MPAA Faces Legal Action Over False Takedown Notices

Legal Issues

from the a-little-accountability-please dept

Just a few weeks ago we pointed to yet another example of the MPAA sending out bogus takedown letters to people who control servers hosting files that have names that sound like certain movie titles, but clearly have nothing to do with the movie. As we noted then, this shows just one of the many problems with the way the system works. Right now, the entertainment industry can accuse anyone of violating copyright law for distributing a file that the industry has no control over and whoever hosts the file is required by law to take it down. The industry should be required to at least verify that the file is infringing. The same thing has apparently happened in Australia to Linux Australia, but the folks there have realized the false accusation breaks a few laws in Australia, and they’ve contacted their lawyers to respond to the MPAA’s takedown notice. In this case, they were accused of distributing the movies “Grind” and “Twisted” when they were really distributing the Twisted framework and the memory management problem solving tool Valgrind. It’s unlikely much will come of this, as the MPAA will apologize… and then keep on sending out bogus takedown notices causing problems for all sorts of perfectly legitimate individuals and companies.