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MPAA Takes University Toolkit Offline For GPL Violation
from the whoops dept
Remember last week how the MPAA was pushing a ridiculous toolkit on universities that was officially supposed to help universities track network usage, but also had the side-effect of potentially exposing all sorts of private info? Well, some folks noticed that the toolkit was built on open source technologies, such as Ubuntu Linux, though the MPAA (irony alert) didn't appear to be abiding by the GPL license associated with the software. It didn't take long for an Ubuntu developer to send a takedown notice, forcing the university to remove the toolkit. The developer contacted the MPAA concerning the violations, and found that the group ignored him (shocking, I know, for a group that claims it's such a huge supporter of intellectual property rights). So, he was forced to go to the ISP hosting the content, which finally resulted in the MPAA pulling the software down. This isn't the first time, by the way, that the MPAA has decided that it was okay to ignore intellectual property rules when it suits the organization, but it does suggest that for all its talk of having a principled stand on the issue, it's all a bunch of hogwash.
