The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'mpaa'

2012/1/25

After the US film industry tried to buy a law outlawing the internet as we know it, the internet is striking back: Paul Graham's venture-capital startup Y Combinator is now planning to explicitly fund driving Hollywood into extinction, before the dying beast drags anything worth saving into the tarpit it's sinking in:

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.
That's one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
Meanwhile, after former US senator turned MPAA representative Chris Dodd made dire warnings to US politicians that Hollywood may not fund their campaigns if they don't comply in passing the laws they have bought, a petition was started on the Whitehouse website to have him investigated for attempted bribery. The petition is unlikely to result in an official investigation, but has, in less than a week, gathered the 25,000 signatures required to oblige the Whitehouse to respond.

censorship copyfight hollywood mpaa usa 1

2005/4/19

The MPAA show their bizarre, fundamentalist views on intellectual property yet again, this time by sending legal nastygrams to websites using the MPAA's ratings code; i.e., if you claim that your website, photo gallery, Harry Potter fan-fiction story or whatever is G (or PG or R or whatever)-rated, you can expect a cease-and-desist notice in the mail:

"We have a right to go after people who use our trademarks without permission, big or small, whenever we find out about them," said John Feehery, executive vice president for the association. "Our ratings are not supposed to be ripped off."
Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that the association would have a point only if the fiction sites had claimed that association reviewers had rated the works. Using the ratings as a rough comparison is not a trademark infringement, she said: "It's like saying a beverage tastes like Coke."

I'm hoping that this does go to court and the MPAA get a good caning, which, if anything resembling common sense prevails, they should.

Meanwhile, if you're content with the G, PG and R ratings, you can always claim that you're using the Australian ones and not the U.S. ones; the Australian Office of Film and Literature Censorship may be Bowdlerites, but they're probably not Galambosians.

(via Techdirt) censorship eff galambosianism mpaa trademarks 0

2005/2/11

The MPAA have taken over BitTorrent pirasite hub LokiTorrent; not only that, but they have captured all site logs, which they intend to use to prosecute users of the site, and quite possibly the US$40k LokiTorrent "fighting fund", contributed to by those opposing Big Copyright's heavy-handed tactics, which may now go directly to the MPAA's war chest to fund the raids and prosecutions. This means that anyone who visited the site can possibly expect to have their equipment seized in a SWAT-style dawn raid and be given the choice between a five-figure out-of-court settlement or a much more expensive lawsuit, with the prosecution funded by the money donated by those considerate EFF-supporter types. If you've visited this site, incinerate your hard disks immediately.

And, from this discussion, it appears that it may have been the site operator's plan all along to collect the "defense fund" for a plea bargain and sell out his subscribers (all conveniently identifiable by login information; no idea whether credit card information is included, though if donors' card/PayPal information can be connected to accounts, it could be nasty).

betrayal lokitorrent mpaa 3

2004/12/18

For each US$100 donated to the EFF, Public Knowledge or IPac, copyright-reform advocacy group Downhill Battle will send one lump of coal to the RIAA and MPAA.

copyfight downhill battle eff mpaa riaa 0

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