In a move which furthers the debate as to what constitutes content stealing, MobiTV has threatened to take legal action against a forum which merely posted a URL giving its users a way to watch the channel free.
MobiTV
is
a website which is supposed to be the
epitome of Web 2.0. They have an edgy site design with the requisite
orange and green Web 2.0 colors. It’s designed for mobile. It streams
video content.
Okay, so they forgot to register the
mobi.tv domain that makes more sense to frequent Web 2.0 users, but
that one small oversight could be forgiven.
Unforgivable?
It’s not so easy, however, to excuse them sending in the
lawyers to
deal with
what is an EGREGIOUS lack of technology. While the web site and
applications look like they know what they are doing, it turns out that
the MobiTV emperor really is wearing no clothes.
As it turns out, the MobiTV channels are served by a
completely
unsecured system that anyone can access. The URL was originally
published on a Sprint users forum, and made its way to another popular
forum, Howard
Forums.
Free Television
As it turns out, all you have to do is save the file to your
hard
drive, open it up, and you have the MobiTV content at your fingertips
without having to pay the $9.95 per month fee.
Now, you’d assume that the company would realize how
ridiculous it
was to have this URL completely unsecured, but instead, they had their
lawyer send a C&D
to the forum owners demanding they remove the information in the
post.
Now, if the users were posting passwords or hacks to get
around a
security feature, I’d understand it, but this is MobiTV’s own fault.
Who has their “proprietary” information out there on a publicly
accessible URL?
The cease and desist claims that since there is no link to
the
URL on the site, it’s “proprietary” and could only have been “reverse
engineered.” If my eight-year-old could get there, I’m pretty sure it
doesn’t require so much as a script kiddie to get the URL.
Conclusions
Obviously, the forum owner pointed out this logic to the
lawyer, who
responded by contacting the forum owner’s ISP, as well as ICANN. I’m
sure ICANN will jump RIGHT on that considering they do more than slap
the wrist of squatters and kiters, but sure, that makes sense.
At this point, MobiTV gets nothing but a lot of negative
publicity,
and SOMEONE who understands how to actually build an application both on the
front AND back ends should be brought in to explain that this is NOT
how you build what’s supposed to be a subscription-only service.
This article is based on a Profy post written by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira.
