Earlier this month, we wrote about how the MPAA has used Patrick Robin’s blogging software and violated the linkware license that it is distributed under by removing Robin’s name and all links back to his site. The organisation has replied with a list of excuses, hoping at least one might stick.
The MPAA has removed Forest Blog from their site. The Director of Application Development replied with the following e-mail:
The material has been removed from our Web server.
- No Web links were ever provided to the blog.
- The blog was never assigned a domain name.
- The blog was never advertised to the public in any way.
- The material on the server was a proof of concept awaiting approval to move into production.
- The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.
- 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.
Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? And it might even be considered an honest mistake, if the MPAA wasn’t on a rampage, suing everybody in sight for copyright violations. The question that arose last time was, how can an organisation that’s only goal is to rid the world of piracy go ahead and illegally use someone else’s copyrighted work? Would someone who downloads a movie from one of the MPAA’s studios be able to get away by saying they were only “testing” the movie, and that they put it up on the Internet, but provided no links to it? Ever heard of Google? Patrick Robin, too, makes a similar comparison:
Whilst that all sounds fair enough but I doubt I’d get away with pirating a few movies providing I didn’t advertise it and only used them for testing purposes. hmmm!
