Boing Boing: MPAA wants the right to commit fraud

Friday, December 1, 2006

MPAA wants the right to commit fraud

The MPAA has killed a California law that would have outlawed "pretexting" -- fraudulently misrepresenting yourself to gain unlawful access to someone's private information ("Hi, this is Fred Frederickson, I'm at the office and need to look at my phone records for last month, can you fax them to me?").

Pretexting was used in Hewlett-Packard's crooked investigation into boardroom leaks, in which board-members, journalists and others had their privacy invaded by HP's investigators.

The MPAA opposes the bill because they want to have a broad arsenal of tools available to them as they attack movie-lovers who share films online.

Ira Rothken, a prominent technology lawyer defending download search engine TorrentSpy against a movie industry copyright suit, says he didn't know about the lobbying, but can guess why the MPAA got involved. Rothken is suing (.pdf) the MPAA for allegedly paying a hacker $15,000 to hack into TorrentSpy's e-mail accounts.
"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy," Rothken said. "I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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