MySpace MP3 Hack Discovered By Authorities, Driven Into Seedy Freeware Underground

jharv | August 21, 2007 10:30 am

Cheeky coder Octavio Chango recently concocted a program which allows you to rip streaming audio off of MySpace sites into MP3s, thereby turning the social-networking site into an unlocked candy store full of new and unreleased music. But Rupert Murdoch’s stormtroopers–perhaps at the behest of any one of the tens of thousands of musicians on MySpace who would prefer the site to honor its agreements about the security of the music uploaded by bands and labels–have already shut him down. Chango has posted emails purportedly from MySpace and his ISP relating to the shutdown, and Digital Music News claims to have had Chango’s story confirmed by MySpace representatives:

At 4.12am (Madrid time) I got a call on my phone, I did not answer because I was sleeping… from +1.310.967.xxxx… (California)… who can be? Well as everyday I wake up and check my sites status and myspacemp3.org open with a weird page… So I think that the page was hacked or something else… I check the server everything ok… so doing a deep investigation I found that my domain registrant changed the DNS setting to his own… (can your domain registrant change your setting without your authorization to point any IP that they want? that is legal? don’t they need a court order or something else to shut down a domain?)

Contacting the California number, Chango recieved an email purporting to be from MySpace which charged he was violating the site’s copyrights and trademarks:

So that means that “myspace.com” are violating all the trademarks that can be composed with your name? ex. “space.com”, “mys.com”, “ace.com”, “pace.com”, …etc…. ???

And witch copyrights I am violating? I am just a search engine for your page… as Google finds information for any site myspacemp3.org finds MP3s from MySpace… and its does not host any file just provide a link… (like MySpace player do internally)

So for example Google.com is violating the copyright of all the pages that it indexed?

For everybody knowledge as the web works if you put any file (music, images or x) public available on your site it is impossible to make a way to not allow downloads… You only can difficult the process… but if some body want the file he will get it…

Well I certainly can’t see any ethical holes in that argument. And Spanish hackers may be brilliant computer geeks, but apparently they lack a basic grounding in international trademark law. (Or at least possess a very large disingenuous streak.) Not one to let the threat of legal action get him down, however, Chango has now included the source code for the program on his Web page, making sure to note that it’s only for “information,” a.k.a. the last refuge of a scoundrel. On the other hand, now that Chango’s piracy virus has been loosed into the digital music bloodstream, labels may have to rethink their policies about making MySpace music available for download–or MySpace might have to rethink its own software.

MySpace MP3 Hack Shuttered, Author Spreads Code [Digital Music News]

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