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.

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