyberspace being
watched?

Basically, yes. As I researched further, I discovered there is a
burgeoning industry based on patrolling the Net for copyright abuses.
There is, for example, Ranger Online, a company that provides "Intelligent
Online Scanning" technology to organizations such as the MPAA.

I decided to try to find out exactly how the MPAA tracks online piracy. I
spoke to Emily Kutner and Hamanshu Nigam of the MPAA and told them that a
friend of mine had been accused of online piracy. They walked me through
the procedure they use to find cases of copyright infringement.

The MPAA looks for people who are distributing movies in any form that
they are not authorized to. It uses Ranger Online's software to monitor
multiple areas of the Internet, including IRC, Gnutella, Usenet, Web
sites, auction sites and ftp sites. It does this on an international
basis. When it finds a location that is distributing copyrighted material,
it identifies the owner and the host of the material. Citing the DMCA, it
sends a letter and notifies the alleged perpetrators that they are
infringing on a copyright.

When I asked exactly how they find an instance of piracy (for instance,
what search parameters they use), Nigam told me the methods were
proprietary information. I was particularly interested in this aspect of
the process, since I was, and still am, very curious as to how the MPAA
decided we had pirated a movie. Nigam did say that by the time an ISP is
notified of a copyright violation, every effort has been made to determine
that piracy has been committed.

Nigam also told me that if I told him my friend's IP address, he could
find out exactly what had happened in his case. I told him I'd have to
check with my friend first. Kutner then said that if my friend were truly
innocent, he wouldn't have anything to hide.

The thing is, he didn't have anything to hide in the first place, and he
was still accused.

My boyfriend doesn't actually care so much about his good name. He is
angry that a service he pays for was interrupted for no reason. And he is
worried that the MPAA will harass him some more if he reveals his IP
address. Perhaps his fears are groundless, but if you had been wrongly
accused and penalized, you would be worried, too.

A large, powerful organization managed to stick its nose in our business
and cause us days of inconvenience and aggravation. We weren't given the
chance to defend ourselves until after action had been taken against us.
If we are accused again of distributing copyrighted material, we lose our
accounts for two weeks instead of one, and face banishment from our ISP.
And not a bit of this is under our direct control.

Nigam told me that if my article had a moral, it should be that piracy is
illegal and no one should trade movies without permission.

This article does have a point, but it's not about piracy. It's about a
flawed piece of legislation that allows a person to be penalized for an
alleged action before he has the chance to defend himself. The moral of
the story is that the DMCA allows you to be tried and judged guilty before
you even know what has happened. The MPAA could have my account shut down
immediately -- or yours -- and there's nothing any of us could do to stop
it.