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RIAA, BPI Websites Guilty of Minor Copyright Abuse

Posted by: , 21:40 AEDT, Fri November 8, 2013

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Both the RIAA and the BPI may have abused license terms of third-party code that was used for their websites
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Image/Photo Credit: Horia Varlan @ Flickr, CC

The websites of the two of the most pro-copyright groups have been found to be guilty of cases of copyright abuse, copyright news website TorrentFreak has found.

The websites of the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) and the BPI, both copyright lobbyists for the music industry, used code that was has their copyright text stripped, a clear violation of the copyright terms of the licensed code.

The two snippets of jQuery code, while free to use, required the original copyright notice to be present as the only major condition of use. This type of violation is common, as various techniques designed to improve loading speed and download size of web pages involve truncating comments, including copyright notices that are not functionally needed for the normal operation of the website.

Shortly after TorrentFreak contacted the RIAA and BPI for comment, both sites quickly restored the copyright notices, but failed to provide any explanation for the oversight.


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