MPAA caught in piracy. Again

The Association of American Filmmakers (MPAA) has set another record in the number of unkind sarcastic reviews in its address. The past history of violation of the license to use the engine for their corporate blog by this organization has obviously not taught her anything. On Monday, a “crusade” of open source developers ended in a triumphant victory, parts of the code of which were used at the University Toolkit , a network monitor that MPAA distributed to universities for free to track Internet activity of students living in dormitories and campuses. It is a “lightweight” version of the cGRID monstrous package, which we learned about earlier.

The toolkit, as stated in its description on the site, was created on the basis of the SNORT and Ntop utilities , which are distributed under the GPL license. As you know, anyone can at their discretion use or modify the GPL-code and distribute the results of their work, but with one caveat: together with the program, the source code should be supplied with all the changes. This is exactly what the MPAA has forgotten: the Toolkit source code has never been published.

Matthew Garrett, one of the developers of the above utilities, did not put up with this state of affairs and sent to the MPAA office the requirement to fulfill the license conditions or stop distributing the program. Having received no response within 9 days, he turned to the hosting provider of the University Toolkit website, who, according to the DMCA law, removed the actual pirated program files from their servers.

MPAA Vice President Seth Oster, in an interview with Ars Technica, however, stated that the link to download the program was removed from the site of the Association itself before Garrett reached the hoster. It will be available again immediately when all the necessary conditions for this are met, he says.