RIAA and BPI Use “Pirated” Code on Their Websites

It turns out that even the most vocal anti-piracy advocates are guilty of infringing the copyrights of others on the Internet. TorrentFreak has discovered that the websites of the music industry groups RIAA and BPI have removed the copyright notices from popular web software, violating the open source licenses these scripts are distributed under.

Copyright is a double-edged sword, and those who sharpen one side often get cut by the other.

Two weeks ago we reported that the new Healthcare.gov website had stripped the copyright notice from one of the scripts it used. This blatant act of ‘piracy’ prompted us to take a closer look at the websites of several anti-piracy organizations, and today we present our findings.

As it turns out the U.S. Government is not the only one violating copyright licenses. The websites of music industry groups RIAA and BPI also use infringing code.

On both sites we found open source JQuerys scripts that are released under the MIT license. This license permits any person or organization to use, copy, modify, merge, distribute, or even sell copies of the software. There’s only one condition users have to agree to; that the original copyright notice stays intact.

Ironically, the scripts used on the RIAA and BPI websites have the copyright licenses removed.

BPI uses the depreciated template script jQuery.tmpl.min.js, and as can be seen below, yesterday there was no reference to the MIT license or the copyright holder listed at the top of the file.


BPI violation

http://torrentfreak.com/images/bpi-script.png

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