Something must be in the air today, as two big acquisitions were announced this morning. First, Oracle announced that it will fork over $8.5 billion for middleware maker, BEA. BEA has been on the radar since last October, when BEA rejected Oracle's unsolicited $6.7 billion offer. Carl Icahn, BEA's largest shareholder, had initially agreed with BEA's counter offer of $21 per share, but then later started pushing publicly for the sale. Oracle held fast to its offer of $17 per share, so it's surprising to see that they were able to agree on $19.375 per share, especially when there were seemingly no other bidders. These acquisitions continue an overall trend of consolidation in the enterprise software market, kicked off by Oracle's 2004 acquisition of PeopleSoft. Since then, Oracle has spent about $110 billion in its acquisition of about 30 companies. Oracle is in a battle with German software giant, SAP, who is also knee deep in the land grab with its recently successful $6.7 billion acquisition for Business Objects. Meanwhile, Sun will spend $1 billion for open source database maker, MySql, making a strong play in the $15 billion enterprise database market. This deal makes sense for Sun, who has been building up its stable of open source products. That said, when will the speculation begin for an Oracle-Sun merger? Both hate Microsoft deeply, and both have been trying to expand beyond their core markets. And, MySql even rejected Oracle's acquisition offer back in 2006. At some point, someone's going to think it makes sense for the two to combine.

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Professor Tara Brabazon, a lecturer at the University of Brighton, is fed up with shoddy student research papers and has dubbed the rampant mis-use of Google results as "The University of Google" -- condemning the practice of simply taking the first few search engine results and compiling them for homework assignments. While we've seen several cases of schools banning the use of Wikipedia, Brabazon even goes so far as to forbid students from using Google as well as other online resources. While the criticism that lazy students are relying too much on search engines is probably valid at many universities, the solution to ban the use of search engine tools and online references seems like an unjust punishment, as well as a disservice to the students who will likely need to use search engines after they graduate. Brabazon points out that students don't attend universities to learn how to use Google, but that doesn't mean the use of websites like Wikipedia and Google should be ignored. If anything, there should be a crash course on what Google is (and is not) useful for -- analogous to the math teacher's favorite little guide "Lies My Calculator Told Me" which details the pitfalls of blindly using a calculator. Students should be taught using all the available tools that can help them further their education, along with how to use those tools effectively. On Google's side, however, perhaps the search engine giant should create a knol that describes how to write a respectable research report using Google -- without getting caught.

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Last month we wrote about musician Kristin Hersh embracing a version of the new business model we suggested for musicians way back in 2003. It's a model where the musician can actually embrace file sharing and do better because of it, by focusing on using the file sharing to sell more scarce goods, such as specific songs or access to the musician. One of my favorite ideas in that discussion was that the musician could offer up that he or she would play a backyard concert for a supporter. I've yet to see anyone else pick up on that suggestion... until now. Well-known singer-songwriter Jill Sobule has just announced her plans for a new album and it involves a website that allows people to buy in at different levels from $25 (you get the CD before it's released) all the way up to $10,000 (you actually get to sing or participate on the CD). At the $5,000 level, Jill will come and perform at your home. I still think the lowest level ($25) is a bit too high, but the various levels and the rewards at each level do seem about right for the model. It's not clear how Sobule feels about file sharing on top of this, but it's clear that she's really embraced this new business model -- so I'm hopeful that it works out for her. So here's a question: will all the folks who say that taking an idea without giving someone credit for it is "theft" claim that Sobule "stole" this idea from me or will they recognize how ridiculous that is and how we're all better off when infinite goods are spread freely?

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Someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent in an article about how Buddy Holly's widow is trying to stop the publication of an autobiography by Peggy Sue Gerron, supposedly the woman whose name was the basis for Holly's famous song "Peggy Sue." The complaint seems to be that Peggy Sue Gerron is using Buddy Holly's "name and likeness" without permission. Though, the more likely explanation is that the Holly estate feels that it should get paid for this story, even though the story is told from Peggy Sue Gerron's own perspective. It has all the earmarks of a shakedown. And, of course, it will fail. It's unlikely that there's much of a case here. The most likely result will be that the book is allowed to be published and all this lawsuit will have done is to draw plenty of extra attention to the book,

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It's no secret that the way that many albums get leaked online before their release date is via review copies that are sent out widely to music reviewers and radio stations. Apparently, the big record labels have been employing a new strategy to prevent that from happening. As TorrentFreak notes, they're putting annoying anti-piracy voice over throughout the CD. Thus, just as you're listening to a song, the music will fade out, and a voice over will announce some message about piracy and unauthorized uploads. This is pissing off reviewers, such as the one here who did his review of the album with the voice overs ("an album that can best be described as perhaps the Mona Lisa after a 2 year old covered in chocolate has crawled all over it. Yes it might once have been a great painting, and yes you can still see that greatness, but really all you can see now is little chocolate hand prints.") In other words, in its effort to prevent the inevitable, the labels are pissing off the reviewers of the album by making it impossible to actually hear the album as it was intended to be heard.

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The NY Times "debate" between law professor Tim Wu and NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton that began Monday now continues. It's actually not much of a "debate" because each are simply answering the questions posed by the moderator, Saul Hansell. However, the latest concerns whether it makes sense to require third party companies, such as ISPs or consumer electronics firms in an effort to protect copyright holders from unauthorized use of their content. Wu's answer focuses on a slightly different question: whether it makes sense for the government to step in and mandate such solutions, and provides a reasonable answer questioning why the government should be protecting one industry's business model at the expense of others'. Cotton's response is quite similar to the one he gave last week at CES. Effectively, it's "there's so much piracy going on, that we need to have others step in and protect our business model."

I'm curious if Cotton believes that automobiles should have been forced to go 3 mph with people walking in front of them waving red flags, for the sake of protecting the market for horse-drawn carriage makers? Or, should consumer electronics companies been forced not to allow VCRs to record TV? Both examples involved "big" problems that were seen as "threats" to an existing business model. Yet, rather than being actual threats (after some bogus lobbying/court cases), companies realized that these were actually huge opportunities to expand markets and make even more money. So why is it this time it's suddenly a big threat and not an opportunity? And even if it is a threat, why should it be seen as something that a third party needs to handle? What happens when the required filtering in the US means that foreign consumer electronics makers come up with the next great innovation that isn't possible in the US and we fall behind in terms of the next important innovation? None of that seems to be of concern to Cotton, whose sole focus is on preserving a business model that is certainly not the most efficient nor effective for the industry. I recognize that it is Cotton's job at NBC Universal to make these kinds of statements, but it should be his fiduciary responsibility to the company to suggest that there are better paths to adapting to the changing market place, rather than clinging to an obsolete business model and dragging down other industries with it.

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Rick Falkvinge, the head of Sweden's Piratpartiet has just given a new interview, and it's worth a read. As you might expect from the leader of a pro-piracy political party, he's rather bullish on the future of filesharing: [A]nonymous encrypted P2P is just a few years off (and encrypted BitTorrent is already becoming ubiquitous). More interestingly, our cellphones are increasing in capacity dramatically. When P2P debuted with Napster in 2000, the average hard drive was the same size as my cell phone memory is today. Using technology already available, BlueTooth 2, I can share content from my cellphone anonymously — say, in a café or so. This will probably just accelerate, with cellphones being more and more capable, holding more and more data, and opening up to customized applications. I'm betting that a P2P app operating on Bluetooth is not far off for the iPhone, for example. Imagine the anonymous sharing that will happen in the background just on the average subway train! The possibilities are very, very encouraging.

File sharing will find new ways — any measure to stop it will be ineffective the instant it is in place.

I can't say that I agree with everything Falkvinge says here. Although it's true that Bittorrent encryption is fairly widespread, the technique is employed to avoid ISP throttling, not as a useful means of protecting filesharers' identities. And anyone who's paid attention to Bluetooth's miserable security record — or who has just been frustrated when trying to get two devices to pair — can be forgiven for laughing wryly at the idea of the protocol evolving into something suitable for ad-hoc high-speed filesharing.

Falkvinge's optimism about anonymous P2P is perhaps the most interesting part of his filesharing triumphalism. In truth, it's a considerably harder problem than he implies: the internet is simply not designed for two-way communication with a truly unknown party. Sure, black hats can spoof IP addresses — but that's a technique that's only useful for a one-way communique, such as when flooding a target with junk packets in a denial of service attack. If you want a response you either need to reveal your identity or relay the traffic through a third party who can be counted on to keep everyone's identities secret.

This sort of relay system has been successfully employed by Relakks proxy service, as well as the Freenet and Tor projects, the latter two of which also add encryption to limit the relay nodes' complicity. But if Falkvinge is counting on the lack of prosecutions against these projects as evidence of the technique's legal unassailability, he's dreaming. Given that both Freenet and Tor are widely rumored to be havens for child pornographers — and the understandable (if occasionally misguided) zeal with which such crimes are prosecuted — it seems like only a matter of time before someone operating a Tor node is arrested for facilitating illegal activity (the infamous Tor embassy hack has already attracted law enforcement's attention, of course).

But Falkvinge's larger point seems sound: there's no indication that P2P can be stopped. But this isn't because of some just-around-the-corner bulletproof technology; it's simply a matter of filesharers' overwhelming numbers — numbers that, as Falkvinge implies, may be better measured by the rapidly-expanding count of P2P-capable network interfaces than by the number of humans operating them.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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One of the problems we have in the various discussions about patent and copyright law is that people falsely assume that both systems are designed to give "credit" to the original creator and to somehow enforce "fairness" in making sure that original creator receives recognition. That has never been the case. Both are designed to create monopolies, to provide incentives to create. That has nothing to do with credit -- and, that's especially clear in patent situations where the actual people named on the patent are rarely parties to a case, as it's more often owned by a firm (such as the company the person worked for). Most companies require that their employees assign any patents to the company. So it seems fairly ridiculous to find out that a guy who doesn't actually own the patents he received is pissed off at Nintendo for using his idea in their Wii controllers. The guy worked for Midway Games, a popular videogame maker, who now owns the patents in question. It's difficult to see what his complaint is, since the patents are no longer his and Midway does not appear to have any problem with what Nintendo has done. In the video itself, a patent attorney suggests that the Wii seems to go well beyond the patents in question and it seems unlikely that Nintendo is infringing -- but since the few second demo looks similar, it makes for a nice news cast claiming someone "stole" an idea.

The likely situation is probably a lot less interesting. Lots of folks have been working on motion sensing videogame controllers for quite some time. This wasn't a new concept that sprung up overnight. There are also many different ways to create such a tool and just because the end results look similar, don't mean that a patent was infringed. However, an even bigger point is one that we've been trying to drive home for a while. The invention part is only one small part of the equation. Innovating and actually bringing the product to market is more important -- and that's what Nintendo did successfully. This guy worked for a gaming company and came up with a prototype six years ago and didn't do anything with it. While lots of folks were trying to come up with motion sensing gaming devices, Nintendo successfully brought one to market.

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While most of the discussion following Steve Jobs Macworld keynote this morning was targeted on the Macbook Air superthin notebook (which does look pretty cool), some of the other announcements coming out of the keynote were potentially a lot more interesting. The first was Apple's Time Capsule offering, which seems to have gotten lost in the hype around the other announcements. Sticking a big (500GB or 1TB) hard drive on a wireless access point may not seem like a huge deal at first, but it is an indication of how increasingly everything that we do is networked. Being able to separate storage from your computer makes for some interesting possibilities. Combined with the Macbook Air solution to do CD installs (mount a different drive on the network, basically), and you begin to see how Apple is making it easier to separate out the components of what used to be considered a computer, and make them all accessible via the cloud. That doesn't mean that any individual solution will necessarily be successful, but it does indicate the direction things are heading in.

The other announcement that did get quite a bit of buzz was the very much expected announcement that . It appears the company has done a lot of smart moves here (many of which it probably learned after seeing what legions of earlier attempts in this space got wrong). It signed deals with all the major studios. It got agreements to allow online rentals soon after the DVD was released (1 month later, which is still too late). You can easily watch the movies via your TV if you have an Apple TV (perhaps a big if). You can transfer the movies to other (Apple) devices. They can start playing soon after you start downloading. They're offering high definition movies, which will certainly appeal to some people (and should be extra worrisome for the folks betting on the success of next generation DVD systems).

However, it's still based on a one-off rental model, with similar prices to what's been tried before. Time and time again, we've seen that models like that later get trumped by subscription services -- which is why it's not surprising to see Netflix beefing up its own service by making it an "all you can eat" plan combined with efforts to get those movies on to television sets. And, of course, a rental model is fundamentally based on DRM systems to make the movie go away at the end of a "rental" period. Rentals make sense for physical goods, when you are returning the good at the end so it can be rented out again, but they're an artificial construct in a world of digital goods. It may work initially, but it leaves Apple wide open to challenges from others down the road. On top of that, it shows Jobs' rather conflicted stance on DRM: he's against it for music, but for it when it comes to video. It's also a bit surprising that the major studios all bought into this, as they've seen how Apple's DRM system in the music world made it much more powerful, leading to the current backlash from the recording industry. So, it's a good start, but it falls back on the wrong business model for long term success.

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Bans on using mobile phones while driving are pretty common these days, so there's not much to talk about in hearing about another such ban. However, up in Calgary, some folks are fighting back against such a ban. The Calgary Health Region has banned staff from driving while talking on a phone, but , saying they rely on pagers and mobile phones to respond to emergencies -- and that banning the use of mobile devices while driving could put patients at risk. Of course, that leaves out the potential of putting other drivers on the road at risk -- but at least a doctor would be present following any such accident (for the sarcasm impaired, that's a joke). Still, given all the calls for banning driving-while-yakking for safety's sake, it's amusing to see doctors claim safety reasons for allowing the practice.

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We've covered in the past J.K. Rowling's attempts to claim that copyright gives her more rights than it actually does, especially with regards to fan fiction. However, Rowling's latest attempt is to try to prevent the publication of "The Harry Potter Lexicon," a fan-created reference book to all things having to do with the world found in the Harry Potter books. Law professor Tim Wu does a nice job explaining why Rowling's claim goes beyond the limitations of copyright law, which does not prevent someone else from creating a guidebook of information about characters you created. As long as the guidebook creators are not copying Rowling's words verbatim, but are merely creating a guide or a critique of Rowling's work, it's not a copyright issue. Rowling's real problem with the guidebook appears to be a different issue. She had no problem when the Lexicon was just a fan website. However, when they wanted to sell a book, she became upset. So the real problem appears to be that she doesn't want anyone else to make any money -- but that's not what copyright law is designed to do. Newspapers make money off of books all the time by publishing reviews, and we all know that's legal. There is no difference in creating a reference book.

Rowling complains that this work will make it difficult for her to publish her own guidebook: "I cannot approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book...." However, as Wu notes, that's silly and has nothing to do with copyright law: "two products in the same market isn't called pre-emption—the word is competition." And, generally, competition is something that we should encourage, as it drives all competitors to provide better products. If Rowling really believes she cannot compete with a fan reference guide, that's hardly the fault of the other reference guide. Given the interest in Harry Potter, it's hard to believe that an "official" reference guide given Rowling's endorsement wouldn't outsell any fan-created version.

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One of the Sicilian Mafia's oldest and most steady revenue streams, protection money, called "pizzo" in Italian, is now at risk a new website that now provides extorted businessmen the support with which to stand up to the mob. Traditionally considered a death sentence to stand up to the Sicilian Mafia, Addiopizzo.org, which means "Goodbye Pizzo," voluntarily lists 230 businesses who openly defy the payment to the Mafia. There is safety in numbers, and the tide of pizzo payments is indeed starting to turn. Perhaps what the website organizers should offer next is the ability for the pizzo-paying business owners to list what they are each paying for "protection." That way, perhaps they can lend some transparency to the Mafia's business. After all, why pay 500 euros a month if your neighbor is only paying 100 euros a month for his "I-hope-nothing-bad-happens-to-you" policy? Or, perhaps, once again, the web has brought an end to an outdated business model, and the Sicilian Mafia needs to adapt with the times. From spam to porn to gambling, the Internet is rife with shady schemes in which the well-organized gangster can participate.

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A month ago, we wrote about the somewhat bizarre ruling in France that Amazon cannot offer free shipping within the country, as it represents an excessive discount in a country where the price of books is strictly regulated. Amazon was told that it would be fined 1,000 euros per day for continuing. Amazon has now appealed the ruling and defiantly noted that . Of course, after thirty days, the court can review the situation and could (and likely will) raise the fine to respond to Amazon's outspoken defiance. Legal experts quoted in the article suggest that there's very little chance that Amazon can win the appeal, but Amazon seems to be using this battle as a way to drum up some extra attention for its free shipping policies (for now) in France. Eventually, it may have to give in, but in the meantime, for 1,000 euros a day and all the news coverage, it's a pretty cheap advertisement for Amazon's free shipping offering.

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The NY Times is running an ongoing "debate" all week concerning issues having to do with copyright. Defending the entertainment industry's strategy is Rick Cotton, General Counsel of NBC Universal, and well known around here for various questionable comments made to support NBC's position of demanding that the government act to enforce NBC's obsolete business model (our favorite remains his argument that corn farmers are hurt by piracy, since fewer people will go to movies, meaning fewer people will buy popcorn). On the flip side is law professor Tim Wu, who we believe has an excellent grasp on copyright issues (though, we don't always agree with him on telecom regulation).

The first part of the debate discusses . Not surprisingly, Cotton takes the "yes" position. While he comes up with a list of 7 reasons, none are close to convincing. He gets off on the wrong foot (and suggests either that he's willfully misleading or simply ignorant) by suggesting that infringement is no different than theft. It's tough to have a serious discussion on copyright and business models when you stake out that obviously incorrect position (theft involves something going missing, infringement does not -- even if both are illegal). The rest of his argument seems to revolve around two key points: that technology can be effective in stopping unauthorized file sharing and that the industry needs to stop unauthorized file sharing. Both points are wrong. He seems to be confusing two points on that first one. It may be true that copy protection can make it more difficult for an individual or some people to upload an infringing file, but it will never be possible to stop everyone -- and the second a single file is available for others, it no longer matters, because that one file is universally available to be copied. As for the argument that the industry needs to stop unauthorized file sharing, that's only true if the industry cannot come up with business models that embrace unauthorized file sharing and use it to its advantage. As we've already discussed, not only is this possible, it's already happening, and it's helping content creators to recognize business models where they can make more money than before.

Wu's response focuses in on some of that, by noting that it really is a business model issue, and that Cotton seems to ignore that. As Wu says: "digital locks are no substitute for a good business model." However, where Wu could be even stronger is in pointing to evidence, both historical and current, that other business models can actually be much better for content creators. Overall, though, it's a good response, and most of the commenters seem to side with Wu rather than Cotton. It will be interesting to see if Cotton actually responds to Wu's points (hopefully without just falling back on the talking points from his original answer), or if the debate just moves on to the next topic.

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We've had so many stories of government computer systems or websites that have terrible security or are just useless (but expensive!) that it shouldn't surprise us to hear of another one. Yet, there's always someone who can go a step further. Witness the news that the TSA's website for individuals who find themselves incorrectly on the security watchlist , with hundreds of falsely accused travelers exposing personal details by using the site. Even better, it turns out that the company that was hired to build the site got the job in a no-bid contract (meaning there wasn't any competition -- it was just chosen) and the guy responsible for figuring out who to hire just so happened to have been a former employee at that company. So, basically, what happened was that a guy who had taken a job at the TSA hired his former coworkers, with no competition for the job and apparently little oversight, to just build a website that turned out to be insecure. And, of course, without any oversight, it took months before anyone even noticed the site was insecure. And, remember, that this is the TSA we're talking about here -- an organization who's main concern is supposed to be security. I feel safer already.

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Back in October, Ford got itself into some hot water over plenty of negative attention after it forced a Jaguar enthusiasts' group to stop selling calendars made up of photos of the cars they actually owned. You would have thought that the folks at Ford would have learned from the negative publicity surrounding that debacle. Apparently, they learned nothing, because they've now done the exact same thing to a Mustang enthusiasts' club, and it's getting even more attention than the last time around. What possible rationale does a lawyer give for suggesting slapping down an attempt by a car company's biggest fans (by their own admission!) to celebrate how much they love their vehicles by promoting them to others? Some may claim that you need to enforce your trademark or risk losing it -- but a situation like this is unlikely to be seen as something that needs to have been enforced. No sane judge will rule that allowing enthusiasts to display a calendar is the equivalent of giving up your trademark rights.

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One of the more amazing things I've discovered in discussing copyright, patents and trademarks with people is that very few people seem to know what each of those three sets of regulations are actually intended for. It certainly makes reasonable discussion and debate on any sort of reform difficult when a large percentage of people involved in the debate (or, tragically, writing the laws around those regulations) seem to believe the purpose of them is entirely different than it actually is. That's why we've tried to point to some historically interesting discussions on these regulations. Two recent blog posts pointed out something interesting related to all this. The first, comes (again) from copyright expert William Patry, who points to a seven minute video of ordinary . The video itself is by Karl Fogel, who also runs a site called Question Copyright. What the video pretty clearly demonstrates is that most people have no clue why copyright exists, and many assume (as we see in the comments around here) that it's there to "protect" the content creator or to prevent plagiarism. No one seems to note that its true purpose, as per the Constitution, is to promote progress (amusingly, many believe copyright is a much more recent creation). While it may seem a bit simplistic to ask a bunch of random people in a park why they think copyright exists, it's actually fairly important when the vast majority of folks don't fully understand the purpose of copyright -- as that's what allows copyright to be extended and turned into something that goes far beyond its original intentions, as we see today. William Stepp, over at Against Monopoly, highlights this by pointing to a new dissertation called Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States. It's 231 pages of copyright history goodness, basically describing how this lack of knowledge and understanding of copyright in the 19th century is what allowed continual copyright expansion in that era as well. What started out as something that could only be held in very, very rare cases (as per James Madison's belief that copyright and patents should be quite limited to avoid abuse) was continually expanded to cover much, much more over time. There have been plenty of stories about how copyright has been expanded and lengthened greatly over the past one hundred years, but it happened for the preceding 100 years as well -- thanks in large part to a near total lack of understanding of the true issues at hand by many of the people involved.

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Back in November, we wrote about a rather bizarre patent lawsuit filed against Google. It concerned a patent held by a professor at Northeastern, named Kenneth Backlawski, and had to do with doing searches across a distributed database. The key point was that Backlawski himself didn't even think that Google infringed on the patent (which had been granted years earlier) until a patent attorney told him he should sue over it -- and even then it took two and a half years to actually find a patent attorney who thought the patent was worth suing over. Google has now struck back, claiming that the patent is clearly invalid and even if it was valid, the company isn't infringing. It also claims that Backlawski didn't file the suit in a timely manner, invoking the doctrine of laches, which is used occasionally in patent disputes, but is far from common. Basically, Google is throwing everything in the book at this patent. Once again, this is a clear example of how the patent system was not supposed to work. No one is accusing Google of "stealing" this idea or benefiting from the work done by Backlawski. The fact that Backlawski himself didn't even realize that Google potentially infringed on his patent is quite telling. It is clearly a case of someone trying to squeeze money out of a successful company, using a patent as the weapon of choice.

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Obviously trying to deflate a possible Apple announcement about movie rentals, Netflix has that lets its customers stream as many shows as they can watch to their PCs. Netflix has been testing this 'unlimited' offering for a few months with its new subscribers -- and it's not exactly surprising that Netflix would have to offer an all-you-can-eat plan at some point, given its existing DVD-based service plans. But Netflix is still playing with the term 'unlimited' in that the downloaded movies are streaming, so presumably, unlimited actually means something more like "up to 744 hours of video" in a month with 31 days (if you don't stop to sleep or eat).

More interestingly, though, is that this announcement places Netflix firmly in the movie downloads business. Mailing DVDs will clearly remain part of Netflix for quite some time due to the lack of broadband penetration for many US customers, but the increasing costs of shipping physical media will likely doom that business. So now the questions of how to handle the distribution of digital data will really become a mainstream issue -- and a serious business test for Netflix. Will the delivery of streaming movies be hampered by the likes of Comcast and ISPs who compete with their own movie downloading services? Does the iTunes pay-per-title model make more sense than a subscription plan? Netflix faces a number of large competitors, as well as pirating consumers. On the upside, however, there is also potential to expand internationally if Netflix doesn't rely on the USPS.

Netflix is trying a few different tactics to support downloading, but its real threats may be the copyright holders who could giveth and taketh away the shows and movies. With around 6,000 titles available for streaming from Netflix, that's only around a year of straight watching if you actually wanted to watch everything -- and didn't need to sleep.

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All too often, we're seeing the DMCA abused by people who aren't using it to takedown copyright infringing materials, but to shut down sites they don't like. The latest example involves some filmmakers and a movie review site. The review certainly was not particularly positive, leading to a rather random series of complaints and threats against its author. While we won't get into the claims of libel and defamation, which go into an entirely separate arena, the fact is that the filmmakers are using the DMCA to try to get the site taken down completely, bringing up all sorts of claims in the DMCA notice. It's difficult to see how a review of a movie can infringe on the copyrights of that movie unless it was showing the movie itself (which does not appear to be the case). It's worth pointing out that a DMCA takedown notice is only supposed to be for copyright infringing material, so including charges of libel and defamation in the takedown seem rather unnecessary. Even more amusingly, though, the takedown notice includes a bunch of random charges that aren't actually illegal, such as: "linking to other websites without any authorization to do so." In fact, the whole thing is so over-the-top, you have to wonder if it's simply part of an attempt to use the Streisand Effect to drum up some publicity for the movie.

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