MPAA is a bunch of prize hypocrites.

"Do as we say, not as we do!"

#1. The MPAA Is a Serial Copyright Violator
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The Motion Picture Association of America has a lot of goddamn nerve. It's so in love with the idea of suing Internet users for downloading movies that it asked the feds to save the 25 petabytes of Megaupload user data compiled while building the case against that site so it can file some lawsuits of its own in the future. Former MPAA head Jack Valenti was fond of saying that there's no such thing as fair use, meaning you don't get to share any movie you own with anyone, ever, without paying, but they have no problem making illegal copies of movies when it serves their needs. For instance, the MPAA was once caught burning illegal copies of the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated to distribute to employees.

"It isn't piracy if we don't call it that."

Like we said, a lot of goddamn nerve, and the MPAA's disregard for the same copyright laws it fights so hard to enforce doesn't end with a few illegally copied DVDs. A blogger who wrote his own blogging engine called Forest Blog found that the MPAA was using his work on one of its sites, but had removed any linkbacks or attribution that would indicate where the software they were using came from. The saddest part of that fiasco was that they were totally within their rights to do that if they had simply paid the developer in question a license fee of just $25. The MPAA argued that the site in question wasn't technically public yet (although you could obviously find it with little effort), and that they would have paid up in the event that it went live.

Meanwhile, the MPAA once forged ahead with a $100,000 lawsuit against a man for downloading one movie that it could not even find on any of his four computers. We added that emphasis because fuck these people so hard.

"He mentioned the movie twice on Twitter. I'm ruling that a green light."

And we still aren't done. The MPAA took its copyright watchdogging in a terrifying new direction a few years back when it introduced rootkit software to be installed on college campuses. They claimed that it was merely for each school's own internal data-gathering needs, but privacy experts pointed out that it would also be a great way to allow anyone to spy on your network while hiding the fact that they're doing so.

Thankfully, we never had a chance to find out. Shortly after posting their new weapon of awful online, it was noted that the software was based on a GPL (general public license) version of Linux called Xubuntu. That GPL requires any program built using that code to have its source code released and licensed under the GPL also. The MPAA refused to do that, forcing an Ubuntu developer to send a takedown request to the ISP hosting the shady software.

Not long after that, the link to the software was taken down. Count that as a minor victory, while also assuming that, in the days since this embarrassing incident, the MPAA has probably just found newer and better ways to spy on you.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20290_5-famous-online-copyright-crusaders-who-are-total-hypocrites_p2.html#ixzz2MnLf4WDG