Saturday, November 02, 2013

BPI, RIAA ignore licence terms on their website until it's pointed out to them

Interesting: copyright farmers the RIAA and their remote-controlled UK equivalent the BPI have been caught using code on their websites which violates the licences of that code.

TorrentFreak has been poking about in the source:

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.
Oddly, after TF contacted the RIAA, the copyright line appeared magically on the RIAA and BPI sites.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

An easy screw up if your minifier (or eager coder) was just removing all comments, though the actual line from jQuery's official minified version...

/*! jQuery v1.10.2 | (c) 2005, 2013 jQuery Foundation, Inc. | jquery.org/license
//@ sourceMappingURL=jquery-1.10.2.min.map
*/

Doesn't directly reference the MIT licence. Also the file name suggests it was generated from a template, which may date the file the when jQuery was dual-licensed and it would be the template that required redistribution, not the content generated from the template (a messy confusing reading which resulted in folks going MIT only I think).

But it's a bit like trying to bust Dexter for jaywalking....

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