MPAA High on the Peyote?

Something is seriously wrong with the MPAA… You’ve probably already heard about the recent MPAA decision to sue people for linking to stuff. If you haven’t heard about this foolishness, it’s worth looking it up… About a month ago, he MPAA decided to sue a basketful of Usenet and Torrent related web sites for facilitating illegal downloads. What’s really strange about the Torrent stuff is that they don’t host or transmit copyrighted material – they link to it. So, according to the MPAA, if you tell somebody where to go to get pirated material, you immediately become part of the illegality. To use a physical-world analogy, if somebody comes up to you on the street and asks where they can buy a pirated DVD of “The Little Mermaid”, you’re doing something illegal if you say something like “try asking that dude with the movie table down on 5th Ave”.

But I digress. The point isn’t about that stuff… It’s about the completely crazy event that came to light yesterday about what the MPAA has been doing to support the case against these guys. Apparently, according to a complaint from yesterday, the MPAA has hired a hacker to break into TorrentSpy’s computer equipment, steal proprietary information, dumpster-dive, and so on. Creepy. Without TorrentSpy’s claim to have the documented agreement between the hacker and the MPAA rep, I would suspect someone of making this stuff up. I guess we’ll see how concrete the documentation is as the trial gets underway.