Tuesday, December 4, 2007

MPAA accused of violating Ubunutu's GPL

It appears that Matthew Garrett from the Ubuntu development team has had the MPAA toolkit removed. Matthew posted a very short journal entry showing the before and after snapshot of the toolkit's home page.

"MPAA don't fuck with my shit.

(And yes, I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP. No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.)"


If you click the "context" link it will take you to the Washington Post article that Brian Krebs and I worked on.

Then Slashdot picks it up last night and there are already 188 comments from readers.

"Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett has succeeded in getting the MPAA to remove their 'University Toolkit' after claims it violated the GNU GPL. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the MPAA directly, Garrett eventually emailed the group's ISP and the violating software was taken down."


Stay tuned....

3 comments:

Devz said...

title has typo 'Ubunut' rather then 'Ubuntu' - i know, pedantic :)

David Taylor said...

Ooops! I missed this comment. Thanks and it has been corrected.

Devz said...

Now it seems the title reads as 'Ubunutu' rather then 'Ubuntu'

In advance, no problems :)