MPAA's Feeling Towards Intellectual Property

Over the weekend, a bunch of people stopped by to point us to the blog post from the maker of some blogging software who was surprised to note that the MPAA had started a blog using his software, but had stripped out all of the backlinks to the developers site -- despite it being pretty clear in the license that you could not do that. The story got picked up on a bunch of popular tech sites, leading the MPAA to take down the blog and proffer a weak defense that the blog (while on an unprotected site) was just for testing, had never been made public and was just a proof of concept. Someone from the MPAA insisted that the organization would have paid for a license to the software had the MPAA moved forward with the project. However, as the developer notes, if he used similar excuses to explain previewing a movie he downloaded, somehow he doubts the MPAA would find that acceptable. Of course, this isn't the first time we've seen the MPAA have a bit of a double standard when it comes to how it can ignore the intellectual property rules it claims to support so strongly. A year ago, remember, the MPAA was accused of making unauthorized copies of a movie criticizing the MPAA, This Film Is Not Yet Rated. That time MPAA officials claimed it was okay to make those unauthorized copies because it had "implications" for MPAA employees. Funny how the MPAA comes up with all sorts of exceptions for its own activities that aren't found anywhere in copyright law -- and yet it doesn't want to give anyone else the benefit of the doubt.