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Police Arrest Operator of Mulve Downloading App

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:39 AM PDT

Last month, a relatively new music downloading application burst onto the scene. Mulve carried no music of its own, but instead allowed users to make their own searches and download material from servers owned by Russia's biggest social networking site. This week Mulve disappeared unexpectedly but for good reason. Without any warning, the UK police arrested its operator.

mulve Back in September we reported on Mulve, a fairly new and impressive application to help users download music. With a claimed database of 10,000,000 tracks and high quality results, Mulve certainly turned heads.

After news of Mulve travelled quickly around the world, the site went offline, unable to cope with the demand.

After an upgrade the site returned, only to disappear again a short time later. This time is wasn’t due to excessive demand, but due to the lawyers at the RIAA.

Mulve, which is an abbreviation for ‘Music Love’, came back online, but the return was short-lived. This week the site disappeared and software stopped functioning again, but under entirely more ominous circumstances.

From speaking with the operators of Mulve, TorrentFreak has learned that police in the UK made arrests in connection with the site a few days ago. We are aware of the grounds for arrest but until the Mulve guys can get their bearings and attempt to come to terms with what has happened, that information will have to wait until another day.

What we can give, however, is our opinion. And our opinion is this. Regardless of what people may have used chosen to use Mulve for, its creators simply cannot be held liable for that. To bring criminal action against them seems utterly absurd.

Mulve was simply a search engine. It did not organize music in any way other than returning results based on user searches. Mulve hosted no music on its servers, but instead pulled it from hardware owned by Vkontakte, Russia’s biggest social networking site.

Is Mulve alone in this respect? Absolutely not. In fact, to find a similar piece of software one needs to look no further than Apple’s App Store.

VKontakte Music is available there for the princely sum of ‘FREE’ (Pro version $0.99) and the only additional requirement is a login for Vkontakte which requires Google translate, an email address and 5 minutes of a user’s time.

VKontakte Music

vcontakte

As can be seen from the screenshot above taken from iTunes itself, this app even shows copyright songs as examples of items for download. Mulve never even went that far so for the police to get involved seems nothing short of ridiculous.

After the failure to convict the operator of OiNK, stand by for another major embarrassment in the UK. This time the case is even more weak.

Mulve’s code has been released and will live on, no matter what happens.

Update:

“Just letting you know that following arrests, we have decided to take Mulve offline for good. We do not want to fight this,” Mulve told TorrentFreak.

“Hell, I am not prepared to spend the next 5 years in prison for a project that was simply meant to be a little bit of fun. We would like to apologise to all those who were affected by this.”

The arrested guy from Mulve further explained to TorrentFreak that he wasn’t actually involved in the programming of the application but since he made the video demo the authorities have put two and two together to make the outcome detailed above.

One thing is clear in all of this though, Mulve is never coming back.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

MPAA: Piracy Will Always Be With Us

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 02:07 PM PDT

In a rare interview session two of the MPAA's top executives gave an interesting insight into the movie industry's view on copyright in the digital age and the anti-piracy hunt that accompanies it. The pair say that their organization will continue to fight against copyright infringements, but admit that piracy will never be completely defeated.

Fritz Attaway and Craig Hoffman are two of the MPAA’s top suits. Attaway is one of the leading people involved in developing the movie industry’s anti-piracy policies, and Hoffman Fritz is the head of corporate communications for the movie industry body.

As part of a course on the production of digital media at the University of Texas, the two were invited for an interview to share their views on copyright and the movie industry in the digital age.

The two touched on a wide variety of subjects such as three-strikes policies, the future of DVDs and fair use. They also gave some background information on key decisions they’ve made over the years. Although the MPAA believes that piracy can be decreased by beating pirated films in terms of quality and availability, they don’t think that it will ever go away completely.

“We will do whatever we can to discourage illegal accessing of our motion pictures,” Fritz Attaway said. “We have no illusions that we will be 100 percent successful. Piracy has always been and will always be with us. Our goal is to keep it under a reasonable level of control where we can make enough revenue in a legitimate market to recoup expenses and continue to make new movies.”

“And I am very optimistic that we will be able to do that. I said in the very beginning that a very large part of that is developing new business models that consumers will access legally and find that experience superior to illegal access. And I think the industry is doing an excellent job of that and will continue to do so,” he added.

When the interviewer compared the RIAA’s anti-piracy operations with those of the the MPAA, Attaway seemed to be offended when the RIAA’s tactics were described as more aggressive. He noted that the two outfits have chosen different paths to pursue their goals, but that they are just as ‘bad’ as their music industry counterpart.

“We are extremely aggressive, certainly equally aggressive as RIAA or any other copyright owner group,” Attaway said. “We have used slightly different tactics than RIAA in part because of the nature of our respective works. There are certainly other reasons as well but MPAA has filed end user lawsuits like RIAA has.”

“However, they are very expensive and we have determined that there are other routes that provide a better return; among them education, working with intermediaries like ISPs to discourage infringing activity, and one, that is probably the most important, is encouraging the development of new business models that provide legitimate alternatives. All of these avenues we are pursuing very aggressively,” he added.

When the subject turned to the role ISPs have in countering copyright infringement, three-strikes policies for repeated infringers were brought up. The MPAA is encouraging these kinds of policies, but stressed that in the United States the decision to terminate the account of an alleged copyright infirnger is made by the Internet provider.

“We encourage ISPs to at least notify subscribers who are engaging in infringing material and advise them that it is illegal and could have consequences. And for repeat infringers we encourage ISPs to terminate service but that is strictly a decision of the ISP and not ours,” Attaway said.

The full interview with the two MPAA executives is available on the Copygrounds website which is part of the introductory course on the production of digital media at the University of Texas.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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