p944 - Slashdot User

NFL Caught Abusing the DMCA 357

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @12:14AM from the poorly-chosen-victim dept.

Implied Oral Consent writes "You know how the NFL puts up those notices before every game saying 'This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited?' Well, Ars Technica is reporting that Wendy Seltzer thought that that was over-reaching and posted a video of the notice on YouTube. Predictably, the NFL filed a DMCA Take Down notice on the clip. But Ms. Seltzer knows her rights, so she filed a DMCA Counter Notice. This is when the NFL violated the DMCA, by filing another Take Down notice instead of taking the issue to court — their only legitimate option, according to the DMCA. Unfortunately for the NFL, Ms. Seltzer is a law professor, an EFF lawyer, and the founder of Chilling Effects. Oops!"

Submission + - How MediaSentry Poisons P2P

Submitted by

Quid custodiet ipsos custodes?

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @04:51PM

Quid custodiet ipsos custodes? writes: "Ars Technica has an interesting tour of MediaSentry's operations. MediaSentry, best known for putting fake files on P2P networks, apparently has no less than 60 employees, 2,000 geographically diverse co-located servers, and 9 GBps of bandwidth which it uses to attack P2P networks that serve files it has been hired to protect. They use no less than four different tactics: decoy files, some of which are now advertisements; spoofing results to P2P network search requests; spamming uploaders with download request to eat their bandwidth; and swarming, where they join BitTorrent or similar swarms and serve bogus data to slow or corrupt the downloads. While some of this has been known for a while now, it would be interesting to see how this admission to the details of their operation plays in court. Given that the RIAA has offered little more than screenshots as evidence on infringement, could they not be mistakenly accusing people based on spoofs they paid MediaSentry to create?"

Submission + - Vista: Not just another pretty face

Submitted by Bob_the_Builder on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @04:51PM

Bob_the_Builder writes: An in-depth look at Vista argues that the new OS is far more than a pretty shell slapped on top of the same underlying components. In fact, what's under the hood represents a complete reworking of many OS subsystems, and it will determine the direction of Windows development for the next several generations of the OS. "Even after the false starts and scaled-back plans, Vista is still a huge evolution in the history of the NT platform, and that's not something to be sniffed at. The fundamental changes to the platform are of a scale not seen since the release of NT." Is Vista a bigger deal than many critics have said?

Comment Re:Converting (Score 1) 483

by p944 on Monday September 25, 2006 @10:56AM (#16185355) Attached to: How to Encourage Use of OSS?

I am not so sure. I applied heavy pressure to convert my Mum to Ubuntu due to the state of her Windows install meaning that basically nothing worked consistently anymore anyway. The heavy part was required as she had no understanding of any of it, so change == bad. Now, no calls, no issues - have checked. All just works. For basic non-power users (i.e. just browsing, email, simple word processing) it takes some beating in terms of no issues, runs on windows hardware happily (roll on simple Mac installs?). The only issue I can see is that if you hand a linux system over and they have a problem with it, they are going to be forced repeat business unless they know a power user of their own...

Slashdot Top Deals