MPAA blames Linux Australia notice on 'human error'

MPAA spokesman Matt Grossman acknowledged to Builder AU the organisation had wrongfully issued Linux Australia with a notice demanding the group take down content on their Web site.

"It was a mistake and we apologise for the mistake but we do our best to prevent this from happening and due to the sheer number of pirated infringements that we deal with on a yearly basis it is a possibility of happening," Grossman said.

Grossman denied the MPAA's system, which sends out 100,000 notices of claimed infringement on an annual basis was flawed. He said the organisation was not doing blind keyword matching against Internet content and sending out automatic infringement notices without checks, as Linux Australia had previously claimed.

"It is a keyword search, however there [are] checks and balances that basically is a manual review before the infringement [notice is] sent," Grossman said.

However neither file was the typical size of a compressed movie, nor were they saved in a typical movie file format.

The files in question constituted open source software that happens to bear the same name as movies. The file entitled Twisted is a download of the popular framework written in Python and clocks in at under 10 megabytes while Grind refers to a download of Valgrind, a tool for developers to locate memory management. It is a download which chews up less than 1 megabyte of memory.

When asked why this slipped through their checks, Grossman told Builder AU "the answer is a simple human error unfortunately. Everyone has a bad day". Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails.

"No, frankly we're not sure how this got so blown out of proportion. In some respects I mean, I guess they are unsolicited because 99.9999 percent of individuals who get them are infringing on the works and they certainly not soliciting a notice of infringement from us or their ISP."

"On the other hand, I assume you are talking about spam or something along those lines, and this is our means of communicating with Internet service providers to ask them to comply with the Copyright Act." Grossman said.

Grossman said no further action involving notices of infringement had been taken against any other organisation or party within Australia to date.