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MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network
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Kraken
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PostPosted: 15-Nov-2009 15:30    Post subject: MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network Reply to topic Reply with quote

link

Sony learned that a resident of Coshocton, Ohio, downloaded a pirated movie via the town's communal wi-fi network.

When the MPAA couldn't figure out which specific individual in town did the download, they responded by pressuring the ISP provider to deactivate the entire network.

A representative of the city said that for the time being, the 100+ residents of the town who used the wi-fi network will be left out in the cold as the city does not have the money to pay for the type of anti-piracy software that they need to put in place in order to get the MPAA to ease up.



If true, then the 99+ who got stiffed of their internet access because of the one probably have very good grounds to sue Sony and the MPAA for denial of service like that. I'd love to see what the courts have to say once this is all over.
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Kraken
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PostPosted: 15-Nov-2009 21:03    Post subject: MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network Reply to topic Reply with quote

According to this, Sony knuckled under after a week's worth of nation-wide hate aimed at them and so told the community they can have their wi-fi back.

However, I can still see people who were denied net access having grounds to sue if the blackout caused by the lack of net access resulted in any sort of damages.
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Karagin
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PostPosted: 15-Nov-2009 23:37    Post subject: MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network Reply to topic Reply with quote

Hold on a second, if they can track the download to an IP and then get the whole thing pulled, why haven't they gone and the same to the sites that allow the pirated downloads to happen in the first place?

Seems that they are going after the wrong people, they should be stopping the sites that there providing the downloads, not wasting time going after one person, or closing down an entire wi-fi network over it.

If all of this is true, I am surprised the city didn't sue or more of the folks in the town didn't sue over lost business and other things do to the heavy handed actions of Sony and the MPAA.
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PostPosted: 16-Nov-2009 11:57    Post subject: MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network Reply to topic Reply with quote

I think the attitude that sony should be sued is interesting. They are protecting whats legally thiers.

What I really want to know is WHY is the person that downloaded it NOT being punished?

And the garbage that "they cant be found", I dont by at all. If they wanted to they could.

What I am seeing here basically says, hey if you can get away with and and not get cought its ok, just be sure your somehwere where no one give a damn.
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Kraken
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PostPosted: 16-Nov-2009 16:37    Post subject: Re: MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network Reply to topic Reply with quote

Stinger wrote:
I think the attitude that sony should be sued is interesting. They are protecting whats legally thiers.


Basically, Sony was punishing an entire county because of a single person.

In other words, they were going above and beyond what would be seen as reasonable in their efforts to protect their copyright.


This is on top of other incidents in the past where Sony has gone too far, such as the infamous rootkit scandal a few years go.

If you don't recall, a selection of Sony Music CDs had computer programs on them that you had to agree to install if you wanted to listen to a CD on your computer. The programs burrowed themselves into a person's hard drive, doing so in such a fashion that if you tried to remove them you risked damaging or even disabling your computer. Why would a person want to remove the programs? Because the programs were set to make a sweep of your system every 60 seconds or so that your system is active and call home to Sony to tell them if you've got any pirated music on your computer; sweeping the computer so often was causing hard drives to fail, meaning that even innocent people were being hammered. Amplify this exponentially (each CD required you to install the program again, no matter how many previous times it was on there), and you have people whose computers were up and dying on them w/o explanation.

The first time Sony offered a "repair" program, you had to jump through significant hoops to get at it (you could only download it via Explorer, you had to download a separate program per instance of the rootkit on your system, etc.). And if you did get it, it was difficult to use properly (there were countless reports of people having their CD-ROM drive getting disabled or deactivated) and put your computer in danger of being hacked since it created a security breach... a breach caused by Sony using the "repair" program as a trojan horse to insert another program on your system to monitor whether or not you had pirated music.

As you can imagine, Sony's little stunt there was, in and of itself, enough to cause millions in damage and lost time once everything was said and done. Last I heard, the legal fallout is wafting about even though this happened roughly three years ago.
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PostPosted: 16-Nov-2009 17:08    Post subject: MPAA terminates town's entire wi-fi network Reply to topic Reply with quote

If Sony has cost someone time and money, they can be sued over that issue, again I point out, if Sony can track that ONE person to a single county in Ohio, then threaten that county into shutting down their Wi-Fi, tells me they could have gone after the one person instead. Really if Sony can do all of this, then they should be working with the different police agencies to track and stop pirates thus ending the issue once and for all.

They stepped over the line in their zeal to protect their property, if the average citizen steps over the line they end up in court facing numerous charges, yet a music conglomeration can do so and expect no one to get upset or counter-sue?

Come on let's be realistic here.
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